Research and news about American Jews
Updated 4/8/26
COMMUNITY RESEARCH
Loose War Footing: Two new surveys of American Jewish opinion find a majority of American Jews opposed to the war. A poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found 55% disapprove of US military action and 73% believe Trump should have sought Congressional approval first; a separate J Street/GBAO poll found 60% opposed. Jewish Republicans strongly support the war while Jewish Democrats broadly oppose it — and both find continued erosion of Israel-aligned sentiment among younger, non-Orthodox Jewish Americans. [4/3/26]
Viral Antisemitism: AJC and CyberWell released a report on antisemitism across social media platforms, drawing on five years of consecutive survey data. The headline: 73% of American Jews experienced antisemitism online in 2025, the highest figure in the history of AJC’s survey. The report includes platform-by-platform breakdowns and nine recommendations for tech companies. [3/27/26]
Campus Antisemitism: The ADL’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card assessed 150 colleges and universities, finding that 58% now earn A’s or B’s — up from 23.5% in 2024. But a companion survey of non-Jewish undergraduates tells a more complicated story: nearly half reported witnessing anti-Jewish behavior on campus. JTA reports that schools that settled with the Trump administration over antisemitism investigations mostly saw their grades rise. [3/25/26]
American Religiosity: A new Gallup poll finds just 47% of Americans say religion is “very important” in their lives — the first time that number has fallen below 50%. Weekly service attendance has dropped to 31%, down from 44% in 1992. Jewish and Catholic Americans are among the few groups that have not seen significant declines. [3/4/26]
Americans on Hamas: The American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll found American adults under 30 increasingly view Hamas as “militant resistance” rather than a terrorist organization. [2/24/26]
Thought Leadership: New research by Dr. Valerie Ehrlich of Mission Bloom Consulting examines Jewish thought leadership in America. The study identifies high barriers to entry to break into the sphere of Jewish thought leadership, leaving many qualified people on the sidelines, and notes there is very little infrastructure to support Jewish thought leaders. The research was commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation and Maimonides Fund. Read a summary of the research by Stacie Cherner of the Jim Joseph Foundation in today’s eJP. [2/20/26]
Campus Concerns: AJC and Hillel International released a new survey looking at campus-specific manifestations of antisemitism including classroom dynamics, social exclusion, and institutional responses. This follows AJC’s annual survey released last week, which found that 93% of American Jews see antisemitism as a problem and 1 in 3 experienced it directly. [2/17/26]
Boston Study: Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study is out with fresh data and analysis on demographics, engagement, belonging, and the communal needs of Jewish Bostonians. The research was led by Rosov Consulting and offers an in-depth, comprehensive look at Jewish life in the region. [2/13/26]
Anti-Zionist Dialogue: For the Sake of Argument, a non-partisan organization committed to fostering healthy arguments surveyed a group of anti-Zionist Jews in an effort to validate and complicate assumptions that pro-Israel leaders and organizations had about anti-zionists. [2/12/26]
The State of Antisemitism: The AJC just released the findings of their annual survey of American Jews. Most respondents (93%) see antisemitism as problem while 1/3 report having experiences antisemitism directly. [2/10/26]
The Zionist Gap: The Jewish Federations of North America has new survey data out about American Jews. While most support Israel (nearly 9 in 10), only 1/3 call themselves Zionists. Why the gap? Mimi Kravetz*, JFNA’s chief impact officer, says this likely has more to do with “definition creep” around the term Zionist than it does about perceptions of Israel.
*In the Berman Archive: Read our interview with Mimi Kravetz from 2024 where she discusses JFNA’s commitment to research. [2/5/26]
AI Antisemitism: The ADL just released its AI Index which aims to determine which LLM service has the strongest protections against antisemitism. The best AI for antisemitism guardrails? It’s Claude. Grok is the worst. [1/28/26]
Antisemitism Studied: Stand with Us is out with a report surveying Jewish K-12 educators, 61.6% of which reported experiencing or witnessing antisemitism at work. Blue Square Alliance released a survey in December showing antisemitism leveling off in the US, but at a worryingly high level. [1/26/26]
Secular Sectors: The newly launched Blue Compass Network just released a study on Jewish professionals working in secular nonprofits. 35% of those Jews are seeking new jobs due to antisemitism or Jewish stereotyping. [1/9/26]
Notes on Camp: The Foundation for Jewish Camp released a census report showing record attendance at Jewish camps this past summer. This year saw 200,000 Jewish campers. That’s a lot of bug juice. [12/19/25]
Roadside Attractions: The aggressive JewBelong billboard campaigns are hard to miss in the cities they target. This year they released an impact report attempting to quantify the public opinion effect of this campaign in Kansas City. [12/19/25]
American Religiosity: Pew has some new analysis of the broad religiosity of Americans. Not much has changed in terms of folks moving more towards religion. And the younger generations are less religious than their parents. [12/17/25]
We Heart Hebrew: #OnwardHebrew is out with a survey of synagogue education programs. The kids seem to like their Hebrew education! The survey’s co-authors share their findings in eJP. [12/8/25]
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
After Afterlife: In Modern Judaism, Daniel Ross Goodman examines a striking feature of modern Orthodox theology: its near-total abandonment of the afterlife as a framework for Jewish practice. [3/29/26]
LA Day Schools: A new article in the Journal of Jewish Education by Sara Smith examines the history of Jewish day schools in Los Angeles through the lens of the court-ordered busing controversy of the late 1970s, exploring how race, property taxes, and shifting Jewish identity shaped the community’s relationship with day school education. [3/28/26]
Picture Books, Contested Histories: In the Journal of Jewish Education, Dana Reisboard examines 12 Palestinian advocacy picture books published between 2020 and 2025, analyzing how they represent Jewish identity, Zionism, and historical context — raising questions about pedagogical ethics in K-12 settings. [3/28/26]
Birthright Shift: A new Brandeis University report, A Summer of Uncertainty, finds that Birthright’s summer 2025 participant pool looks dramatically different than before Oct. 7: 17% identified as Orthodox (up from 5% in 2023), 38% attended Jewish day school (up from 23%), and 42% identified as conservative (up from 20%), while the share of liberals shrank from 57% to 34%.
