Right. There are plenty of examples of linking criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but this seems to be doing something less common, linking support for financial regulation with anti-semitism.

If we are going to talk about undeclared interests, Malhotra’s former employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup seems like a better place to start.

There are some political science folks around CT, no? Would be interesting if someone could ask Mahlotra or Margalit in a professional setting if they planned to publish anything on this, or to release the survey.

Although practices vary, I think the usual standard is that senior authors are listed first in academic publications. That is why I assumed Malhotra was the lead author, though possibly both are equal.

lemuel pitkin @73 – thanks for the thanks!

I do think it’s worth making a conscious effort to include Margalit when referring to the article. Malhotra did at least show some willingness to address criticism, and even make (very limited) concessions about the quality of the article. (I personally thought he came across as somewhat ingenuous, with just the slightest air of the ill-briefed junior politician sent out to absorb flak – though I could be imagining that.) In any case, none of that can be said of Margalit, and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to do a disappearing trick.

As MB points out (though without hinting at any undeclared interest, formal or material, operative or not), Margalit’s esoteric correctio: “When we found these results we thought it was important to put it out there…there is an issue here, but I wouldn’t take the number 24 [percent] literally” raises the question why one would publish and stand by figures which shouldn’t be taken literally (numerically?).

Given the evident tendency of Israeli militants to make use of anti-semitism charges in the attempt to discredit critics (often Democrats, and qua Democrats, I believe?), Margalit has a prima facie motive for conscious or unconscious bias and the prioritisation of impact over accuracy. He must in any case have some understanding of these particular issues, and should (i.e. may be presumed to) know better.

I must confess to a twinge of unease here, but I do think it’s fair comment and ought to be said.

Tim, I don’t see how criticism of exaggerated or skewed measures of antisemitism would increase antisemitism. I could come up with strained arguments that it would either tend to increase or decrease it, but I actually doubt it would have any effect. The roots of prejudice have to lie deeper or it wouldn’t have its emotional force.

The matter of how to interpret the raw absolute numbers is open-ended. You can get finer and finer in analysing this stuff, and even if you go through and check each hit for relevance, you presumably want to weight for some sort of importance measure, for example readership, influence of readers.

But there’s also a different question of the ‘valence’ of the report, which throws all the numbers into question – the Jewish Week piece is included in the hits, but depending on what is being measured should perhaps count as 1 hit. Perhaps there are a lot more that are similarly critical on balance. For those, wider dissemination is actually a good thing not just for its corrective effect on those who have read uncritical reports, but for its general cautionary effect (unless that itself leads to underestimating the level of real antisemitism, in which case it is pro tanto bad) and, I have to say, in drawing attention to those (ir)responsible.

And BTW if sodding Google would actually run the search I specified instead of ‘helpfully’ deriving what are supposed to be similar terms (in this case ‘Jewish’), then the number of irrelevant hits would have been reduced. I wouldn’t mind, if only this overweening helpfulness were made explicit and I could turn it off.