Jewish Elite Students' Sudden Alienation from the Left

Jews have drawn SJW heat away from conservative students

In a new report based on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s massive annual US undergraduate student surveys of some 60,000 students, I find that Jewish students on elite US campuses (in light blue in the chart) are suddenly feeling much less free to express their views.

At the same time, conservatives (in red) are feeling less pressure to self-censor.

Why this odd juxtaposition of trends around progressive illiberalism?

After several years of stability - in which Jews self-censored their views at some of the lowest rates of all students - the share of Jewish Ivy League students who often self-censor their political views rose from 13 to 35 percent between 2023 and 2024. The change was a more modest 5 points across all universities.

Meanwhile, at the same time, after several years of stable but high self-censorship, the share of conservative Ivy League students who often self-censor their political views dropped from 55 to 31 percent between 2023 and 2024. Conservatives still self-censor a lot more than liberals, but they were feeling relatively more free to speak in 2024 than in any year since comparable survey results began in 2021. This was especially true in the Ivy League, but also more widely across the university sector.

Encampments alienated elite Jewish students from the far left. In 2024, the share of Jewish Ivy League students who identify as very liberal declined from 40 percent before encampments to 13 percent after they appeared, Jews identifying as Strong Democrats fell from 37 to 14 percent.

The effect was more muted across the university system as a whole, but Jews in general shifted away from the ‘very liberal’ position by around 6 points, with a modest increase in conservatism of 2 points.

Students are *evenly divided* as to whether Hamas or Israel was responsible for the ‘2023 outbreak of violence in the Middle East.’ You read that right: students are not sure who was responsible for the frenzy of anti-Jewish murder and rape by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Overall, student sympathies lie with the Palestinians much more than the Israelis. 10 percent of students sympathize more with Israel, 40 percent with the Palestinians. The rest sympathize with both or don’t know.

Liberal Jews and liberal non-Jews have never been further apart, and this on an issue which has come to occupy a central place in campus politics. 53 percent of liberal Jewish students say Hamas started the war in October, placing them far closer to conservative Jews (83 percent) than liberal non-Jews (14 percent).

Just 38 percent of conservative students say Hamas started the war in October, with 16 percent saying Israel did. The rest sympathize with both or don’t know. This speaks to a recent Washington Post article from Terell Wright suggesting young Republicans are cooling on Israel.

Religious Jews self-censor more than secular Jews. 40 percent of Ivy League Jewish students who regularly attend synagogue self-censor their views often. More religious people of all faiths also self-censor more, but the effect is most profound for religious Jews. There is some evidence that the more identifiable Jewish males and Muslim females self-censor more. But the bottom line is, as Jay Greene argued in response to Steven Pinker, that religious Jews are feeling a lot of pressure on Ivy League campuses. As the chart below shows, 40 percent often self-censor their political views among other students or their professors.

FIRE data allows us to see what happened before and after the encampments went up - mainly on elite campuses - after April 17, 2024. The rise of encampments increased self-censorship among Jews and Muslims, but Jews lost expressive freedom at a much higher rate than Muslim students in the Ivy League.

Why did Jewish speech become less free at *precisely* the same time that conservative speech got more free? Why did the encampments have a disparate impact on Jewish and conservative expressive freedom across all US universities - as the charts below show?

The answer seems to be that Israel sucked a lot of the left’s political energy away from race and gender, which had preoccupied left-wing activists for the better part of a decade. A 2024 FIRE report shows that most targetings of professors for cancellation around the Israel-Palestine issue come from the off-campus political right.

Here is the broader trend comparing cancellations of academics from the right in red and from the left in blue. There is a fairly even pattern until this year. The right-wing numbers in 2025 are, however, largely driven by the Trump administration’s restrictions on critical race theory texts and courses, which is treated as a professor targeting (ie restricting their academic freedom):

While the off-campus right dominates professor targeting on the Israel-Palestine question, most student-led cancellations around the Israel-Palestine issue come from the on-campus left. The share of student-on-student targeting accounted for by the issue of Israel-Palestine increased from 17 percent in 2022 to 65 percent in 2024. All numbers from the same FIRE report.

The pivot from race/gender, which is sacred for the young left, to Israel-Palestine, which is less central to their myth-symbol complex, seems to have taken the heat off conservatives and placed it on Jews.

Conservative students, meanwhile, appear not to have been chilled by anti-Israel speech. That is, leftist ire against Israel and Jews is not experienced by many conservative students as an attack on them that would prompt them to hide their views on politics from other students. In fact the data suggests they seem relieved that the gun is being pointed at someone else - someone (pro-Israel Jews) that they largely do not consider to be them. The drop in conservative self-censorship also indicates that the campus left does not consider conservatives to be complicit in Israel’s actions. Note that these FIRE surveys took place during the Biden administration, and the left associates it with the hated Democratic Establisment, whom the left accuses of being pro-Israel.

Meanwhile, as we saw, many conservative students either do not care about Israel or are on the fence.

All of which suggests that student views on Israel-Palestine are only modestly aligned with left-right or Democratic-Republican partisanship.

This could change. If Trump’s actions get young conservatives firmly behind Israel, associating conservatism with the fight against antisemitism, the left may in turn police conservative speech more. I would then expect to see conservatives reporting more self-censorship when the 2025 FIRE data are released.

If, however, the young right cools on Israel, as Terell Wright suggests, this will leave Jewish students more isolated.

What this means for Jewish self-expression and voting remains to be seen, but the FIRE data suggests that Jews on elite campuses are far less likely to comfortably align themselves with left-wing activism than in the recent past.

You can read more deeply into the analysis in my new @UniOfBuckingham heterodoxcentre.com report at:

https://www.heterodoxcentre.com/research/chss-report-no-4-jewish-inhibition-conservative-freedom/.

And my new piece in Tablet Magazine:

Whatever happens with Trump’s campaign against antisemitism on elite campuses, the relationship between young elite Jews and the far left is unlikely to recover. And these young Jews are likely to have an outsized impact on the politics of American Jewry going forward.

The influence of the Critical Race Theory-adjacent ideology known as Settler-Colonialism is likely to ensure that being pro-Israel - as most liberal Jews are - and a member of the left in good standing are mutually exclusive.

Only a major liberalizing shift in the politics of Israel-Palestine, a remote prospect, can reverse elite Jewish students’ growing estrangement from the left.