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As young Jews are move away from Israel, Jewish leaders are reluctant to change their approach
Washington, D.C. — Anna Langer stood behind the podium earlier this week at one of the largest gatherings of Jewish professionals in the world and laid out hard facts of the relationship between American Jews and Israel. Her most striking point: That younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.
“It’s a growing segment of our young people, and it’s an area we must pay attention to,” said Langer, who runs domestic Israel strategy for the Jewish Federations of North America; JFNA helps direct hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Jewish programming and organizes the annual conference.
From the event’s main stage, Rahm Emmanuel warned that the Israel-Hamas war had battered the country’s reputation among a generation of young American Jews in the same way that the Six Day War in 1967 had invigorated their parents’ support of Israel. “We have our work cut out,” Emmanuel said.
But despite broad concern that many young Jews are abandoning Israel, few of the experts and organizations at the event seemed open to changing much of anything about their approach in order to reach these disaffected members of the community. Instead, the solutions proposed by Jewish educators and philanthropists involved doubling down on existing strategies: cultivating warm feelings toward Israel through more sponsored trips and education, while dismantling the forces — including social media and teachers unions — that they believe are causing young Jews to sour on the country.
“It’s very easy to slide into anti-Zionism.”
Sara HurwitzAuthor of As a Jew
“TikTok is just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with videos of carnage in Gaza,” Sara Hurwitz, Michele Obama’s former speechwriter who has written two books about Jewish identity, told the audience of some 2,000 Jewish professionals. “This is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews.”
Eric Fingerhut, the head of JFNA, said that two of his organization’s top priorities were facilitating the sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison, the pro-Israel tech mogul who owns Oracle, and countering the influence of the National Education Association, a teachers union that has expressed hostility toward Israel.
“This is a technology coming from outside this country,” Fingerhut said, referring to TikTok’s Chinese ownership. He added that antisemitism and criticism of Israel on social media was “a global attack on Jewish people and the State of Israel, funded with billions and billions — probably trillions — of dollars, fueled by some of the most sophisticated algorithms.”
(A spokesperson clarified in a text message that he was referring to online influence and disinformation campaigns from China, Russia and Iran.)
Another frequent refrain at the conference was that the real solution to communal divisions was a stronger commitment to what Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, described as “Jewish education, Zionist identity and Torah learning.”
“These are the essential elements of a healthy constitution for our community,” he said.
Hurwitz, too, suggested that young Jews were drifting from Israel because their Jewish identities had been reduced to “a big empty void.”
“Young people who have that empty Jewish identity today — it is being filled by antisemitism,” she said. “It’s very easy to slide into anti-Zionism.”
***
On the sidelines of the conference, however, some attendees acknowledged that the belief young Jews critical of Israel were simply devoid of a meaningful Jewish identity overlooked some of the reality. Young Jews remain both supportive of a Jewish state in Israel and emotionally attached to the country. Despite reporting deep levels of discomfort with Israel’s actions, they have joined the “surge” of Jewish engagement that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, showing up in increased numbers to synagogues and Jewish events.
“Disengagement is not our problem,” Langer, the JFNA executive, told a group assembled to discuss the future of Israel education. “Rather, it’s our ability to hold space for complexity and cultivate belonging in a deeply connected — and yet deeply divided — community.”
She pointed to statistics that showed half of American Jews believe the community does not allow for nuanced conversations about the war in Gaza. And nearly 70% found it hard to support actions taken by the Israeli government, even though only 7% of Jews report avoiding communal institutions over these concerns.
Langer said the research suggested Israel education needed to feature more nuance: “When students perceive their education as one-sided or incomplete, it undermines their trust and engagement.”
Jon Falk, vice president of Israel engagement and antisemitism for Hillel International, said his organization had brought Palestinian speakers to its chapters to help address this desire. “I believe that Hillel brings more Palestinian voices to campus than even SJP,” Falk said, referring to Students for Justice in Palestine.
But despite acknowledging that young Jews are deeply uncomfortable with Israel — around 65% of Jews under 40 say that Israel’s actions often conflict with their moral, political and Jewish values, according to data presented at the conference — there was no suggestion that Jewish organizations should move away from ironclad support for Israel.
