The Holocaust and Contemporary Attitudes towards Jews and Israel: A Seven-Nation Study

By Tom W. Smith

Last of three parts: Country by country patterns

The Memory of the Holocaust Study, conducted in seven nations in the spring of 2005, was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to gauge the state of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli attitudes in the contemporary world and how those attitudes are related to people’s knowledge about the Holocaust. In the March and April issues of Public Opinion Pros, we looked at the country by country responses and responses according to demographic groups to questions pertaining to respondents’ knowledge of the Holocaust and attitudes toward the Holocaust, Jews, and Israel.

In this issue, we take our examination a few steps further by exploring country by country patterns in the responses to these questions. To accomplish this, we conducted a factor analysis—a statistical procedure that attempts to find questions in a survey whose responses cluster together so that, when combined in a scale, they form a coherent measurement of some concept or condition.

Based on this factor analysis, five scales were created:

• The Know/Teach scale, based on three items indicating whether respondents believed understanding the Holocaust was important, that remembrance should be kept strong, and that the Holocaust should be taught about in schools.

• The Problem/Again scale, consisting of two items on the likelihood of another Holocaust occurring and whether anti-Semitism was a serious problem.

• The Sympathy scale, a two-item scale measuring sympathy toward Jews and Israel.

• The Sympathy Plus Refuge scale, which added the “Israel as a Jewish refuge item” to the two sympathy questions.

• Negative Views, comprising the two items with negative statements about Jews (that they exploit the Holocaust and have too much influence).

Having created the five scales, the next step was to see how each of them related to knowledge of the Holocaust—as indicated by the number of “don’t know” and “wrong” responses to the items in the survey that measured knowledge—for the seven different countries.

In general, we found that having less knowledge about the Holocaust led to less support for remembrance of and teaching about it. Support for knowing and teaching about the Holocaust in turn related to seeing problems as serious, having sympathy, having sympathy and accepting Israel as a Jewish refuge, and rejecting negative images. But, except in the United States, knowledge itself was only weakly and sporadically related to these attitudes.

These relationships were explored further using a multivariate regression analysis that simultaneously considered the impact on attitudes of age, education, knowledge, and support for knowing and teaching about the Holocaust. Again, results showed that in all countries, those with more knowledge were less supportive of forgetting and not teaching. Age was related only in the United Kingdom, where older adults were more supportive of remembrance and teaching. Education, on the other hand, made a difference in all countries, with the better-educated opposing forgetting and not teaching. In sum, in all countries, more education and more knowledge (independent of education) about the Holocaust led to support for being knowledgeable about the Holocaust, remembering it, and teaching about it.