Hello and welcome to Documensch Research, your one-stop-shop for what’s new in Jewish research.
May was another big month. Our community research roundup includes a new poll on the widening gap between Israeli and American Jewish opinion on Israel-Palestine, an INSS memorandum on declining American Jewish support for Israel, Pew’s tracking of religion’s growing influence in American life, and the ADL’s annual antisemitism audit. On the academic side, a new study of congregational school students, an ambitious ecosystem critique of Jewish education research, fresh work on emotion and Holocaust memory, and a special issue on emerging approaches to adult Jewish spiritual education.
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 research we should consider sharing and archiving. We can be reached at bermanarchive@stanford.edu.
Without further ado,
-Ari
Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive at Stanford
Community Research
Generational Split: Twenty-four percent of American Jewish voters now support a single binational state in Israel-Palestine. The figure comes from a new Jewish Voters Resource Center poll conducted by GBAO Strategies. Arno Rosenfeld in the Forward offered some helpful context: just 1% of Israeli Jews back a binational state with equal rights per a 2025 Tel Aviv University survey, and an AJC poll two years ago put the figure at 13% among American Jews overall. The gap between Israeli and American Jewish opinion keeps widening.
American Jewish Shift: A new policy memorandum from the Institute for National Security Studies, the Tel Aviv–based think tank, frames declining American Jewish support for Israel as a national security crisis for Israel itself. The memo, by Middlebury’s Ted Sasson and INSS’s Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, catalogs falling synagogue membership, shrinking federation donor rolls, and a generational collapse in emotional attachment.
Leap of Faith: A new Pew Research Center survey finds 37% of U.S. adults now say religion is gaining influence in American life, the highest share since 2002 and up 19 points in just two years. Familiarity with “Christian nationalism” rose 14 points, with 59% now recognizing the term. Most Americans still want houses of worship out of electoral politics, but partisan divides on religion’s role in government remain sharp, and 17% now favor declaring Christianity the official national religion, up from 13% in 2024.
Incident Report: The ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 6,274 incidents in the United States in 2025, a 33% drop from 2024’s record 9,354, but still the third-highest year on record. Notable: physical assaults rose 4% to a record 203 incidents, armed assaults jumped 39%, and three people were killed in antisemitic attacks, the first Jewish fatalities since 2019. Campus incidents fell 66% and Israel-related incidents dropped from 58% to 45% of the total.
Academic Research
Listen to the Kids: In the Journal of Jewish Education, Esther Friedman centers the perspectives of 68 students aged 9–17 on what keeps them in (or drives them out of) congregational school. Students in Reform supplementary schools prioritize social belonging, meaningful peer relationships, and practical Hebrew skills; they want real conversations about contemporary issues and flag significant mismatches between their own priorities and adult assumptions about what they need.
Connecting the Dots: A major new study in Contemporary Jewry by Adina Bankier-Karp and David Graham challenges a foundational assumption of Jewish education research. Drawing on hierarchical regression analyses of survey data from 21,260 respondents across four diaspora communities — Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the U.S. — the authors argue that the field’s “silver bullet” framing, which credits identity outcomes to discrete programs, fundamentally mismeasures what’s actually happening. Jewish identity, they find, emerges from an ecosystem: schooling, family upbringing, peer networks, and national setting. The impact of any single intervention depends entirely on the others.
Feeling From Afar: In a new piece in Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ Spring 2026 special issue on “Emotions in Holocaust Studies,” Rachel E. Perry examines two graphic albums created in Mandatory Palestine during the Holocaust by German Jewish refugees: Erich Glas’s Nights and Lea Grundig’s In the Valley of Slaughter. Perry argues both works exemplify “tele-pathos,” or feeling from afar, and complicate the scholarly assumption that the Yishuv processed news of European extermination in silence or detachment. Made during a period of declared mourning and public outcry, the albums document an active emotional community engaged with suffering it could not reach.
The Hasidic Turn: A separate special issue of the Journal of Jewish Education, introduced by Brandeis’s Joseph Reimer, examines a quiet but significant development: American Jewish adults are increasingly seeking spiritual education grounded in Hasidic texts and mindfulness practice. The issue traces how the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and a network of teacher-scholars — including Hebrew College’s Or Rose, IJS founder Nancy Flam, Elie Holzer, and Stanford’s Ariel Evan Mayse — are building a distinctively Jewish spiritual idiom for adult learners drawing on classical Hasidic sources.
