Pew Survey Reveals Americans’ Limited Holocaust Knowledge

Less than half of Americans can answer basic questions about the Holocaust, according to a new Pew Research Center report. The report, released just before the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, examines the results of a survey testing Americans’ religious knowledge, which included five basic questions about the Holocaust. The results revealed that most Americans associate the Holocaust with the attempted annihilation of Jewish people: They know approximately when the Holocaust happened and what Nazi-created ghettos were, but less than half know how many people were killed during the Holocaust or how Hitler came to power. Four of the questions were also included in a separate Pew survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. Like adults, teens know more about the general timeline of the Holocaust than the specific death toll. Becka Alper, primary...

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Religion in the News

By Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil The biggest religion news stories in 2011 involved tensions with Islam, followed by faith in presidential politics, a new Pew report reveals. Some of the key findings in the study, “Religion in the News,” include: Religion coverage made up just 0.7 percent of all mainstream media coverage in 2011, down from two percent in 2010 Religion received as much attention as race, gender and LGBT issues Islam made up nearly one-third of all religion news stories last year The top religion stories of the year included: religion in the election, Peter King’s “Radical Islam” congressional hearings, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, the Westboro Church protests, religion in September 11th commemorations, the Catholic priest abuse scandal and Terry Jones’s Quran burning For more on religion coverage in the mainstream media, Moment speaks with Jesse Holcomb, a research...

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