Hello and welcome to Documensch Research, your one-stop-shop for what’s new in Jewish research.
August brought some interesting new visions (and the documents that express them) for Jewish organizations. UpStart and NCJW both released multi-year strategic plans representing big shifts, new research found most young Jews are living Jewishly in ways their own institutions don’t see, a scenario-game exercise flagged what Jewish leadership speeches aren’t talking about, and a wave of new data on antisemitism arrived from two new ADL releases. On the academic side, a sobering review of antisemitism in the health professions, new work on Jewish parenting after October 7, and an AJS Review piece complicating the idea that capital can ever really be “just business.”
Check us on the Documensch Daily website or on Bluesky to get the latest. As always, reach out with feedback, suggestions of people we should interview, or ideas for documents we should consider archiving. We can be reached at bermanarchive@stanford.edu.
Without further ado,
—Ari
Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive at Stanford
Community Research
All Innovation: UpStart’s new FY27–29 strategic plan marks a pivot from program provider to field catalyst, with a “Jewish Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship” methodology it wants the whole sector to adopt as shared language. By FY29 it’s targeting 1,000+ leaders trained, 300+ ventures supported, and 100+ organizations formally signed on, a substantive bet on standardizing how Jewish nonprofits innovate.
NCJW Forward: NCJW’s new five-year plan asks its roughly 50 remaining local sections to integrate, affiliate, or disaffiliate by December 2027, shifting the 133-year-old organization from community service toward advocacy on four causes: reproductive freedom, economic opportunity, civil rights, and safer communities. Five sections have already left and two have shuttered; one departing Arizona chapter cited discomfort with the national group’s Israel-advocacy focus.
Jewish Outside the Lines: Project Prism, a new study from the Jim Joseph Foundation and Sense Worldwide, set out to map how young Jews live Jewishly beyond what institutions can see. NORC at the University of Chicago ran a probability-based survey of 2,000+ Jewish adults ages 22–40 and found 75% regularly do something Jewish, usually informally at home or with friends, and for 45% that’s their only form of participation. What predicts lasting belonging is not whether someone showed up, but whether they felt connected once there.
Game Theory: A new report from Tzomet Games codes 15 major American Jewish leadership speeches against 1,903 timeline events logged by 250+ Jewish professionals in a structured scenario exercise imagining 2025–2050. The speeches concentrate on antisemitism, security, and institutional defense; the game sessions treat AI, demographic strategy, and geographic redistribution as the community’s biggest unaddressed levers.
Numbers Season: There were two ADL-linked releases this month that complicated the picture of antisemitism in America and effective ways of preventing it. A randomized study of 372 students across nine schools found a single 45-minute lesson on contemporary antisemitism cut agreement with antisemitic tropes by up to 15.5 points, replicated in a 5,000-student follow-up. New FBI hate crime data for 2025 puts anti-Jewish incidents at 1,528: 63% of all religion-based hate crimes nationally, down 21% from 2024’s record.
Academic Research
Non-Political Capital: In AJS Review, Jacob Beckert traces how Louis Marshall and Felix Warburg insisted their Palestine Economic Corporation was “strictly business,” channeling over $14 million into 1920s–30s Jewish agriculture and industry with no connection to Zionism. Beckert argues the claimed neutrality didn’t survive deeper scrutiny: the capital built the very Zionist project they meant to stand apart from.
Underdiagnosed: A new narrative review in the Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal finds 88% of Jewish medical students and physicians in the US have experienced antisemitism, up from 40% before, while fewer than 2% of institutions have added antisemitism to their anti-discrimination training. Authors Hedy Wald (Brown) and Steven Roth (UIC) pooled data across medicine, nursing, psychology, and social work in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia in the first systematic look at antisemitism across the health professions since October 7.
Pride Over Preparation: A new study in the Journal of Jewish Education finds Jewish parents are far more likely to pass on culture, history, and pride to their kids than to prepare them for bias or teach mistrust of non-Jews. Leah Hibel and Yael Teff-Seker surveyed 218 parents of children ages 2–18 and interviewed 30 of them, documenting real shifts in parenting behavior since October 7.
