The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has received a multimillion-dollar grant to significantly expand ADL’s polling on global anti-Semitism.
Totaling $7.5 million over three years, the grant will be used to establish the ADL Global Anti-Semitism Index, a significant annual barometer of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world. During the project’s first year, ADL will measure anti-Semitic attitudes in 50 countries around the world, with additional countries being added in each subsequent year.
The ADL Global Anti-Semitism Index will build upon the League’s past polling efforts, first introduced in 1964 and which have been conducted regularly in the United States and in as many as 12 countries in Europe since 2002.
“The Global Anti-Semitism Index will give us the ability not only to better understand the magnitude of the problem around the world, but to assess where it is most problematic, how pervasive it is in certain regions, and exactly which anti-Jewish beliefs are the most seriously entrenched,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “We will be able to share that information with governments to use it as a lever to promote education and legislation against anti-Semitism. We will be able to present countries and international bodies with hard data on the actual level of attitudinal biases toward Jews around the world. And we will be able to pinpoint which countries are the most deeply infected with one of the world’s oldest hatreds.”
Foxman announced the new ADL initiative at the fourth hInternational Conference of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.
The new index will encompass numerous countries in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, where polls on anti-Semitic attitudes will be fielded simultaneously. In each country, pollsters will conduct either face-to-face, telephone or online surveys in the native language and the resulting data will be compiled and compared to create the most comprehensive snapshot of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world.
The initial ADL Global Anti-Semitism Index survey will be conducted by First International Resources LLC, and compiled and released before the end of 2013.
