Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

American Jews And Muslims Have More In Common Than We Thought, Study Finds

(JTA) — The more that American Jews and American Muslims interact with each other, the more likely they are to see the two faiths as more similar than different, a comprehensive study of Muslim-Jewish relations in America has found.

Fifty-four percent of Jews and 65 percent of Muslims surveyed in a poll for the Foundation of Ethnic Understanding responded that “Judaism and Islam are more similar to each other than they are different.” Jews who had frequent exposure to Muslims said Islam is more inclusive, more evolving and more modern than those who were exposed more infrequently.

PSB Research on behalf of the FFEU conducted a national online survey of 1,000 respondents – 500 self-identified American Jews and 500 self-identified American Muslims – between January 9 and January 24, 2018. The study was sponsored by Ory Capital Partners.

The study, released on Wednesday, showed that the gaps between American Jews and Muslims were smaller than previously thought, and that the more devout the person was, the closer they aligned with the other religion.

The one issue where there was dramatic disagreement was over Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, with 48 percent of all Jews surveyed either strongly or somewhat supportive of Jerusalem being designated Israel’s capital and 63 percent of Muslims either strongly or somewhat opposed to it.

Both American Muslims and Jews acknowledge that there is anti-Muslim sentiment in the American Jewish community, with 55 percent of Jewish respondents surveyed saying that there is some and 9 percent saying there is a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment among Jews, and 44 percent of Muslims saying there is some and 17 percent saying there is a lot.

On the topic of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, 44 percent of Jews and 48 percent of Muslims say that it is possible for a peaceful and mutually agreed upon solution to the conflict, with 39 percent of Jews and 21 percent of Muslims responding that this is impossible.

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.