One sticking point may be that, according to Langer, when you consider American Jews of all ages, they are evenly divided over whether communal institutions should be more supportive or more critical of Israel. And many young Jews continue to have a positive relationship with Israel.
“It sounds wonderful to say that we should be a community and serve everyone,” said David Cygielman, the CEO of Mem Global, which runs a network of group houses for young Jews. “But how does that play out? And does that alienate people who are coming to be part of a strong, vibrant Jewish community who love and want to engage with Israel?”
The reluctance of experts who spoke at the conference to consider shifting their Israel strategy was underscored by the absence of liberal pro-Israel groups at the event. J Street was not represented at the conference, nor was the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, one of the most progressive Jewish establishment organizations, which for decades maintained a formal relationship with the federation network.
As for how attendees who were there positioned themselves politically, they overwhelmingly sided with John Podhoretz, a conservative journalist who argued against the feasibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during a mainstage debate.
And when Greenblatt was asked gently about divisions within the Jewish community over how to fight antisemitism, including criticism of the ADL’s recent announcement that it was creating a Mamdani Monitor to track the new, and Muslim, mayor of New York City, he expressed confidence that his organization had taken the correct approach.
“I am a ferocious and unapologetic Zionist,” Greenblatt said. “Anyone who wants me to apologize: Get in line.”
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One strategy experts did, repeatedly, endorse included travel to Israel, which plummeted following the Covid-19 pandemic, as a solution to eroding support for the country among both Jews and non-Jews, even as they acknowledged that participating in those kinds of trips now came with “a lot of social isolation and punishment” for participants.
“Imagine if every federation across North America took 100 public school educators and administrations to Israel every year,” said Jenna Potash, an executive at UJA-Federation of Toronto. “That’s really something we should focus on.”
And on the rare occasion that speakers did make allowances for criticizing Israel, many suggested that those discussions take place only in private.
“You need to lead with proud support for Israel, standing publicly and legislatively with Israel in unmatched times of vilification,” Langer said. “At the same time, we need to create internal spaces for honest, nuanced and educational conversations about Israel.”
Yet the bulk of speakers seemed to reject the notion that any consolation was needed for Jews who were uncomfortable with the Jewish establishment’s traditional support for Israel. Mark Charendoff, who runs the influential right-leaning Maimonides Fund, said he was in the process of re-calibrating the organization’s focus to fighting the enemies of the Jewish people, after years focusing on reaching young Jews.
Charendoff said this new strategy means building alliances with people who “we might disagree with on 80%” so long as “we agree with them on Israel.”
“Our enemies are trying to normalize anti-Zionism,” Charendoff said. “We have to re-normalize Israel as part of the conversation and psyche and ethos of American Jewry.”
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Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the longtime dean of Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, will retire at the end of the school year, the president of Ziegler’s parent institution said Wednesday, in what may signal a broader transformation of the Los Angeles Conservative seminary.
Jay Sanderson, president of American Jewish University, confirmed the news in a phone interview with the Forward.
“He has served the Jewish world admirably, honorably for more than 25 years, leading an upstanding rabbinical school and making his mark on hundreds of Jewish leaders across the country,” Sanderson said.
Artson, who is also a vice president at AJU, is not leaving the school entirely. Sanderson said he will take on a “more senior role” in the administration of AJU, which also includes graduate schools for education and business. He will also continue teaching as the newly inaugurated Mordecai Kaplan Chair.
Artson did not reply to inquiries Wednesday night.
Sanderson, who became president in May 2025, has been making noise about bigger changes ahead at Ziegler since his arrival. In a podcast interview posted Jan. 15, he said he wanted AJU — which is already nondenominational other than Ziegler — to be “less denominationally driven.”
“What I was alluding to is an idea that has been talked about in the Jewish world for 15 years, that no one, frankly, has the courage to do, which is to create a multi-denominational rabbinical school, teaching 21st century skills, and bringing people across denominations to learn together,” Sanderson told the Forward. (Trans-denominational rabbinical schools do exist, including one in Los Angeles — the Academy for Jewish Religion, California.)
AJU sold its 22-acre hilltop campus prior to Sanderson’s arrival to a neighboring Jewish day school for terms that were undisclosed at the time. Sanderson said Wednesday that while he hadn’t seen the exact documentation, he thought it was between $55 million and $60 million. He said AJU netted very little of that, however, because most of the proceeds went to pay off debt on the campus.
