Michael Safyan's answer to How is it that antisemitism still exists nowadays?

Jewish follower of news about bigotry and orgs that fight it · Author has 6.3K answers and 8M answer views · Updated 5y ·

I think demographics is the biggest contributor to anti-Semitism persisting, though there are multiple factors. The Jewish population of the world is somewhere around ~16 million (this number is relatively generous in that it includes people who self-identify as Jewish but are not technically Jewish). At that size, the Jewish population is only about ~0.2% of the entire world population, which is an incredibly small fraction. If all Jews were evenly spread out, and each Jewish person met and made friends with 10 unique people who were not Jewish, this would still leave 97.8% of the world’s population never having met or made friends with someone Jewish. Since there are so many people who have little to no interaction with Jews, it is very easy for pre-existing conspiracy theories, myths, stereotypes, etc. to continue to propagate.

Another factor at play, besides demographics, are cognitive biases such as confirmation bias that make it very difficult to shake these pre-existing hatreds; for example, it has been my own experience when it comes to trying to better inform someone with pre-existing anti-Semitic prejudices that for someone who is too far gone, almost anything one does only seeks to confirm their beliefs — be mean and it proves their antagonistic viewpoint, but be nice and they will assume that it is some form of deceipt; there is no way to be perceived in a positive, trustworthy light (short of having the messaged delivered by someone they trust who is not Jewish, though if the message is defensive of Jews, they may just take it as proof of alleged “Jewish media control” or some other form of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory).