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Yesterday Pew, or specifically the Religion and Public Life arm of the Pew Research Center, released its latest study on \u201cWhat Americans Know About the Holocaust<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, the historical understanding of the Holocaust is deemed a matter of \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0 Yikes.<\/p>\n As far as the key question, \u201cdo Americans have at least a minimum clue of what the Holocaust was all about?\u201d well, I suppose it\u2019s all a matter of expectations.\u00a0 Pew asked its interviewees to state in their own words, what the Holocaust was.\u00a0 66% said that was the \u201cannihilation of Jews\u201d or a similar answer.\u00a0 A further 12% give answers showing some general understanding (\u201cconcentration camps\u201d or \u201cpersecution of Jews\u201d) and 6% give answers about death in general (that is, without apparently placing it in any specific context).\u00a0 3% said something else entirely, 3% said they didn\u2019t know, and 10% didn\u2019t give an answer at all.<\/p>\n As always, there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s relative.\u00a0 Is 66% definitely know, and 12 \u2013 18% kinda-sorta know, good or bad, relative to the degree to which Americans are shown to have or lack basic knowledge in all sorts of ways?\u00a0 And, of course not just Americans, but just, well, people, in general.<\/p>\n The survey also asked four historical questions \u2014 oddly none of them were about concentration camps, which is annoying because that would at least have tested the most rudimentary level of knowledge and sometimes I think these sorts of questions are intentionally made difficult in order to make the claim more dramatic.\u00a0 Instead, these questions were:<\/p>\n When did the Holocaust happen?\u00a0 Between 1890 and 1910, between 1910 and 1930, between 1930 and 1950 or between 1950 and 1970.\u00a0 69% of Americans got this right.<\/p>\n What were Nazi-created ghettoes?\u00a0 Parts of town where Jews were forced to live, places where Jews were killed, factories where Nazis forced political opponents to work, or housing for poor Nazis.\u00a0 Surprisingly, almost as many people got this right, at 63%, though I think the answer choices might explain this: if you know that the \u201cplaces where Jews were killed\u201d were concentration camps, and the other two responses were not related to Jews, you\u2019d get to the correct answer by process of elimination.<\/p>\n How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust?\u00a0 Less than 1 million, approximately 3 million, approximately 6 million, or more than 12 million.\u00a0 45% answered correctly, 29% were \u201cnot sure\/no answer\u201d and the remainder were pretty much split at 12% each for 3 and 12 million, with only 2% saying \u201cless than 1 million,\u201d the standard denier\u2019s answer that there was persecution but not mass murder.<\/p>\n And how did Hitler become chancellor of Germany?\u00a0 By democratic political process, by violently overthrowing German government, by hereditary succession, or by agreements with nearby countries.\u00a0 43% said \u201cdemocratic political process,\u201d 25% said a violent overthrow, 28% were not sure\/no answer, and 2% each gave the other replies.\u00a0 Now, honestly, I can\u2019t get all that upset about people answering that it was a violent taking of power, given that it\u2019s reasonable to think that if the only fact that you\u2019ve remembered is the Reichstag fire, perhaps paired with a vague impression of violence formed from Kristallnacht.\u00a0 And \u201cdemocratic political process\u201d isn\u2019t quite right, or at least it\u2019s misleading in that the Nazis were nominally the minor party in a coalition and he gained his power more by intimidation than by democratic political coalition-building.\u00a0 But in any case, as an answer to a simple multiple choice question, it\u2019s the right choice.<\/p>\n But helpfully, the Pew report breaks down the results by question and by demographic group, and we have a convenient upper bound:\u00a0 90% of Jews said that the Holocaust occurred between 1930 and 1950.\u00a0 They provide splits by religion\/denomination, and, not surprisingly, those denominations associated with more educated members had greater percentages correct:\u00a0 76% of Mormons<\/a> got this right, and 74% of Mainline Protestants, but only 67% of Catholics.<\/p>\n Split by education level, 55% of those without a high school education knew the approximate timeframe, 70% of those with some college, and 84% of those with a college degree.<\/p>\n But here are two surprising statistics:<\/p>\n Blacks performed far worse than whites on this quiz, and women did worse than men.<\/p>\n To take these in turn, 39% of blacks knew the timeframe, vs. 53% of Hispanics, and 78% of whites.\u00a0 The numbers tumble even further for the other questions:\u00a0 27% said that 6 million Jews were killed, compared to 51% of whites, and 18% said Hitler became chancellor through democracy.\u00a0 Yes, they would collectively have been better off guessing.<\/p>\n And blacks who identified as Protestant of a historically black denomination did even worse that blacks as a whole:\u00a0 35% got the timeline right, 23% said 6 million Jews were killed, and 11% said Hitler became chancellor through democracy.\u00a0 What explains this?\u00a0 And note that those rates are considerably lower than the knowledge rates for Americans, in general, with a high school diploma or less, at 55%\/33%\/29%.<\/p>\n Is it simply a matter of the lower educational attainment for blacks in America?\u00a0 According to the Census Bureau (via the website Black Demographics<\/a>), more than half of that group has at least some college education, so, in general, they ought to do better than the high-school-only Americans, unless, that is, the quality of education in predominantly-black areas is so poor that extra years of schooling can\u2019t make up for it.<\/p>\n Incidentally,\u00a0 Hispanics scored at a level in-between blacks and whites, which I admit to being surprised at, given that a large percentage of Hispanic-identifying folk are immigrants with little education.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s just a given that they aren\u2019t a part of the polling?<\/p>\n And here\u2019s the second surprise:\u00a0 women\u2019s scores were notably worse than men\u2019s.<\/p>\n 61% of women got the general timeframe question right, compared to 78% of men.<\/p>\n 58% of women knew what ghettoes were, vs. 69% of men.<\/p>\n 38% knew that 6 million Jews were killed, vs. 53% of men.<\/p>\n And 35% knew the democratic-process question, vs. 53% of men.<\/p>\n To be honest, that\u2019s dismaying, especially because we\u2019re constantly told that women are doing so much better in school than men are, but that hardly seems to be the case here.<\/p>\n Separately, when I commented on this on twitter, someone observed that this seemed to be the norm, and pointed me to a 2017 Pew current events multiple choice survey (the report<\/a>, oddly, doesn\u2019t show the gender split, but you can see it if you click through the quiz yourself<\/a>):\u00a0 the two \u201chuman interest\u201d questions had nearly even rates correct (71% of men and 72% of women identified lead as the problem with the water in Flint, 88% of men and 85% of women answered that mosquitoes were the cause of Zika), but the more politics-oriented questions had a pronounced gap:\u00a0 71% of men but only 53% of women knew that Nancy Pelosi was the House speaker and 67% of men but only 53% of women knew that the UK was the country aiming to leave the EU, for example.<\/p>\n So this is all just, well, strange.\u00a0 What do you make of it?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday Pew, or specifically the Religion and Public Life arm of the Pew Research Center, released its latest study on \u201cWhat Americans Know About the Holocaust.\u201d Yes, the historical understanding of the Holocaust is deemed a matter of \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0 Yikes. As far as the key question, \u201cdo Americans have at least a minimum clue of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[573,94,285],"class_list":["post-16431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antisemitism","tag-education","tag-holocaust"],"yoast_head":"\n