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Widespread Anti-Semitism Has Suppressed Jewish Life in Europe
(Tablet) Yair Rosenberg - CNN released a sweeping survey of European attitudes toward Jews on Tuesday, essentially finding that 1/4 of respondents espoused textbook anti-Semitic views. Moreover, 34% said they knew "little or nothing" about the Holocaust. These numbers are bad enough on their own. But they do not paint the whole picture, which is substantially worse for European Jews and Jewish life. As a result, shocking numbers of European Jews conceal their Jewishness in public, and many have left Europe entirely. In 2013, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights conducted its own survey of European anti-Semitism. Nearly 40% of European Jews said they feared to openly identify as Jewish, including 60% of Swedish Jews, 51% of French Jews, and 45% of Belgian Jews. A new survey released Monday found that 43% of Dutch Jews hide their Jewish identity. Anyone who has ever been to Europe knows that synagogues are frequently unmarked and typically encased within extraordinary layers of security, as compared with their North American counterparts. In other words, anti-Semitism has had a massive chilling effect on Jewish life in Europe, beyond the numbers of actual anti-Semites. None of this is to say that there isn't vibrant Jewish life across Europe today. But the existence and resistance of proud Jewish communities should not blind us to the sobering long-term effects of that anti-Semitism.