Defense organizations have done a great deal to find out what non-Jews think of Jews, but very little has been done to ascertain the feelings of American Jews toward themselves and their non-Jewish neighbors, Dr. John Slawson, executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee, said today. To meet this need, the Scientific Research Department of the AJC is completing a comprehensive study of Jewish attitudes which is expected to be ready for publication shortly, he announced.
Intensive interviews with over 200 Jewish families in Trenton, New Jersey, were used to collect the data on which the study is based, Dr. Slawson reported. “Our aim,” he declared, “was to find out what Jews themselves thought of anti-Semitism, Israel, intermarriage and social relations with non-Jews, religious observance and Jewish education for their children, and of many other topics related in some way to their Jewishness. We also wanted to discover to what extent these views were shared by their children.
“It is well known,” Dr. Slawson stated, “that anti-Semites form invidious, stereotyped images of the Jew which they use to bolster their prejudices. Not so well known is that many Jews also tend to think of Jews as a completely homogeneous group. The tremendous range and diversity of American Jewish opinion and behavior are not always realized. It was in an effort to explore the range of these diversities that this study was conceived.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
