Abstract
Since October 7, 2023, antisemitism on American campuses has become a contested political issue. Scholars of antisemitism argue that the relationship between antisemitism and political ideology follows a "horseshoe" pattern, with higher levels of antisemitic hostility on both the far right and far left. However, existing empirical research has yet to establish this connection, in part because antisemitism may be expressed differently on opposite sides of the left-right political spectrum. To address this challenge, we develop a measure of antisemitism grounded in both formal definitions and empirical data about how US Jewish college students perceive anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements and then measure the prevalence of these attitudes among non-Jewish US college undergraduates. We find that explicit anti-Jewish attitudes are more common among those with far-right political identities, and beliefs about Israel that formal definitions and most Jewish students find antisemitic are more common among those who identify with the political left.