To appear as: Staetsky, Daniel. "Perceptions and Realities of Antisemitism: A Comparison of Canadian, British, and French Jews." Chapter 20 in Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds. Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2023). 1 Perceptions and Realities of Antisemitism: A Comparison of Canadian, British, and French Jews L. Daniel Staetsky In the contemporary Western world, negative opinion of Jews is distinctly a minority view. In the Anglophone world, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA), it is especially low. Pew Research Center surveys indicate that at most 10% of people in these countries reveal strong negativity towards Jews. Furthermore, during the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries, negativity towards Jews has remained stable or declined in prevalence, and no state-sponsored violence is inflicted on Jews at present (Bergmann 2008; Jikeli 2017; Cohen 2018; Staetsky 2019). Antisemitic incidents are rare: in Canada and the UK, recorded antisemitic incidents are at a level of 550- 600 incidents per 100,000 Jewish population per year, while in France the comparable figure is about 120 per 100,000 Jewish population per year. Nationally, the level of police-recorded crime in Canada and the UK is at 6,000-10,000 incidents per 100,000 in population. 1 Even if one accounts for very significant levels of underreporting of antisemitic incidents and differential reporting by country (Enstad 2017), the overarching conclusion regarding rarity remains unchanged. The nature of trends in antisemitic incidents remains uncertain; increases in the volume of antisemitic victimisation—reported recently across many Western countries, including Canada and the UK--owe significantly to improvement in the scope of reporting of such incidents (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2018a, 2020). These facts notwithstanding, a significant proportion of Jews living in the Diaspora continue to see antisemitism as a serious problem. Recent research in Canada, for example, has shown that about 85% of Jews in Canada believe that Jews experience discrimination and about one-third say discrimination against Jews occurs often (Brym, Neuman, and Lenton 2019). In the 2018 survey of Jewish communities conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (EU-FRA) in 12 European countries, about 85% of the respondents indicated that antisemitism, in their view, is a problem in their societies and about 45% said it is a very big problem. Specifically, in France the respective proportions were 95% and 65% and in the UK 75% and 30% (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2018b).The situation in the USA was no different, as indicated by the the 2019 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey of American Jews: almost 90% defined antisemitism as a problem and nearly 40% said it was a big problem (Mayer 2019). 1 These calculations are based on data on antisemitic incidents recorded by the Community Security Trust/CST, UK (Community Security Trust 2020), B’nai Brith Canada (2020) and Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive/SPCJ (2020). The CST recorded 1,805 antisemitic incidents in 2019 and B’nai Brith Canada recorded 2,207 such incidents. Three years average of antisemitic incidents recorded by the SPCJ equaled 513. Relating these counts to Jewish population counts for the UK, Canada and France (292,000, 392,000 and 450,000 respectively) gives a rate of 618 per 100,000 for the UK, 563 per 100,000 for Canada, and 114 per 100,000 for France. In 2019, the annual count of crimes reported to the police in England and Wales was 5.8 million (Office for National Statistics 2020a) and 2.2 million in Canada (Statistics Canada 2020a). These counts, coupled with population counts for England and Wales (56 million) and Canada (37.5 million), produce the following rates: 10,375 per 100,000 for England and Wales and 5,866 per 100,000 for Canada (Office for National Statistics 2020b, Statistics Canada 2020b).