Hello and welcome to the Summer Research Edition of the Documensch Newsletter,
By the looks of things below, Jewish Research doesn’t really take a vacation. On the Community Research side of things, we have a robust cluster of new work on how antisemitism spreads now: through algorithms, chatbots, and recommendation engines rather than through fliers, tracts, or protests (though those have not gone away). Plus fresh demographic data out of Orange County and three new national polls. Academic Researchers delve into the relationship between AIPAC and JFK, explore drivers of character development at camp, reframe the narrative of Iranian Jewish migration to Los Angeles, and map out Jewish learning outside of institutions.
If you’re hanging at the pool or waiting in the car to get the kids from day camp, you can always check us on the Documensch Daily website or on Bluesky to get the latest. Please 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
Algorithmic Antisemitism: A new Boundless/GQR survey finds roughly a third of Americans hold anti-Jewish views tied to conspiracy tropes about power and control, and that these ideas now spread mainly through algorithms and ideologically charged media, not organized extremist movements. A companion study from the Combat Antisemitism Movement offers an object lesson: two test Instagram accounts seeded with mainstream wellness and fitness content were escalated by the platform’s own recommendation engine into explicit antisemitism within three days, hitting as much as 31% antisemitic content in a single session, with no user intent involved. Together the two argue that institutions built to respond to visible incidents aren’t equipped for antisemitism that spreads like background radiation and is fueled by non-human actors.
Beit Midrash for the Republic: As America marks 250 years, the Pardes Institute and interfaith project Faith250 propose an unusual civic exercise: studying the Declaration of Independence the way Jews study Torah. The resulting four-essay collection, Talmud of America, applies beit midrash-style close reading and discourse to the founding document, preserving its contradictions rather than resolving them.
Beyond the Pride Parade: A first-of-its-kind JFNA survey finds LGBTQ+ Jews want more from communal life than they’re getting, but one-off Pride programming isn’t what retains them. Prompted by JFNA’s 2025 Pride mission to Israel, the research finds small-group, year-round engagement builds connection in a way marquee annual events don’t.
Holding the Line: A new Prizmah study finds Jewish day school enrollment has held steady above pre-pandemic levels five years after the COVID-era surge, particularly in New York and Florida. This is a reversal of a decades-long decline in non-Orthodox enrollment first documented in the last Avi Chai day school census.
Small Town, Bigger Concerns: A JFNA survey finds Jews in smaller communities feel measurably less supported when antisemitism arises. Just 39% say local law enforcement takes it seriously, versus 47% in larger communities. And small-community leaders report feeling far less physically safe in Jewish spaces (60%) than community leaders overall (86%). Notably, the survey found no significant gap in antisemitism actually experienced, only in the response to it.
Purple (Chosen) People: The Cohen Center’s demographic study of Orange County’s 93,500 Jews finds the self-described “purple county” is purple among its Jews too. Half identify as Democrat, below the 57% share among U.S. Jews nationally. 21% identify Republican, closer to the national Jewish norm than to Orange County overall. That split tracks attachment to Israel: very liberal Jews are least attached, 30% reporting none at all, while moderates and conservatives are most attached.
The Genocide Question: A new AP-NORC poll finds 30% of American Jewish adults believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, against 49% who say it has not. The same survey finds 51% of Jewish Democrats specifically believe the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israel, and roughly six in ten Jewish adults view Netanyahu unfavorably.
Cooling, Not Collapsing: A new Pew Research Center survey finds Americans’ views of Israelis have grown steadily more negative: 52% favorable versus 42% unfavorable, a narrower margin than in 2022. Opinion of Palestinians has generally held steady. The shift is sharply partisan: 65% of Republicans view Israelis favorably versus 43% of Democrats, a gap that has widened rather than narrowed.
Worse Than Before: The Blue Square Alliance Against Hate’s semiannual tracking survey of 7,053 American adults finds antisemitic attitudes at their highest level since tracking began in 2023: 30% of respondents now express such views, up from 24% last August. The generational split is the sharpest finding: 29% of Gen Z and millennials view Jews as a threat to American social unity, against 13% of boomers. One methodological caveat: the survey folds anti-Zionist sentiment into its antisemitism measures, which conflates separate concepts while inflating the trend line.
Bucking the Trend: Nearly three years after Oct. 7 triggered a wave of emergency giving, JFNA reports the surge became something durable: donor rolls at local federations grew 2.7% between 2023 and 2025, reaching roughly 290,000 donors, even as broader American philanthropy consolidates around fewer, larger gifts. The growth wasn’t concentrated in major markets — outgoing national campaign chair David Heller points to Columbus, Ohio, where the annual campaign doubled from $6M to $12M.
Academic Research
Myth to Model: A new study in American Psychologist finds that leading LLMs — GPT-4, DeepSeek, Mistral — encode latent antisemitic stereotypes that safety filters don’t catch. Researchers Gutman and Gilead, of Ben-Gurion and Tel Aviv Universities, found Jewish-named characters rated by the models as more competent and privileged but less warm and likable, mapping onto the “puppet master” archetype. Interestingly, the models flag that same archetype as antisemitic when asked about it directly. Safety training, in other words, appears to have taught models what not to say when questioned head-on without changing the associations they draw on when generating freely.
AIPAC & JFK: In Modern Judaism, Kobby Barda revisits the 1963 Senate hearings chaired by Sen. J. William Fulbright. The hearings scrutinized whether the organization that would later be named AIPAC should have registered as a foreign agent. Barda uses newly declassified JFK files to dismantle the theory that AIPAC orchestrated Kennedy’s assassination to dodge that designation. Barda argues the archival record shows AIPAC operating as a genuinely American organization, independent of Jewish Agency funding or direction.
Grapes of Wrath: Also in Modern Judaism, Phyllis Meyer and Omri Asscher trace how American Reform Haggadot have handled the Sh’fokh Hamatkha (”Pour Out Your Wrath”) from 1892 to 2021. Early-century editions eliminated the vengeance verses outright; recent Haggadot have restored them, reframed through annotation and paired with alternative readings on peace.
Pact Mentality: In the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Gennady Estraikh reconstructs the crisis that the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact detonated inside American Yiddish communist circles. Writers who had weathered earlier ruptures walked out within weeks and the communist daily Morgn-Frayhayt watched circulation fall from over 51,000 in 1939 to roughly 20,000 by late 1940, a loss it never recovered even after American Jews rallied to the Red Army in 1941. Estraikh’s more interesting finding is what didn’t happen: national party membership barely moved, and the journalist-historian Melech Epstein, himself among the defectors, later concluded that the ridicule heaped on defectors by the rival Yiddish press pulled waverers back toward the party rather than away.
De-Programming Character: A Journal of Youth Development study of five Jewish residential summer camps finds that belonging, peer friendships, and counselor support — not curriculum or program design — are the primary drivers of life-skill and character growth in campers. An awkward finding for a field that tends to measure itself by what it programs.
Tehrangeles Untangled: In the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Lior Sternfeld challenges the standard narrative of Iranian Jewish emigration as clean one-way flight. After 1979, many who left assumed return was possible, keeping property, businesses, and cross-border ties, sometimes going back before eventually settling abroad for good. The open-access article argues this provisional, unresolved departure is what actually produced the diaspora known as Tehrangeles.
Judaism Mediated: A new NYU Press book by Sharon Avni and Laura Yares argues for a more expansive understanding of American Jewish learning that can account for how it happens in museums, fandoms, or concert halls. Avni and Yares’ multi-cited ethnography paints a richly detailed picture of how the mediation of Judaism enables people to learn about Judaism well beyond classrooms, schools, and synagogues.
