Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

11% Of American Jews Say They Don’t Feel Safe: Poll

(JTA) — In a survey conducted online among hundreds of respondents who identified as Jews, 27 percent of Europeans and 11 percent of Americans said they felt unsafe.

In the World Zionist Organization survey, which was conducted last year among a total of 1,361 respondents, 51 percent of those in Europe said that wearing Jewish symbols in public made them feel unsafe. In North America, that figure was 22 percent.

A press statement by WZO about the survey was conducted among Jews not living in Israel but it did not say how many of the 1,361 respondents were from Europe, North America and beyond. The statement also did not specify which countries in Europe the respondents on that continent came from.

Nearly a third of European respondents said they had experienced or witnessed an anti-Semitic event featuring vandalism. Compared to 11 percent worldwide.

Worldwide, most respondents who said they had experienced an anti-Semitic incident also indicated that they did not report it to police. Six percent said they did not report the alleged incident out of fear their security. Thirty percent said they did not want “to make a deal of it” and 42 percent said lacked faith in authorities to act on their complaint.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.