Research and news about American Jews
Updated 8/31/26
COMMUNITY RESEARCH
Social Innovation: UpStart’s new FY27–29 strategic plan lays out an ambition to stop just running programs and start shaping how the entire Jewish innovation ecosystem operates, built around a proprietary “Jewish Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship” methodology it wants adopted as a shared field-wide language. Targets by FY29 include training 1,000+ leaders, supporting 300+ ventures, and getting 100+ organizations to formally adopt the methodology. [8/24/26]
Hate Crimes: New FBI hate crime data shows 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025: 63% of all religion-based hate crimes nationally, even though Jews are roughly 2% of the U.S. population. That’s a 21% drop from 2024’s record. [8/24/26]
45-Minute Fix: A randomized ADL 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; a follow-up study of 5,000+ students nationally replicated the effect. Teachers delivered it with no special training. [8/21/26]
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.[8/18/26]
NCJW Forward: NCJW’s new five-year plan asks its roughly 50 remaining local sections to choose one of three paths by December 2027, shifting the 133-year-old organization’s identity 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 and its adoption of the IHRA antisemitism definition. [8/17/26]
Game Theory: A new report from Tzomet Games codes 15 major American Jewish leadership speeches against 1,903 timeline events logged by 250+ professionals across a structured 2025–2050 scenario exercise, finding the speeches concentrate on antisemitism, security, and institutional defense while the game sessions treat AI, demographic strategy, and geographic redistribution as the community’s biggest unaddressed levers. [8/13/26]
Global Antisemitism: The J7 Task Force’s second annual report on global antisemitism found 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the Jewish diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing, with 20 people killed and more than 23,000 incidents tallied across the seven-country coalition — up 136% since 2022. American incidents alone rose 131% over the same period, averaging 17 a day. [8/7/26]
West Coast Day Schools: Prizmah’s new enrollment landscape report finds Jewish day school enrollment up 7.5% across North America since 2021-22, with the Southeast and Southwest posting double-digit regional gains against the West’s 0.2%. Because Prizmah couldn’t release granular Bay Area data, J. The Jewish News of Northern California ran its own decade-long analysis of state enrollment figures, finding the region’s apparent stability masks real churn: two Oakland-area K-8 schools have grown more than 20%, several others have shrunk, and rising tuition alongside a stagnant regional population appear to be blunting the post-Oct. 7 bump seen elsewhere. [8/3/26]
Worse Than Before: The Blue Square Alliance Against Hate’s semiannual tracking survey of 7,053 American adults finds antisemitic attitudes at their highest point since tracking began in 2023, with 30% of respondents now expressing them, 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 caveat: the survey folds anti-Zionist sentiment into its antisemitism measures. [7/30/26]
Bucking the Trend: Nearly three years after Oct. 7 triggered a wave of emergency giving, JFNA reports the surge became durable: donor rolls at local federations grew 2.7% between 2023 and 2025, reaching roughly 290,000, even as American philanthropy broadly consolidates around fewer, larger gifts. Outgoing national campaign chair David Heller points to Columbus, Ohio, where the annual campaign doubled from $6M to $12M. [7/29/26]
Cooling, Not Collapsing: A new Pew Research Center survey finds Americans’ views of Israelis have grown steadily more negative — 52% favorable against 42% unfavorable, a narrower margin than in 2022 — while opinion of Palestinians has held roughly steady. The partisan gap has widened rather than narrowed: 65% of Republicans view Israelis favorably against 43% of Democrats. [7/28/26]
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, against 47% in larger communities, and small-community leaders report feeling far less physically safe in Jewish spaces (60%) than community leaders overall (86%). The gap isn’t in antisemitism experienced — it’s in the response to it. [7/27/26]
Perceptions of Gaza: A new AP-NORC poll finds 30% of American Jewish adults believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, while 49% say it has not; the same survey shows 51% of Jewish Democrats specifically believe the US is “too supportive” of Israel. About six in ten Jewish adults view Netanyahu unfavorably. [7/07/26]