Ziegler has since moved to LA’s Westside, and AJU’s administration — which had planned to stay on campus until 2027 — moved out 18 months early.
Artson, a leading intellectual in the Conservative movement, helped spearhead the push to legalize gay marriage under halacha, or Jewish law. He argued that “committed, permanent, exclusive homosexual relationships between equals” could not have been biblically prohibited because they were unknown until the modern era. The responsa he published in the 1990s making that case is still taught in rabbinical schools today; the Conservative movement did not formally sanction gay marriage until 2012.
And at a time when Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship, was seen as cloistered, his arrival at AJU in 1999 — it was then known as the University of Judaism — helped shape its brand of Conservative Judaism as a movement that could be both compassionate and capable of interfacing with the public.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, head of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said hundreds of Ziegler-ordained rabbis and untold numbers of people in their communities have benefited from Artson’s “visionary leadership.”
“His impact is wide and deep and will be felt for a very long time,” Kligfeld said.
In 2024, Artson and Ziegler Vice Dean Rabbi Cheryl Peretz were investigated and cleared by the Conservative movement after they were accused by former students of enabling a toxic culture at the school. A letter from AJU responding to the complaint acknowledged it and pledged “to do better.”
Sanderson, who did not say what the plan was to replace Artson, said that Ziegler students’ response to the news of the dean’s impending departure was mixed.
“I am signaling that we’re going to be looking at things and potentially changing things going forward,” Sanderson said. “So naturally, some of the students were excited, and some of the students were anxious.”
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Columbia University Professor Who Praised Oct. 7 Massacre Still Teaching Zionism Course
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Columbia University has retained a professor who celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — where the Palestinian terrorist group sexually assaulted women and men, kidnapped the elderly, and murdered children in their beds — allowing him to teach a course on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history, published an encomium to Hamas in The Electronic Intifada which lauded the Oct. 7 atrocities as “astounding,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and the basis of future assaults on the Jewish state. Additionally, Massad went as far as to exalt the Hamas paragliders who flew into a music festival to slaughter the young people attending it as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance.”
“Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them,” Massad wrote.
Massad went on to boast that an estimated 300,000 Israelis had been displaced from their homes during the attack while mocking the Biblical story of the Exodus, a foundation stone of the Jewish faith which tells the story of the Jews’ escaping slavery in Egypt.
“Reports promptly emerged that thousands of Israelis were fleeing through the desert on foot to escape the rockets and gunfire, with many still hiding inside settlements more than 24 hours into the resistance offensive,” he continued. “No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.”
According to Columbia University’s website, this academic semester Massad will teach a course titled “Palestinian-Israeli Politics and Society,” which “provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.” The class will also go over the history of “the development of Zionism through the current peace process.”
The decision to continue allowing Massad to teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes amid Columbia’s insisting that it is combatting antisemitism and ideological bias in the classroom.
In July, university president Claire Shipman said the institution will hire new coordinators to oversee complaints alleging civil rights violations; facilitate “deeper education on antisemitism” by creating new training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — a tool that advocates say is necessary for identifying what constitutes antisemitic conduct and speech.
Shipman also announced new partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other Jewish groups while delivering a major blow to the anti-Zionist movement on campus by vowing never to “recognize or meet with” the infamous organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a pro-Hamas campus group which had serially disrupted academic life with unauthorized, surprise demonstrations attended by non-students.
“I would also add that making these announcements in no way suggests we are finished with the work,” Shipman continued. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that antisemitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding will take time. It will likely require more reform. But I’m hopeful that in doing this work, as we consider and even debate it, we will start to promote healing and to chart our path forward.”
Columbia University had, until that point, yielded some of the most indelible examples of anti-Jewish hatred in higher education since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel set off explosions of anti-Zionist activity at colleges and universities across the US. Such incidents included a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
On Tuesday, Columbia again stated its intentions to combat antisemitism and foster intellectual impartiality, saying it has appointed new officials and monitors to oversee its compliance with a $200 million settlement it reached with the federal government, a resolution which returned some $400 million which US President Donald Trump canceled over allegations it had refused to correct the allegedly hostile environment.
