​It is a tragic reality that for centuries, many people tried to justify their antisemitism with religious beliefs. This may explain a reaction reported by Naomi Shaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a Deseret News article published a few months ago:

“Be careful,” my elderly aunt admonished me before I left New York City 22 years ago to visit a number of Christian colleges across the country for research on a book I was writing.

She and others in my Jewish extended family were genuinely worried about my physical safety, with one even muttering something about lynching. They warned me about antisemitism and cautioned me to watch my back.

Sadly, university campuses have become more dangerous for Jewish students, particularly since the savage attack on Israel in October.

A recent report from the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International found that “73% of Jewish college students surveyed have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year.” Since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, the percentage of Jewish students in the United States who said they “felt comfortable with others knowing they’re Jewish” dropped from 63% to 38%. The percentage who “said they felt ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ physically safe on campus” dropped from 66% to 45% since October.

A Brandeis University study surveyed 2,000 Jewish university students from 51 college campuses, chosen because they had large populations of Jewish students. These students expressed more concern about “antisemitism coming from the political left than from the political right on their campus” occasioned by anti-Israel criticisms.

To be clear, it is not that students felt others were just criticizing Israeli policies. These students reported “a general climate of antisemitic hostility at their school.”

In fact, a large portion of the Jewish students surveyed “had unfavorable views of the Israeli government” and a large portion characterized themselves as politically liberal. But these students also reported that they were concerned about antisemitism on their campuses. Thus, large proportions of Jewish students who “had unfavorable views of the Israeli government” or were politically liberal reported antisemitism concerns on their campuses. Most of the antisemitism came from fellow students, though “at the most hostile schools” 30% of surveyed students “reported encountering hostility toward Israel from faculty.”

In the Brandeis study, the schools at which Jewish students experienced the greatest fear were secular schools. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that religious schools are safer. Perhaps those schools have fewer Jewish students and so were not surveyed in this study.

There is some anecdotal evidence, however, that suggests that support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism is embraced by people of faith.

For instance, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a strong statement in the wake of the October attacks, including a forthright repudiation of antisemitism: “The Jewish people have long endured genocidal attempts to eradicate them and to destroy the Jewish state. These antisemitic, deadly ideologies and terrorist actions must be opposed.”

In a recent Sutherland Institute Defending Ideas podcast, Rabbi Chaim Zippel contrasted the widely reported hostility towards Jewish students on some campuses with Brigham Young University’s positive efforts to support its Jewish students.

Rebecca Sugar, a columnist writing in The Wall Street Journal prior to October, said: “Institutions that honor the Judeo-Christian tradition and celebrate Western civilization tend to resist the academic decay, and attendant anti-Semitism, now plaguing many first- and second-tier campuses.” She points to data from the Israel on Campus Coalition on “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel events across 1,100 campuses nationwide, during the 2021-22 academic year” which found that “only two of the 225 incidents recorded took place on Christian campuses. Neither was violent.” She also points to positive examples from schools such as Notre Dame, Hillsdale, Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount and Wake Forest.

Indirectly, the existence of religious schools is, in itself, an important protection of religious minorities. The pluralism that allows Christian schools to flourish allows Jewish schools like Yeshiva University to flourish as well.

What might make universities with strong religious identities more, rather than less, supportive of religious minorities that do not share their faith?

This is a question Sutherland Institute will be returning to in a longer report expected to be released later in 2024, but it may be that a religious identity is an important resource for fostering tolerance and a sense of belonging on college campuses. These universities share the commitment of other universities to pursue truth and provide education to students, but they typically often have additional commitments that reflect a sense of accountability to God, including for the way they treat others.

Perhaps as religious commitment generally wanes across society, those who believe are finding more in common with other believers despite differences in the specifics of those beliefs.

As with other significant challenges facing higher education, religious colleges and universities may have something important to offer in the effort to end antisemitism.