Day School Study: A new Prizmah study finds that Jewish day school enrollment has held steady above pre-pandemic levels five years after the COVID surge, particularly in New York and Florida, reversing a decades-long decline in non-Orthodox enrollment documented in the last Avi Chai census. [6/26/26]
Beyond Pride: A first-of-its-kind JFNA survey finds that LGBTQ+ Jews are hungry for Jewish community engagement — but that one-off Pride programming isn’t retaining them. The research, prompted by JFNA’s 2025 Pride mission to Israel, finds that small-group, year-round interactions are what keep people coming back, not marquee events. [6/20/26]
Talmud of America: As America turns 250, the Pardes Institute and interfaith project Faith250 are asking people to study the Declaration of Independence the way Jews study Torah: poring over it, arguing with it, putting it in tension with ancient sources. The result, a four-essay collection called Talmud of America, applies beit midrash technique to founding documents: preserving the disputes, sitting with the contradictions, resisting easy resolution. [6/9/26]
Ambient Antisemitism: A new Boundless survey finds roughly a third of Americans hold anti-Jewish views tied to conspiracy tropes about power and control, and antisemitic ideas now travel primarily through algorithms and ideologically charged media rather than through organized extremist movements. Another study by the Combat Antisemitism Movement shows the mechanism in action. The research argues that Jewish institutions designed to respond to visible incidents aren’t built for antisemitism that spreads like ambient noise. [6/5/26]
Who Belongs: A new Shalom Hartman Institute white paper by Christine Hayes argues that Jewish communities can’t have honest conversations about belonging until they separate three concepts they routinely conflate: identity, status, and standing. Designed as a discussion guide for rabbis and communal leaders, the paper addresses conversion, intermarriage, and the growing population of non-Jews deeply embedded in Jewish life [6/2/26]
Generational Split: A new Jewish Voters Resource Center poll, conducted by GBAO, finds 24% of American Jewish voters now favor a binational state in Israel-Palestine — and per the Forward’s reporting, 51% of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 do. Just 1% of Israeli Jews back a binational state with equal rights, per a 2025 Tel Aviv University survey. [5/27/26]
American Jewish Shift: A new memorandum from the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an Israeli think tank, frames declining American Jewish support for Israel as a national security crisis, cataloguing falling synagogue membership, shrinking federation donor rolls, and a generational collapse in emotional attachment to Israel. [5/20/26]
Leap of Faith: Pew’s new national 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 over two years. Familiarity with the term “Christian nationalism” has risen 14 points, with 59% now recognizing it. Most Americans still want houses of worship to stay out of electoral politics, and partisan divides on religion’s role in government are sharp. [5/15/26]
Incident Report: The ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 6,274 incidents in the United States in 2025, a 33% drop from the record 9,354 in 2024. Physical assaults rose 4% to a record 203 incidents, armed assaults jumped 39%, and three people were killed. Campus incidents fell 66%, and Israel- or Zionism-related incidents declined from 58% to 45% of the total. [5/6/26]
Perception vs Reality: Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion released its interim report examining the December Bondi Beach massacre in which two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah candlelighting. As Judah Ari Gross writes for eJP, the report reveals that NSW Police sent just three officers to the event despite the Jewish security organization rating the threat as “high.” An email to the officers noted their presence would help the community “feel safe.” [5/4/26]
Educator Satisfaction: Early findings from the Growing Educators and Leaders Study, a longitudinal project launched by the Jim Joseph Foundation in 2023, show that Jewish educators’ career commitment remains stable over time. What fluctuates, significantly, is job satisfaction, and the strongest predictor of that fluctuation is the quality of supervision. [4/24/26]
