Gendering Experiences of Anti-Semitism: A Quantitative Analysis of Discrimination in Europe

Abstract

Little is known about the gendered dimension of anti-Semitism. Emerging from a literature review on social identity theory, anti-Semitism, sexism, and Jewish feminism, I demonstrate the urgency of examining the link between gender and experiences of anti-Semitism, using the FRA’s 2018 dataset “Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism: Second Survey on Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in the EU,” a large-scale survey of Jews in thirteen countries across Europe. The independent variable is gender identity. Five dependent variables relate to experiences of sex/gender discrimination, physical attacks, offensive/threatening comments, offensive gestures/staring, and online harassment. Using five control variables—being identifiable as a Jew in public, country, Jewish identity, education level, and Jewish population in one’s neighborhood—I engage with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis to analyze my variables. The findings show that while women are more likely to experience gender discrimination, men are significantly more likely to experience anti-Semitism.