The religious affiliation and anti-Semitism of secondary school-age Swedish youths: an analysis of survey data from 2003 and 2009

Abstract

Not only Swedish studies, but also several international studies, claim an increase in anti-Semitic attitudes in recent decades. As prejudice is acquired in the early years of socialization, and/or is innate and fairly stable over the life cycle, examining adolescents’ attitudes is vitally important. Hence, by controlling for individual demographic and socio-economic background factors, we study two interrelated questions: Has anti-Semitism among Swedish secondary school-age youths changed between 2003 and 2009? Are changes equal across groups, with a specific focus on religious groups? Using two unique cross-section surveys of secondary school-age students in Sweden for the years 2003 and 2009, we try to address the above questions. Our analysis shows, in contrast to the views of the general public and other related studies, that anti-Semitism has decreased slightly during the examined period. Moreover, the study finds a variation in anti-Semitism by religious affiliation: it has increased among Muslim youth, but remains stable in other groups.

Keywords:

• anti-Semitism
• attitudes
• religion
• survey
• Sweden
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Jim Crow laws are a set of regulations that were implemented in the USA from 1876 to 1965. They upheld racial segregation between white and black Americans at the local and national level.

2. The second intifada took place from 2000 to 2005, which partly coincides with our examined time period.

3. Data come from the Swedish media archive using ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ as keywords. This does not say anything of the actual content of those articles.

4. This anti-Semitism is ‘new’ in the sense that it links hostility towards Jews to the situation in the Middle East, and particularly the conflict between Israel and Palestine (Peace 2009; Bachner and Ring 2005; Bangstad and Bunzl 2010; Jacobs et al. 2011).

5. The report was part of a collaboration with the Swedish Committee against Anti-Semitism.

6. Radicalization is a very slippery concept in that it is used to cover a wide range of things, from the increasing importance of Islam to the increased risk of terrorism. In this article, we interpret radicalization as the former – that is, the increased importance of religion.

7. For more information about the initial questionnaire and sampling of the two surveys, see Ring and Morgenthau (2004) and Löwander (2010). The 2009 survey was conducted in the autumn of that year, following the Israeli military operation.

8. The problem of differentiating between threat theory and social learning theory is a problem in a lot of contemporary research on prejudice and related attitudes. A reason for the latter is partly due to the limited access to longitudinal studies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pieter Bevelander

PIETER BEVELANDER is Professor of International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER) in the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) at Malmö University.

ADDRESS: Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM), Malmö University, Citadellsvägen 7, 20506, Malmö, Sweden. Email: [email protected]

Mikael Hjerm

MIKAEL HJERM is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Umeå University.

ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, Umeå Univeristy, Mediagränd 14, 90187, Umeå, Sweden. Email: [email protected]