ADL receives $7.5 million grant to poll anti-Semitic attitudes

(JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League received a $7.5 million grant to launch a global anti-Semitism index.

In a statement Thursday announcing the grant, which will be paid over three years, the ADL said it would “significantly expand” the organization’s polling on global anti-Semitism.

The grant for the ADL Global Anti-Semitism Index was announced this week at the fourth International Conference of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.

First International Resources LLC, a New Jersey-based firm, will compile and release the survey by the end of the year.

In its first year, the project will poll and measure anti-Semitic attitudes in 50 countries. More countries will be added as time goes on, the ADL said in a statement. Pollsters will conduct face-to-face, telephone or online surveys in the native language of each country.

“The Global Anti-Semitism Index will give us the ability not only to better understand the magnitude of the problem around the world, but to assess where it is most problematic, how pervasive it is in certain regions, and exactly which anti-Jewish beliefs are the most seriously entrenched,” said Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director. “We will be able to share that information with governments to use it as a lever to promote education and legislation against anti-Semitism. We will be able to present countries and international bodies with hard data on the actual level of attitudinal biases toward Jews around the world. And we will be able to pinpoint which countries are the most deeply infected with one of the world’s oldest hatreds.”

Last year, the ADL released “Attitudes Toward Jews in 10 European Countries,” an opinion poll of 5,000 Europeans conducted in January 2012 in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom.