Nearly one-third of the American people believe that there is growing hostility toward the Jews in this country, according to a poll conducted by Fortune Survey and published in the November issue of Fortune, which says that “Jewry may well find cause for alarm” in this fact.
The survey reports that 52.5 per cent of those polled found little hostility, 32.5, growing hostility, and 15.0 answered that they didn’t know. “Thus more than half of the nation denies that there is any appreciable and growing race prejudice,” fortune asserts. “This may be encouraging. On the other hand, if nearly a third of the people acknowledge that they sense a thing so subtle and so underground as a change in attitude, Jewry may well find cause for alarm.”
Breaking down its figures, Fortune found that the larger the community, the more prevalent was anti-Semitism, which “since most of the Jews are in large cities,” was held to be “a fact of much darker portent to them than what the nation believes as a whole.” However, Fortune reported that differences in opinion by economic level were negligible.
Polling the Jews on the same question, Fortune Survey found that the Jews were hardly more worried about their popular standing than gentiles. it reported that 41.7 PER cent of the Jews saw growing hostility, compared with 35.3 per cent of the Catholics, 31.0 of the Protestants and 30.0 of those professing no religion.
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