Almost half of all adults worldwide harbor deeply rooted anti-Semitic views. Publicist Neville Teller reported this shocking result of a survey in the Jerusalem Post on January 27, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It is the most comprehensive survey of global public opinion on the subject ever conducted. The project was carried out between July and November 2024 by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in collaboration with the multinational market research company Ipsos and others. More than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories were surveyed for the representative study. The survey also shows that the proportion of adults worldwide who hold anti-Semitic views has risen from 26 percent in 2014 to 46 percent in 2024.

This proportion is disproportionately higher in the Middle East and North Africa, where three quarters of respondents believe anti-Semitic prejudices to be true, whereas the proportion was lowest in Western democracies governed by the rule of law. But not all is well there either: the British Community Security Trust recorded a 204% increase in anti-Semitic incidents between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2024.

The author was particularly struck by the stark contrast between nearly four billion anti-Semites and just 2.2 million Jews worldwide outside Israel and the USA. For human rights organizations, the high proportion of ignorance about the Nazi genocide of European Jews, which is around 20 percent, is a wake-up call. This shows how important it is to remember the atrocious past even long after crimes against humanity have been overcome.