'The Jews Are Just Like Any Other Human Being.’

Abstract

Our paper presents the results of a study which was conducted between 2016 and 2019 in a high school in Budapest. The research attempted to measure the impact of the Haver Foundation’s activities on high-school students. The Foundation implements activities about Jewish identity, thus we intended to see whether the different activities of the Foundation changed the attitudes of high-school students, and whether they affected the formers’ level of knowledge and the associations they make with Jews. In line with the sensitivity and complexity of the research topic, and in order to create the broadest analytical framework, we followed several classes in a longitudinal setting by triangulating our methods. Results confirm the importance of these activities, especially with regard to the increase in the level of knowledge about Jews and Judaism. They also indicate that there is a need for such informal settings in high-school education. However, more extensive research needs to be carried out to obtain more accurate results about the reduction of prejudices.

The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments

“…In Hungary there is a long tradition of research exploring the structure of attitudes towards various minorities including the Roma, Jewish people, and more recently immigrants (Enyedi et al, 2004;Örkény & Váradi, 2010;Sik et al, 2016;Simonovits & Szalai, 2013). Experimental researchers have also explored ways to tackle exclusionary attitudes through interventions conducted in educational settings (Kende et al, 2017;Simonovits & Surányi, 2020), or embedded in online games (Simonovits et al, 2018). When designing the present study, we sought to build on this body of research by investigating possible ways in which exclusionary or discriminatory behaviour can be measured and changed in Hungary.…”