Pay School: The Samis Foundation has released “Day School Affordability and the Catholic School Model,” a structural comparison of Catholic and Jewish day school economics. The report finds the tuition gap is architectural, not incidental: dual curriculum doubles teaching staff requirements, security costs have surged 124% since 2022, and Jewish schools lack the layered parish subsidies that suppress Catholic tuition. [4/17/26]
Better Together: A new Jim Joseph Foundation case study on a shared Jewish communal campus in Newton, MA. Bringing together Hebrew College, Temple Reyim, Keshet, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and others is saving money and sparking new ideas — including a weekly community lunch co-op that’s become a campus institution. Read more at eJewish Philanthropy. [4/13/26]
Losing Israel: Two new surveys this week capture a sharp shift in American opinion. A Pew Research Center poll of 3,500 U.S. adults, conducted March 23-29, finds 60% now view Israel unfavorably (up 20 points since 2022) with 56% of Jewish Americans expressing little or no confidence in Netanyahu. Separately, the Jewish Electorate Institute finds 63% of American Jews describe themselves as both pro-Israel and critical of Israeli government policies, with AIPAC viewed favorably by Republican Jews and unfavorably by Democrats. [4/10/26]
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]
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Meet the Parents: A new study in the Journal of Jewish Education finds that Jewish parents are far more likely to transmit culture, history, and pride to their children than they are to prepare them for bias or encourage mistrust of non-Jews. Leah Hibel and Yael Teff-Seker surveyed 218 parents of children ages 2 to 18, documenting significant shifts in parenting behavior after October 7. [8/17/26]
Non-Political Capital: A lawyer and banker who led American Jewish communal life in the 1920s and ’30s insisted their Palestine Economic Corporation was “strictly business,” channeling over $14 million into Jewish agriculture and industry with no connection to Zionism. In AJS Review, Jacob Beckert argues their claimed neutrality didn’t square with the results: the capital built the very Zionist project they meant to stand apart from. [8/12/26]
Canadian Hate: A government-commissioned survey of nearly 900 Jewish students at Canadian universities finds that 95.7% experienced or witnessed antisemitism on campus in the past year, with 70% saying their institution doesn’t take the problem seriously and 18% of incidents citing faculty members directly. The Association for Canadian Studies report, commissioned by Canada’s former Special Envoy on Holocaust Remembrance, explicitly modeled its methodology on U.S. survey research, including Brandeis’s Cohen Center studies. [8/11/26]
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 anti-discrimination training. Authors Hedy Wald (Brown) and Steven Roth (UIC) pooled US, UK, Canadian, and Australian data across medicine, nursing, psychology, and social work. [8/5/26]
Pact Mentality: In the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Gennady Estraikh reconstructs the crisis the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact set off inside American Yiddish communist circles. The poet Moyshe Nadir, Leon Feinberg, and the journalist-historian Melech Epstein walked out within weeks, and the communist daily Morgn-Frayhayt watched circulation fall from over 51,000 to roughly 20,000 by late 1940, a loss it never recovered. Estraikh’s more interesting finding is what didn’t happen: party membership barely moved, and Epstein later concluded the ridicule heaped on defectors pulled waverers back toward the party rather than away. [7/30/26]
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 measures itself largely by what it programs. [7/30/26]
OC Jews: A new Cohen Center study of Orange County’s 93,500 Jews finds the self-described “purple county” is purple among its Jews too, with half identifying as Democrat, well below the 57% share among all U.S. Jews in 2020, and 21% as Republican, closer to the national Jewish norm than to Orange County overall. That partisan split also tracks attachment to Israel: very liberal Jews are least attached (30% not at all), while moderates and conservatives are most attached. [7/21/26]
Judaism Mediated: In a new book from NYU Press, Sharon Avni* (CUNY) and Laura Yares (Michigan State) argue that most American Jews learn about Judaism far from the synagogue. Rather, Judaism is learned in the cultural spaces often overlooked by standard engagement surveys like those done by Pew. This learning is rarely linear, accumulating serendipitously across cultural encounters, and some of its most engaged participants aren’t Jewish at all.