*In the Berman Archive: Read our interview with Len Saxe on Jewish research methodology and the state of American Jewish identity. [3/23/26]
Soviet Jewish Recyclers: In Eastern European Jewish Affairs, Tetiana Perga draws on previously unexplored Ukrainian archival materials to examine the role of Jews in shaping waste recycling policy in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s. [3/20/26]
The Art of Spiritual Teaching: In a new article in the Journal of Jewish Education, Elie Holzer develops atheory of spiritual pedagogy through close reading of the Hasidic text Or HaMeir. Holzer argues that genuine spiritual teaching requires an attentiveness to language in which speech, voice, and silence together create a pedagogical presence. [3/3/26]
Indian Jewish Identity: In Modern Judaism, Benjamin Steiner examines the postwar competition between American Orthodox and Conservative movements for the affiliation of India’s Bene Israel Jews. [3/17/26}
Haredi Tally: A new study in Contemporary Jewry by Daniel Staetsky and Robert Brym proposes two methodologies for improving estimates of Haredi community size in diaspora cities — one based on community directories, the other on official counts of Haredi schoolchildren — applied to Montreal and Toronto. [3/6/26]
Emotional Testimony: In Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Robin Judd examines how Jewish survivor-military couples observed, recognized, displayed, and rationalized emotions in their wartime and postwar testimonies. Their stories “offered clues to how they made sense of their nuanced, messy presents, and later, their complicated pasts.” [2/25/26]
Spicy Jewry: In the Jewish Quarterly Review, Katalin Franciska Rac examines how paprika and culinary culture shaped Jewish integration in modern Hungary, highlighting food’s influence on minority-majority relations in Hungary and challenging the historiographical approach that distinguishes between the roles culture played in the integration process of merchants and intellectuals. [Winter 2026]
HUC at 150: The latest American Jewish Archives Journal celebrates the 150th anniversary of Hebrew Union College with an issue dedicated to compelling histories related to the insituttions. Jason Kalman traces the life of David Joseph Solomon, the first student from India’s Bene Israel community to attend Hebrew Union College (1896–1902). The article examines how transnational Jewish networks, American liberal Judaism, and colonial educational ambitions intersected in Solomon’s journey from Bombay to Cincinnati and back. [Winter 2026]
Teachers’ Identity: In the Journal of Jewish Education, Ketty Granite and Shosh Leshem explore how Hebrew teachers in North American Jewish day schools perceive their professional identity. The findings highlight that teaching Hebrew in the Diaspora “extends beyond language instruction, involving deeper ideological, cultural, and identity-based considerations.” [2/23/26]
Rabbis for Equality: In Jewish Culture and History, George Y. Kohler examines three nineteenth-century Reform-oriented rabbis who invoked Talmudic rulings to justify granting women equal rights within Judaism: “Their aim was not to abandon halakah, but rather to modernize it, adapt it to their new ethical convictions, and express these convictions in legal terms.” [2/13/26]
False Poets: Asher Shallah traces the invention and afterlife of a fictitious fourteenth-century poet: first fabricated by sixteenth-century Italian humanists, then mistakenly absorbed into the Jewish literary canon by nineteenth-century Jewish scholars seeking to demonstrate longstanding Jewish contributions to European literature. A smart window into historiographical practice, emancipation-era discourse, and the ideological uses of literary forgery. [2/13/26]
Perceptions of Safety: The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies has a new report by Tahir Abbas on the security, antisemitism and synagogues in Europe. The research includes a comparative approach to gauging safety concerns, observing “that Jewish respondents perceive significantly higher levels of anti-Semitic hostility and hate crimes than non-Jewish groups perceive regarding their own communities.“ [2/6/26]
NEWS OF NOTE
18Doors Slammed: 18Doors, the national nonprofit supporting interfaith Jewish families, laid off roughly two-thirds of its staff in late March after an unanticipated budget shortfall. Former CEO Jodi Bromberg put the stakes plainly: “The question it leaves in the minds of families like mine is: Whose priority are mixed-heritage and interfaith families in Jewish life?” [4/8/26]
Synagogue & State: A coalition of Oklahoma Jews moved to intervene in the federal lawsuit against a proposed virtual K-12 that would become the country’s first publicly funded religious school, arguing the state’s existing defendants can’t be trusted to uphold the constitution. [4/7/26]
Preemptive Strike: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly removed educational resources connecting American racism to Nazi ideology and canceled a civic education workshop on the fragility of democracy, changes two former employees say were made preemptively to avoid scrutiny from the Trump administration. The museum denies the changes were politically motivated. [4/5/26]
