Old and New Anti-Semitic Attitudes in the Context of Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation--Two Studies in Germany.

Abstract

On the basis of a new heuristic model of anti-Semitism, researchers are able to distinguish between new and old aspects of anti-Semitic attitudes. The results of two studies suggest that anti-Semitism in Germany contains very different aspects and the data fit the new theoretical model. Both traditional aspects, like "manifest anti-Semitism," as well as new forms of anti-Semitic attitudes, like "latent anti-Semitism," "rejection of responsibility for Jews," "anti-Israeli attitudes," and "anti-Zionism," were found. Furthermore, we identified various anti-Semitic attitudes with different predictive elements. Individuals with extreme anti-Semitic attitudes differ significantly from those without anti-Semitic attitudes with regard to the extent of authoritarianism, readiness for violence, approval of the repetition of National Socialism, and political orientation. The comparison between the two general concepts, authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, demonstrated that authoritarianism has greater utility in explaining separate aspects of old and new anti-Semitic attitudes. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Essentialism and attribution of monstrosity in racist discourse: Right‐wing internet postings about Africans and Jews

“…The present analysis supports Rensmann's (2004) concept of 'modernized antiSemitism' and to an even greater extent Frindte's concept of deliberately 'staged' antiSemitism (Frindte, Wettig, & Wammetsberger, 2005): the contemporary Nazis try to transport the old prejudice against the Jews into our times. In this process, some old antiSemitic constructions are presented in a new fashion.…”

Harmful Ideas, The Structure and Consequences of Anti‐Semitic Beliefs inPoland

“…For instance, there is an on‐going debate about the relations between Israel‐criticism and anti‐Semitism. Recent studies found a strong positive relationship between anti‐Zionism and anti‐Semitism (Frindte, Wettig, & Wammetsberger, ; Kaplan & Small, ), while in other studies it was observed only under a bogus‐pipeline procedure (Cohen, Jussim, Harber, & Bhasin, ). To give another example: early research on anti‐Semitism (Allport & Kramer, ) found that anti‐Semitic attitudes lead to higher accuracy in indicating the Jewish identity of the person in a photograph, while more recent studies (Andrzejewski, Hall, & Salib, ) found the highest accuracy among non‐anti‐Semitic participants.…”

“…Right‐wing authoritarianism was found to predict anti‐Semitism in the United States, Czech Republic (Dunbar & Simonova, ), and Germany (Frindte et al., ), and it was related to beliefs in Jewish conspiracy in Poland (Grzesiak‐Feldman & Irzycka, ). The predictive power of authoritarianism on different forms of anti‐Semitism was much higher than that of other similar individual difference measures (Frindte et al., ). These results support the original claim of Adorno and colleagues () that the individual‐difference antidemocratic syndrome constitutes a foundation for contemporary anti‐Semitic attitudes.…”

“…Anti-Semitic beliefs never existed in a vacuum-they were often part of broader worldviews. Psychological literature on anti-Semitism placed anti-Semitism in the specific set of personality traits that predispose people to hold such beliefs (Adorno et al, 1950;Frindte et al, 2005;Dunbar & Simonova, 2003). Other authors stressed situational factors, such as crisis, failure, or deprivation, that fuel anti-Semitic beliefs in a process of scapegoating (Glick, 2002;Gibson & Howard, 2007;Zawadzki, 1948).…”

“…This is why the original study on authoritarianism included a measure of "stereotyped negative opinions describing the Jews as threatening, immoral and categorically different from non-Jews" as part of the authoritarian personality construct (Adorno et al, 1950, p. 71). More recent literature has also investigated anti-Semitism as related to specific-authoritarian-personality (Dunbar & Simonova, 2003;Frindte et al, 2005;Grzesiak-Feldman & Irzycka, 2009). Right-wing authoritarianism was found to predict anti-Semitism in the United States, Czech Republic (Dunbar & Simonova, 2003), and Germany (Frindte et al, 2005), and it was related to beliefs in Jewish conspiracy in Poland (Grzesiak-Feldman & Irzycka, 2009).…”