* In the Berman Archive: Read Sharon Avni’s essay on what Hebrew does for American Jews. [7/20/26]
Tehrangeles Untangled: In the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Lior Sternfeld challenges the story of Iranian Jewish emigration as one-way flight, showing that after 1979 many left assuming return was possible. Many kept property, businesses, and cross-border networks, sometimes going back before settling abroad for good. The open-access article argues this “exit without closure” produced the diaspora known as Tehrangeles. [7/10/26]
AIPAC & JFK: In Modern Judaism, Kobby Barda revisits the 1963 Senate hearings that scrutinized whether AIPAC’s predecessor should have registered as a foreign agent, and uses newly declassified JFK assassination files to debunk the antisemitic conspiracy theory that AIPAC orchestrated Kennedy’s killing to avoid losing its lobbying status. Drawing on archival records, Barda argues AIPAC operated as a genuinely American organization, independent of the Jewish Agency’s funding or direction. [7/2/26]
Grapes of Wrath: 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, charting a shift from outright elimination of the passage’s vengeance verses in early editions to their gradual restoration in recent Haggadot, reframed through annotation and paired with alternative readings promoting peace. [6/19/26]
Myth to Model: A new study in American Psychologist by researchers at Ben-Gurion and Tel Aviv universities finds that large language models encode latent antisemitic stereotypes that safety filters don’t catch. [6/12/26]
Conservative Canadian Jews: In Contemporary Jewry, sociologist Robert Brym analyzes the 2025 Canadian federal election through a Jewish lens, finding that some traditionally Liberal Jewish voters shifted toward the Conservatives largely in response to rising antisemitism. This pattern raises questions about how security concerns are reshaping diaspora Jewish political behavior more broadly. [6/5/26]
Connecting the Dots: A new study in Contemporary Jewry challenges a foundational assumption of Jewish education research. Adina Bankier-Karp and David Graham draw on hierarchical regression analyses of survey data from 21,260 respondents across four diaspora communities — Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the U.S. — to argue that the field’s “silver bullet” framing, which credits identity outcomes to discrete programs, fundamentally mismeasures what’s happening. Jewish identity, they find, emerges from an ecosystem: schooling, family, peer networks, and national setting interact, and the impact of any single intervention depends entirely on the others. [5/29/26]
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. [5/15/26]
Unstable Holocaust Memory: In Jewish Culture and History, Bill Edmonds traces how Quaker Holocaust rescue work is being reread through the lens of contemporary Israel-Palestine politics. Edmonds uses the case to illuminate how Holocaust memory is not fixed but volatile, shaped and reshaped by the conflicts of the present. [4/24/26]
Queer Memory: In the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Elazar Ben-Lulu draws on research at the American Jewish Archives to examine how Jewish LGBTQ+ individuals negotiate belonging within institutional memory, and how the inclusion of materials like queer sermons and prayers that disrupt dominant heteronormative frameworks. [4/20/26]
Campus Prejudice: A new report from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis finds antisemitism on campus is not one problem but three: hostile views toward Israel among progressivesl, hostility toward Jews (distinct from Israel) more common among non-white and Muslim students, and generalized minority-group hostility more common on the right. Nearly half of Jewish students reported experiencing prejudice in the fall 2025 semester. [4/15/26]
Antisemitic Drivers: A new 30-year comparative study in Contemporary Jewry finds anti-Zionist sentiment — not general prejudice — is the key engine of modern antisemitism. Flare-ups in the Middle East raise hostility toward Jews where anti-Israel culture is already strong. [4/10/26]
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]
NEWS OF NOTE
Building Bridges: A Zionist rabbi whose Queens synagogue is represented by Zohran Mamdani and AOC explains why he texts them “Shabbat Shalom” every week, and why that relationship mattered after a March attack on a Michigan synagogue. [8/31/26]
Star Turn: A University of Michigan astrophysics PhD candidate built a computer model for the exact moment Shabbat should end: when three medium-brightness stars become visible after sunset. They found it often runs ~10 min later than standard rabbinic approximations. [8/27/26]
Milk & Money: Canadian milk and honey landed in the crosshairs of the new US-Canada trade war weeks before Rosh Hashanah. The CJN’s North Star finds Jewish dairy and honey producers backing the hard line anyway, one of them arguing Canada should close its borders further. [8/26/26]
Role Playing Golem: Peter Bebergal and JF Martel have written a Depression-era Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure that runs from a break-in at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts through the city’s 1930s Jewish neighborhoods to a golem ritual. Speaking to Boing Boing ahead of a NecronomiCon panel on religion in the game, the two describe the design problem plainly: the Mythos treats all human faith as delusion, so the trick was to give Jewish belief a real moral center inside an amoral universe. [8/21/26]
