Scottish Jews to run survey on impact of polarisation on community

The umbrella group for Scottish Jewry is to undertake another survey to understand how society’s increasing polarisation is affecting Jews north of the border.

It will be the third big survey undertaken by the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (SCoJeC) in recent years. The first, called ‘Being Jewish in Scotland,’ was carried out in 2011-12, while a follow-up was done in 2014-15. Both were funded by the Scottish Government.

The latest temperature check was announced this week after SCoJeC secured funding for two final-year social science students from the University of Glasgow, who will work on the survey together with SCoJeC researcher Fiona Frank.

The organisation said it was being undertaken “in the context of an increasingly polarised society where antisemitism has become a familiar topic of discussion both in the media and in the political arena”.

It added that “Jewish people are understandably unsettled, and it is therefore timely to revisit our previous findings, in order to identify patterns and find out whether Scotland is different from the rest of the UK”.