Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development and director of the Critical Issues Poll at the University of Maryland has the results of a sounding done this past summer on American attitudes to Jews and Muslims.
The PDF of his conclusions and those of his colleague Michael Hamner is lengthy, but here I just want to draw attention to some key findings.
The favorability rating of “Muslim people” in the US steadily rose from 46% in 2015, the year ISIL attacked Paris and posed a threat to US allies in the Middle East. In 2015, only 37% of Americans said that they had a favorable view of the Muslim religion. Maybe because Trump made them underdogs in the US during his first term, by 2021 78% of Americans said they had a favorable view of Muslim people. Some 57% had a favorable view of Islam as a religion.
It is a paradox that Americans at some points say they like Muslims, but take a dim view on the whole of their religion. I’m not sure how that works. Moreover, it should be noted that their attitudes toward the religion are rooted in almost complete ignorance. Professor Telhami should ask them sometime about whether they’ve ever read the Qur’an or a book about Islam by an academic specialist. I’d bet only 2 or 3 percent would say “yes.” The Qur’an is the most disliked book in Europe and the US that no Europeans or Americans have read.
By January 2024, a few months after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, only 67% of respondents expressed a favorable view of Muslim people, a decline of 11 points. It went on down to 64% that August, but a year later had risen slightly to 65%.
It isn’t rational that Americans let current events so heavily influence their views of Muslims. The paramilitary wing of Hamas had 30,000 fighters. There are 2 billion Muslims in the world, only 20% of them Arabs. The Palestinians of Gaza make up only 0.01% of the world’s Muslims, who reside in Senegal, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Turkiye, and many other non-Arab countries. And a majority of Palestinians in Gaza disapproved of Hamas in polling before October 7.
Most Americans don’t know any Muslims, and so they let very particular news stories influence how they see them. Polling shows that Americans who do know a Muslim personally have a higher than average estimation of the community and the religion. Muslims in American are probably about 4 million strong, some 1.14 percent of the population.
There is also a strong partisan divide. Even in 2025 amid the Gaza genocide, 82% of Democrats said that they had a favorable view of Muslims. Only 43% of Republicans said that, down from 71% in 2021. Telhami and Hamner find that Republicans who watch Fox News regularly are the most Islamophobic. People who get their news from social media are more positive toward Muslims.
Photo by Kamil Kalkan on Unsplash
In contrast, the favorability of Jews and Judaism has increased across the board. In 2025 some 85% of Americans have a positive attitude toward Jews and 76% think well of Judaism as a religion.
I suspect the small minority of Americans who have an unfavorable view of Jews are on the far right.
An interesting divide has opened up about the definition of antisemitism. They write, “In our 2025 poll, we found that a majority of respondents said that attitudes against Jews (73%) and attitudes against Judaism (55%) were antisemitic.”
I’m not sure what antisemitism could be if not “attitudes against Jews,” but I guess 17% of Americans couldn’t go along with that one. It is also interesting that 45% seem to think you can dislike the Judaic religion and still not be antisemitic.
Many fewer Americans think that a negative view of Zionism equates to antisemitism. Even among Republicans, only 39% hold this view, and only 21% of Democrats do.
Interestingly more Republicans (44%) thought critiquing Israeli policy is antisemitic than thought critiquing Zionism is. Only 21% of Democrats think that attitudes against Zionism are antisemitic, and only 20% believe that attitudes against Israeli policies are antisemitic. In fact, 59%, a clear majority, of Democrats said that attitudes against Israeli policies are not antisemitic.
One thing going on here is that at least 2/3s of evangelicals vote Republican, and evangelicals often believe that it is wrong to criticize Israel, misusing Genesis 12:2 in this regard.
The poll knocks down the Trump administration’s position that there is an epidemic of antisemitism in the United States. The college-educated are even more favorable toward Jews and Judaism than the general population. On the other hand, there is clearly a crisis of Islamophobia in the US, especially among Republicans and especially by those who watch Fox Cable News.
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