Hello and welcome to Documensch Research, your one-stop-shop for what’s new in Jewish research.
This month’s community research brings new data on post-Oct. 7 engagement, a poll of New York City’s Jewish voters, and second looks at how to measure antisemitism. On the academic side, a debate over vigilance and inherited trauma, Holocaust testimony in the digital age, and how the dreidel got religion.
And Monday, November 2, we are excited to be hosting another live event at Stanford. A panel of experts will discuss the implications of a new law that added “Jewish” as an ethnic option on state forms. What does it mean that Jews are now a state-recognized ethnic group? What are the implications for Jews in the Golden State and beyond? The event will be livestreamed, so join us Monday, Nov. 2, at 5:30 pm PT at Stanford or on Zoom for Are Jews an Ethnic Group? Registration is required.
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
Family Ties: JFNA released two sets of findings this month from its 2026 surveys of American Jews. The first is a post-Oct. 7 survey of 2,836 Jewish adults that found 38% reporting new or deeper Jewish engagement since Oct. 7, up from 31% last year and down from 43% in early 2024, and these “Surgers” are far more attached to Israel (93%) than Jews whose engagement held steady (51%). A binational study, comparing American respondents with 1,323 Israeli Jews, finds 62% of American Jews now call Israelis extended family or part of their community.
Safe Spaces: Honan Strategy Group’s poll of 503 Jewish New York City voters, fielded Oct. 2–6, has driven at least four different news stories this month, so it is worth reading as one dataset. 51% say Jewish New Yorkers are unsafe in the city, against 38% of non-Jewish voters; respondents feel safest in their own neighborhoods (83%) and at synagogue (74%), and least safe at protests. On where criticism of Israel crosses a line, 85% say it isn’t inherently antisemitic, while 56% say it often serves as cover for antisemitism, and respondents split on calling Gaza a genocide and on boycotts.
Recount: Two of the year’s most-cited antisemitism counts got a second look. In Jewish Currents, Wellesley’s Josh Lambert and Emory’s Dan Sinykin rebuilt the data behind claims that Jewish fiction is being shut out of publishing deals. Once they added small and midsize presses and moved the baseline back to 2000, 2025 tied for the third-best year of the century for deals signaling Jewish or Israeli content, complicating the narrative of exclusion. The Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research re-sorted the 2,847 Israel-related incidents reported as antisemitic in the ADL’s 2025 audit: 731 involved Jews targeted over Israel, while roughly 790 were rally chants and signs that targeted no Jewish person or institution. NCAR is explicit that it isn’t downplaying antisemitism; its argument, like Lambert and Sinykin’s, is that the headline numbers bundle very different things together and muddy the nature of the problem.
Seen from Tel Aviv: Two special publications from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, both co-written by Ted Sasson and Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, read American Jewish politics for an Israeli policy audience. Three Camps, One Party classifies all 259 Democratic incumbents and viable November candidates by aid position, rhetoric and funding. It projects the anti-AIPAC left will remain by far the smallest faction, while the largest bloc, 109 Mainstream Progressives, favors conditioning aid; the authors conclude that ending military financing is now the party’s prevailing view. No Longer on the Sidelines draws on six months of off-the-record sessions with leaders of major Diaspora organizations in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and South America, who described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a local problem that is normalizing hostility to Israel, dividing communities, weakening advocacy and fueling antisemitism. Both papers close with recommendations to Israel’s government, which shapes what they set out to measure.
Resilience, Qualified: A September study in PLOS One found Jewish college students’ mental health on par with their peers and called it resilience. Reanalyzing the study’s released data, the Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research finds the average hides a split: among Jewish students who perceived the most campus hostility, 20.6% met the threshold for moderate-to-severe depression, nearly double the 11.9% among those who perceived the least. More than a quarter (28%) agreed at least somewhat that they needed to hide being Jewish to fit in. The underlying sample, recruited through paid referrals, is not representative.
Academic Research
Trauma Talk: A special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism stages an unusually direct exchange. Rachel Benaim-Abudarham argues that the intensity of mainstream American and Israeli institutional responses to antisemitism since October 7 often exceeds the threat, reflecting inherited trauma and conflating dissent with danger. Corinne Blackmer, co-editor of Poisoning the Wells, the book Benaim-Abudarham critiques, rejects the premise, countering that Jews remain the most frequent targets of religious hate crimes in FBI data, that security measures are rational, and that the critique offers few concrete examples. Read together, the pieces show how far apart the field remains on where vigilance ends and overreaction begins.
Considering Testimony: In Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sussex’s Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden argues that the field’s long preoccupation with representation, whether and how the Holocaust can be depicted at all, pulled attention away from media as physical objects. She traces two traditions running alongside that debate: the record, from the Warsaw Ghetto’s Oyneg Shabbat archive to survivor testimony collections, and interaction, from guided site tours to digital testimony projects. Her framework for judging interactive Holocaust media arrives as testimony passes from living witnesses to recordings and interfaces.
Spin Doctors: In Modern Judaism, Zvi Ron traces how a children’s gambling game picked up religious meaning in layers. The story that Jews spun dreidels to hide Torah study from the Greeks, and the reading of its letters as “a great miracle happened there,” both came later. Ron’s case is that a folk practice turns into a vehicle for religious education and communal memory one interpretation at a time.
