{"id":9080,"date":"2018-04-12T15:59:31","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T21:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=9080"},"modified":"2018-04-12T16:03:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-12T22:03:16","slug":"what-about-the-new-holocaust-poll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/04\/what-about-the-new-holocaust-poll.html","title":{"rendered":"What about the new Holocaust poll?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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The headline is dramatic:\u00a0 66% of Millennials don\u2019t know what Auschwitz was, and 22% don\u2019t even know what the Holocaust was.\u00a0 That\u2019s according to a new poll, the Holocaust Knowledge Awareness Study<\/a>, produced by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just how dire a situation is it?<\/p>\n

For comparison, the ADL produces an ongoing poll<\/a> about antisemitic attitudes globally, and their 2015 poll reports that 93% of Americans say they have \u201cheard about the Holocaust.\u201d\u00a0 Of these, 89% say that they believe that historians have fairly reported the the number of Jews who died \u2014 vs. 1% who deny it, 5% who say the deaths have been exaggerated, and 5% who say they don\u2019t know.\u00a0 This means that 83% of Americans in general say they know what the Holocaust was and that they accept the historical account \u2014 though, to be sure, the poll does not quiz them on what they think those numbers are.<\/p>\n

For comparison, 93% of Aussies report having heard about the Holocaust, and of these 88% agree with the historical account.\u00a0 \u00a0For Canada, 91% have heard of, and 90% of those agree with the historical account.<\/p>\n

Now, the ADL does not split out these polling results by age, but the new poll shows relatively similar, but marginally worse results for this general question, 89% instead of 93%.\u00a0 Is this just a matter of margin of error in polling (the pollster, Schoen Consulting, reports a 3% margin of error)?\u00a0 Did the three year\u2019s passage of time have a significant impact?\u00a0 Or was there something different about the polling method?<\/p>\n

The new poll also does not ask whether the interviewee questions historical accounts but simply asks them to identify how many Jews were killed, and reports that 31% of all adults, and 41% of Millennials, said that 2 million or fewer were killed.\u00a0 Again, I\u2019d like to see the poll design \u2014 we are increasingly conditioned to be moderate in our opinions, to choose B or C in our multiple choice answers.\u00a0 Were survey-takers asked to provide their own estimate, or given a set of choices, from which 6 million seemed like the outlier?\u00a0 Yes, people should know this basic fact of history, but is it really as bad as it looks?<\/p>\n

Likewise, survey-takers were asked what Auschwitz was, with the answers:<\/p>\n