Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews? by Jonathan Fox and Lev Topor (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews? by Jonathan Fox and Lev Topor Arno Tausch Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews? By Jonathan Fox and Lev Topor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 256 pages. $29.95 (paper). This innovative quantitative study on governmental and societal discrimination against Jews in 76 countries is a very welcome application of advanced comparative, cross-national political science to the subject of antisemitism. The present study, written by Jonathan Fox and Lev Topor, is important reading for researchers and students of antisemitism, international relations, and political science in general. A well-written introduction outlines the book. As established in chapter two, government-based discrimination (GRD), which is one of the two central variables of the present study, is measured by the restrictions placed on religious institutions, clergy, or the practices of minority religions that are not placed on the majority religion. The other variable is societal religious discrimination (SRD) faced by the Jewish population. It is measured by actions taken against religious minorities by members of a country's religious majority who do not represent the government. They include economic discrimination, speech acts, non-violent property crimes, harassment, and violence. The data archive, compiled by Jonathan Fox and his associates, used in this study, is freely available on the internet (The Religion and State Project, Round 3, https://www.thearda.com/data-archive?fid=RAS3 and https://www.thearda.com/data-archive?fid=RAS3&tab=3). Readers interested in official government reports that further highlight the information provided by the authors may consult the global International Religious Freedom Reports, provided by the U.S. State Department (https://www.state.gov/international-religious-freedom-reports/). For readers of this journal, who may not be familiar with econometrics and politometrics, I have summarized the very extensive statistical material in chapter two, entitled Patterns of Discrimination, which forms the backbone of the empirical argumentation of the book and informs the statements of Fox and Topor. Explaining the realities of government-based and societal discrimination against [End Page 186] Jews in the world in social scientific terms is the goal of this book, and the two phenomena can be summarized as follows: • Global bottom 25% of countries with government-based religious discrimination against Jews: Andorra; Australia; Austria; Barbados; Canada; Estonia; France; Italy; Malta; Mexico; New Zealand; Panama; Suri-name; United States; Uruguay. • Global 25–50% of countries with government-based religious discrimination against Jews: Bahamas; Belgium; Belize; Colombia; Germany; Hungary; Latvia; Lithuania; Netherlands; Slovakia; Slovenia; Ukraine; United Kingdom; Brazil; Czech Republic. • Global 50–75% of countries with government-based religious discrimination against Jews: Finland; Liechtenstein; Luxembourg; Iceland; Ireland; Macedonia; Paraguay; Portugal; Spain; Bolivia; Switzerland; Argentina; Cyprus; Chile; Denmark. • Global top 25% of countries with government-based religious discrimination against Jews: Moldova; Peru; Venezuela; Croatia; Uzbekistan; Norway; Bulgaria; Sweden; Armenia; Greece; Iran; Egypt; Georgia; Algeria; Belarus. • Global bottom 25% of countries with societal religious discrimination against Jews: Barbados; Estonia; Malta; Mexico; Panama; Suriname; Bahamas; Belize; Iceland; Ireland; Macedonia; Paraguay; Uzbekistan; Andorra; Slovenia. • Global 25–50% of countries with societal religious discrimination against Jews: Luxembourg; Portugal; Peru; Georgia; Liechtenstein; Bolivia; Norway; New Zealand; Latvia; Denmark; Colombia; Spain; Algeria; Uruguay; Lithuania. • Global 50–75% of countries with societal religious discrimination against Jews: Cyprus; Chile; Moldova; Armenia; Iran; Slovakia; Finland; Bulgaria; Egypt; Switzerland; Croatia; Italy; Brazil; Ukraine; Venezuela. • Global top 25% of countries with societal religious discrimination against Jews: Netherlands; Belarus; Canada; [End Page 187] Sweden; Hungary; Czech Republic; Argentina; Austria; Greece; United Kingdom; Australia; United States; Belgium; Germany; France. In chapter three, on religious (especially Christian) antisemitism, and chapter four, on anti-Zionism and anti-Israel behavior and sentiment, the authors present the most important theoretical underpinnings and the most important empirical findings on these subjects based on dozens and dozens of regression results in the appendix. Table 3.2 clearly shows that government support for a particular religious denomination—such as the still-existing state-church system in Scandinavia—reinforces the two forms of discrimination against Jews, according to Fox and Topor's data, while the share of the population that considers religion important (WVS) and also the participation rate in sacred celebrations (WVS) have no statistically significant influence or...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".