Ivy League Shakedown: A former Justice Department civil rights attorney has told Congress that the federal antisemitism investigations into Harvard, Brown, and Columbia were decided before the evidence was in, with hundreds of millions frozen before the probes closed and the investigative team’s conclusions disregarded. At Brown, investigators found the university had responded promptly to the two incidents they could identify and recommended a notice of no violation; an HHS official agreed there was no violation but said such a letter would never clear leadership. Brown settled for $50 million and Columbia for more than $220 million. Harvard fought and won. The disclosure was filed by the Government Accountability Project on behalf of Haley Van Erem and reported by the AP and MS NOW. [8/18/26]
Synthetic Guide: Sefaria, the largest free digital library of Jewish texts, launched an AI chatbot designed to push users deeper into its ~390-million-word corpus rather than hand over one tidy answer. [8/18/26]
Forward Reverse: Alyssa Katz has left the Forward after less than nine months as editor-in-chief, a departure JTA caught when her author page shifted into the past tense. Neither the paper’s PR team nor publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen would say why. Antisemitism reporter Arno Rosenfeld recently left, too, headed to Haaretz as Washington correspondent in its new US bureau. [8/17/26]
Checking the Box: California’s SB 1387, which would add an optional “Jewish” ethnicity box to every state demographic form, cleared a key committee Thursday and heads next to the State Assembly. Passage would make CA the first state to treat Jewishness as more than a religion this way. [8/14/26]
Monumental Questions: A Forward feature traces Southern Jewish communities’ monuments to Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, as proof of their own belonging in the Jim Crow South. The last surviving monument, during Charlotte’s 2020 BLM protests, sits in a New Orleans storage unit, where the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience still hasn’t decided whether to display it. [8/13/26]
Seeing Swastikas: Hindu teenagers in New Jersey and Maryland’s Howard County have convinced school boards to formally separate their devotional swastika from the Nazi Hakenkreuz, changing curriculum and dress-code rules for tens of thousands of students. It’s a case study about whose reading of a loaded symbol gets to set classroom norms. [8/12/26]
Essential Pluralism: Before moving to the US from Belgium, historian Flora Cassen was warned about culture shock over doctors, dating, and food. Nobody warned her about American Jewish life itself: loud, argumentative, endlessly inventive. She argues that Jewish life and the open, pluralistic country that let it flourish are inseparable, and this fall she’s teaching a new Brandeis course, America and Its Jews at 250, tracing that connection from the colonial era to today. [8/10/26]
Shul Commuter Scooters: Kick scooters have become the default way to reach synagogue in Orthodox neighborhoods like LA’s Pico-Robertson, cutting walk times in half and stretching community boundaries across a shared eruv, per the Forward. Rabbis are split on whether the practice crosses into uvda d’chol (“weekday activity”), with some quietly conceding it’s now too widespread to reverse. [8/6/26]
Unclear and Present Danger: Religion News Service interviewed 18 Jewish New Yorkers after a Manhattan double-stabbing NYPD is investigating as a hate crime, though it’s unclear whether the attack specifically targeted Jews. The interviews surfaced an ongoing fight over whether criticizing Israel’s government endangers Jews: Rabbi Max Hollander and Netanyahu himself said Mamdani’s rhetoric critical of Israel puts a target on Jews, while Rabbi Jill Jacobs and JFREJ’s Sophie Ellman-Golan called that equation itself the problem, arguing it makes ordinary Jews answerable for Netanyahu’s actions. [8/3/26]
Blessed, Not Wed: The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has approved a new teshuvah (a rabbinic ruling on Jewish law) letting Conservative rabbis publicly bless intermarried couples committed to building Jewish homes. Officiating interfaith weddings remains off-limits, but the ruling also welcomes non-Jewish parents onto the bimah at b’nei mitzvah and permits rabbis to officiate funerals for non-Jewish family members. [7/31/26]
Broader Books: PJ Library’s new Sephardic Stories Initiative is publishing its first four children’s books drawing on Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jewish traditions, including a Farhud-era Baghdad tale and a supernatural Libyan quest, the Forward reports. The launch comes as Jewish-themed fiction book deals have reportedly dropped 82% since 2023, per a Publishers Marketplace analysis cited in the piece. [7/29/26]
RabbAI: Rabbi Zvika Krieger splits his time consulting on AI ethics for Anthropic and other tech giants and leading Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev congregation. In an interview with the J., he suggests that Jewish tradition, and its ease with “sitting with not-knowing,” is a necessary counterweight to the instant answers offered by AI. His American Jewish path from Pico-Robertson day school in LA, to Burning Man, to the world of big tech is an interesting one. [7/29/26]
New View: In a new Guardian documentary, filmmaker Matthew Cassel explores New York’s Jewish community, including his own family, to trace how the war in Gaza and genocide accusations against Israel are opening a generational rift over support for Israel. [7/28/26]
Saddest Day: Today is Tisha B’Av, when Rabbinic Jews fast to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem’s First and Second Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE. This year, progressive Jewish groups in San Diego, Los Angeles, Massachusetts, and D.C. are tying the day to protests over immigration enforcement. [7/23/26]
Hallucinatorah: Steve Marcus’s new YIVO exhibit mashes up Judaica with 1960s counterculture: LSD* blotter art of famous rabbis, a peace-sign Torah pointer, tefillin wrapped around a Black Power fist. On view at the Center for Jewish History through December.
