Are US employers discriminating against Jews?

For Jews or Israeli-Americans finding their job search a steep climb, a new study from the Anti-Defamation League’s Centre for Antisemitism Research shows the problem does not lie with them.

Résumé studies are considered good barometers of bias. In that vein, this study was conducted by labour economist Bryan Tomlin to assess whether “Americans who signal Jewish or Israeli backgrounds experience discrimination in the US labour market.”

Three thousand applications were submitted to administrative assistant openings on Craiglist.org, where humans still sort inquiries. Applications to these nationwide openings involved identical email text and identical résumés that differed only in the name of the applicant – selected to ‘sound’ Jewish, Israeli, or Western European – and résumé signals of the same.

Tomlin found that small changes – like mentioning an undergraduate focus on Jewish literature rather than English literature, or fluency in Hebrew rather than French – really mattered. In short, American Jews must apply to 24.2 per cent more jobs and Israeli-Americans must apply to 39 per cent more jobs to hear back from the same number of employers as someone signalling Western European heritage.

Rachel Schneider, Director of the Boniuk Institute’s Religion and Public Life Centre at Rice University told me that the “overall findings do not surprise me, as this seems consistent with literature and prior research on the hiring side.” The study’s conclusion certainly complements the findings of a 2022 study Schneider worked on, How Religious Discrimination is Perceived in the Workplace: Expanding the View, that addressed the experiences of the already-hired. Among the 11,356 American employees surveyed, 52 per cent of Jews reported religious discrimination, nearly double the study’s overall rate of 27 per cent.

Have American workplaces changed radically – and recently? Two earlier studies cited in that 2022 study were much sunnier. Consider 2013’s Religious affiliation and hiring discrimination in New England: A field experiment”. Four researchers at the University of Connecticut ran their own résumé study, submitting 6,400 résumés. They tested how seven religious groups, including Jews, were treated by employers in New England. They reported: “The lack of discrimination against Jews in our study fits with the highly positive opinions expressed about Jews in national surveys . . . Jews may receive less religious discrimination in the labour market because employers assume that, because of their typically higher education and occupational aspirations, they make better employees.”

The following year, three of those co-authors published a follow-up study, Religious Affiliation and Hiring Discrimination in the American South: A Field Experiment. They again tested for discrimination against members of seven religious groups including Jews, this time in the fairly religious South. Researchers “submitted 3,200 résumés to 800 jobs within 150 miles of two major Southern cities.”

This Southern study found, “Only Jews escaped totally unscathed as we found no statistically significant evidence of hiring discrimination...Not only did Jewish applicants not face discrimination but they also actually may have received preferential treatment by some employers – that is, they were more likely to receive an early, exclusive, or solo response from employers, compared with all other religious groups combined. This suggests there is a subset of employers who show a preference for Jewish applicants.”

 Has the American cultural landscape shifted dramatically over the past decade? Jay Greene, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who has studied institutional antisemitism, is sceptical. Greene told me, “I have concerns that the methodology of the ADL study is not fully described and does not appear to conform to conventional approaches to these types of studies, which raises questions about whether these results are reliable or not.”

Another, indirect, route to potentially answering the ADL’s and Greene’s questions involves US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data. Between October 2022 and September 2023, an EEOC spokesperson told me, the federal agency “received 4,341 religious discrimination claims out of a total of 81,055 discrimination claims (5.4 per cent of the total).” However, the EEOC doesn’t share “statistics concerning the national origin or religious identity of charging parties.”

Where does that leave individual American Jews and Israeli-Americans encountering discrimination? Gerard Filitti, Senior Counsel at The Lawfare Project, advises that job hunters “have legal rights to be free of the sort of discrimination that denies them employment. They need to be persistent, document their interactions with potential employers, and feel comfortable enough to share their experiences. No one should be forced to hide their identity in exchange for employment, especially not in 2024.”

​Melissa Langsam Braunstein is a writer based in the Washington DC area @slowhoneybee