Shul Shakeup: In a sweeping piece, New Yorker contributor Eyal Press follows a New Jersey Conservative congregation navigating a full-scale internal rupture over Israel and Gaza . The story tracks how the debate over Israel has fractured into something more fundamental: whether Zionism itself remains viable as a component of liberal Jewish identity. [4/6/26]
Cali Jewish: California’s SB 1387 would add “Jewish” as an optional ethnic identity on state government forms — a first in the US — to close data gaps affecting hate crime reporting and Jewish students in public schools. A UC Berkeley demographer is urging caution about the risks of government-maintained ethnic data. [3/31/26]
Shabbat Protest: Ronni Hendel, an executive coach in Los Angeles, has organized a No Kings demonstration in Pico-Robertson — one of the country’s largest Orthodox communities — so that Shabbat-observant Jews who can’t drive can participate in this weekend’s nationwide protests. [3/27/26]
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: 115 years ago today 148 workers died, most of them young Jewish immigrant women. Survivors like Pauline Newman fought for child labor protections. The Forward asks what it means that those protections are eroding again. [3/25/26]
Haggadah Design: “A Haggadah is really just a zine.” Last spring, designer and critic Elizabeth Goodspeed surveyed the contemporary Haggadah as a design object: cross-generational, typographically tangled, wine-stained, and built to be revised year after year. [3/24/26]
Prairie Home Minyan: The Forward’s Benyamin Cohen spent four days in Tulsa reporting on Tulsa Tomorrow, a program that since 2017 has been flying young Jewish professionals to Oklahoma for sponsored weekends — airfare, hotels, meals — to see whether they could picture a life there. Of the roughly 600 people who’ve visited, 113 have moved and stayed. [3/23/26]
The Kids Are Alright: J. Weekly gave 20 Jewish kids disposable cameras and sent them to Purim parties. The results are delightful. [3/20/26]
Iranian Jewish History: Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,700 years — a history that looks very different in the context of the current U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Project Mosaics has developed a free set of curriculum modules tracing that history from antiquity through the Iranian Revolution and the emergence of the Tehrangeles* community in Los Angeles, including the story of the crypto-Jews of Mashhad, who lived a double religious life for over a century, and the Polish-Jewish Holocaust refugees who passed through Iran in 1942.
*In the Berman Archive: Read our interview with Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, a Tehrangeles-born Iranian Jewish rabbi, on what American Jews are missing about this moment. [3/19/26]
Poll Position: Jewish Currents reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis examines the methodology behind the Jewish People Policy Institute’s monthly surveys of American Jewish opinion, which have been widely reported as showing strong support for Israel’s war on Iran. The problem: JPPI polls a self-selected panel of “connected” Jews that skews significantly more religious and politically conservative than the broader American Jewish population — and doesn’t weight results to match it. [3/17/26]
Refugee Advocacy: Over 1,100 Jewish clergy from 45 states signed a HIAS-organized letter calling on leaders not to “wrong or oppress the stranger,” released ahead of HIAS’ annual Refugee Shabbat. Signatories include Amy Eilberg, Irving Greenberg, and David Wolpe. The letter follows earlier Jewish mobilization in Minnesota against ICE enforcement and comes as HIAS has contracted operations after the Trump administration moved to end refugee admissions.
*In the Berman Archive: Kurt Grossmann and Arieh Tartakower’s The Jewish Refugee (1944), published by the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, examined the Jewish refugee experience from WWI through WWII — tracing demographics, relief structures, and the politics of Jewish displacement across the U.S., France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. [3/12/26]
Faithful Left: The Forward covers the second annual U.S. conference of Smol Emuni (“the faithful left”), held at B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan — a gathering of religiously observant Jews, Zionists and anti-Zionists alike, organized to foster an alternative to the prevailing right-wing discourse about Israeli and American politics in the Orthodox world. [3/10/26]
Burnout on the Bema: Writing in JTA, cantor and Boston University doctoral candidate Laura Stein argues that clergy burnout is structural and rooted in how seminaries train rabbis and cantors before they ever enter the field. Stein calls on institutions to integrate research on burnout, formation, and well-being into both training programs and ongoing professional development. [3/9/26]
Identity Framework: Dr. Benji Davis, Rabbi Michael Unterberg, and Rabbi Alan Goldman propose a framework for Jewish education centered on three dimensions that make Jews a people: land (Israel integrated throughout education, not just one unit), language (Hebrew as “our language” cultivating ownership and belonging), and culture (Judaism as collective folkways, not abstract traditions). [2/24/26]