*In the Berman Archive: Decades before Marcus, a pseudonymous student wrestled with the same questions in a 1968 essay for Response. Read Notes From the Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah.
[7/23/26]
GOP vs NIF: House Judiciary and Ways and Means Republicans are investigating the New Israel Fund, which funds progressive Jewish and Arab groups in Israel, over claims it illegally supported 2019 Israeli campaign activity. One cited offense, bussing Bedouin citizens to the polls, echoes GOP attacks on Black voter turnout drives at home. NIF says the allegations recycle a lawsuit already dismissed in federal court and target American Jews’ First Amendment right to give. [7/13/26]
Tome Home: A Hasidic-raised scholar’s “10,000-book library” landed him in eviction court on the Upper East Side, pitting a landlord against an enthusiastic adherent of Jewish reading culture. [7/9/26]
Second Line: Two decades after Katrina, a 198-year-old Reform shul on the Mardi Gras parade route has a problem most congregations would envy: Touro Synagogue may be growing too fast. [7/6/26]
Jewish America: The American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, and Yeshiva University Museum are marking 250 years of Jewish involvement in American democracy with All We Have Standing Between Us, an exhibition running July 21–December 31 at the Center for Jewish History, paired with a new narrative podcast hosted by AJHS Executive Director Gemma R. Birnbaum. The exhibition spans seven thematic sections tracing figures from Emma Lazarus* to Betty Friedan; the podcast’s first two episodes drop today.
*In the Berman Archive: Read Susan Sapiro’s 1998 essay on Emma Lazarus in Ma’yan’s Journey newsletter, which explores Lazarus’s navigation of Jewish and American identity a century before this exhibition. [7/1/26]
Texas Mess: Texas approved a required Bible reading list for public schools (yes, public schools) that draws from six Hebrew Bible passages in mostly Protestant translations with no Jewish organizations consulted. The list’s one Jewish-translated text, Lamentations 3, is paired with Holocaust literature in a way rabbis say risks leading eighth graders to read the Shoah as divine punishment. [6/29/26]
Wexner Reckoning: Eighty alumni of the Wexner Heritage Program have signed an open letter calling on the Wexner Foundation to take action for survivors of sexual violence and trafficking, and launched Tikkun Funds directing more than $356,000 in pledges to three vetted nonprofits. The campaign comes as Wexner’s name appears 1,746 times in publicly released Epstein files and the foundation has announced all leadership programs will spin off under a new name by January 2027. [6/26/26]
Lonestar Jews: Houston Public Media has an in-depth report on Jewish voters in Texas politics — finding them caught between a Democratic Party whose Israel policy positions are increasingly alienating and a Republican Party where Ted Cruz himself acknowledges antisemitism has spiked sharply on the right. [6/25/26]
Morning Minyan: Started as a COVID stopgap in March 2020, Los Angeles-based IKAR Synagogue’s daily 8 a.m. Zoom minyan peaked at 110 participants two days after October 7th and now draws 40 to 60 people six days a week from as far as Japan. [6/24/26]
Jewish Juneteenth: The Jews of Color Initiative has compiled its Juneteenth Resource List 2026 — events, essays, and readings at the intersection of Black Jewish life and the holiday of liberation. [6/19/26]
Newish Currents: Arielle Angel departs as Jewish Currents’ editor-in-chief after eight years, marking the exit with a personal essay reflecting on the Jewish left and anti-Zionist organizing in the wake of October 7th.
*In the Berman Archive: We interviewed Angel just days before Oct. 7 2023. [6/15/26]
Funding Freeze: The DOJ has withheld over $200M in congressionally-allocated Violence Against Women Act grants, forcing Jewish Women International to draw on credit lines and lay off senior staff. JWI’s work training Jewish men on consent and domestic violence prevention has stalled. [6/12/26]
Camp Files: The Foundation for Jewish Camp’s 2026–2030 Strategic Direction — released today with sustainable business models and affordability at the center — arrives the same week news broke that NY brothers Michael and David Shabsels, owners of roughly 30 Northeast camps, defaulted on a $195M Israeli bond offering after allegedly transferring $34M to companies they control: a case study in what the field is building against. [6/11/26]
