Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt says a new study finds Jewish and Israeli American job-seekers face significant discrimination in the US labor market. The study, conducted by the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research, found that Jewish American job candidates needed to send 24.2% more applications to receive the same number of positive first responses from employers as Americans with Western European backgrounds. For resumes indicating an Israeli sounding name and professional background, applicants needed to send 39% more inquiries to receive the same number of responses.
The study, which sent 3,000 inquiries to administrative assistance job postings across the United States, found that “both the Jewish and the Israeli Treatments experienced a decrease in positive response rates relative to the control.” Greenblatt argued that this data supports the concern that antisemitism is spreading into the US labor market, citing instances of anti-Israel protesters, harassment of Jews in public, and blocking of access to synagogues.
Greenblatt stated that “we’ve seen a clear pattern of discrimination through this empirical research, which bears out what we had heard anecdotally. There is real implications at our labor market where Jewish and Israeli people are being discriminated against. It’s a big problem that hasn’t been reported on that we’re just breaking right now.”
Greenblatt also referenced a new complaint filed by the editor-in-chief of a student-run Jewish magazine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), alleging that the student government warned against hiring “Zionists,” created a “no hire list,” and rejected applications from students who wrote about their Jewish heritage. He argued that this is part of a larger pattern of discrimination, citing instances of blacklisting and hate speech.
Greenblatt called for the Trump administration to take action to address this issue, stating that “discriminating against people because of their faith, their ethnicity, their national origin is a violation of the law. And we hope that the Trump administration, specifically the Trump Labor Department, will take action to stop this once and for all.”