That agreement, as told by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, called for Columbia to “bring viewpoint diversity to their Middle Eastern studies program.”
On Wednesday, Middle East expert and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) Asaf Romirowsky told The Algemeiner that Massad’s remaining on Columbia’s payroll is indicative of the university’s hesitance to enact meaningful and lasting reforms.
“Joseph Massad is a notorious tenured antisemite who has spent his career at Columbia bashing Israel and Zionism, a poster child for BDS and a scholar propagandist activist. Furthermore, he has shown his true colors time and time again defending Hamas and calling the 10/7 barbaric attack on Israel ‘awesome,’” Romirowsky said.
Noting that Columbia’s own antisemitism task force said in a December report that the institution employs few faculty who hold moderate views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he added, “By allowing Massad to continue teaching and spreading his venom, Columbia is only codifying the dearth of knowledge as it relates to the Middle East. It should take the finding of the report and act upon it by getting rid of the tenured radicals they allowed to hijack the institution.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Julie Menin wants to be a bridge in the Mamdani era
Julie Menin, the newly-elected speaker of the New York City Council, understands the significance of becoming the first Jew to lead the city’s legislative body.
“We live in a day with the first Muslim mayor of New York City and now the first Jewish speaker of the Council serving at the same time,” Menin, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said in her inaugural speech.
In a recent interview, Menin said she views it as a “historic time for the Jewish community” amid rising antisemitism and tension over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and believes it is up to her to “bridge divides, as opposed to the kind of divisiveness that we’ve seen.”
When she was officially selected as speaker – the second-most powerful government position in America’s largest city – Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, remarked, “In medical terms, the word Menin is a protein that suppresses disease. We need more Menin to stop the spread of this disease of hatred.” Potasnik, who is a veteran chaplain of the fire department and was a member of Mamdani’s transition team, called Menin a leader “who knows the way, who shows the way and who goes the way.”
Menin’s leadership and relationship with Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be tested in the coming weeks as he comes under growing scrutiny from New York’s Jewish community over his anti-Zionist worldview and revocation of executive orders tied to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
Mainstream Jewish leaders see Menin as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions. A recent Honan Strategy Group poll of 848 NYC voters found that 39% want Menin to be a check on Mamdani’s agenda, while 38% want her to fully embrace it.
The Menin-Mamdani relationship faces its first test
In her first legislative move, Menin introduced last week a five-point plan to combat antisemitism that includes a bill that would ban protests around entrances and exits of houses of worship; provide$1.25 million in funding to the Museum of Jewish Heritage; and create a hotline to report antisemitic incidents. Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposal to establish a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues. A City Hall spokesperson said the mayor would wait for the outcome of a legal review before taking a position.
Mamdani told the Forward on Wednesday he has yet to discuss the specifics of the bill and would veto it if he determines it’s illegal. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.
Menin, who has already appeared several times alongside Mamdani — including in a social media clip promoting new public restrooms — said that, given her career as an attorney and her experience serving in a senior role at the New York City Law Department, she would not have introduced legislation that lacks legal standing.
“I feel very confident that the bills that we are going to put forward absolutely meet that legal muster,” she said. Menin declined to say whether she would seek to pass it with a veto-proof majority to get it signed into law, but said that her private conversations with Mamdani on the matter have been productive.
“I feel we’re going to have very broad-based support in the council,” she said. “They do not infringe upon the peaceful right to protest, but they do ensure that both congregants and students can enter and exit their respective facilities without intimidation and harassment. And I look forward to continuing to have productive conversations with the mayor on this topic.”
Menin will also be talking with a powerful group of progressive members, all of whom backed her bid for speaker. The body’s progressive caucus now includes 24 members, two short of a Council majority. The Jewish Caucus, which Menin attended last week, has seven members.
The Council is expected to vote on the set of bills at next month’s meeting.
Menin said passing the plan on an “aggressive and fast timetable” is crucial. “It’s obviously very important to call out antisemitic incidents as soon as they happen,” she said. “But we need far more than words. This is real decisive action to combat antisemitism.”
Fighting antisemitism and hate
Menin said she has a record of confronting antisemitism in public life.
When she was first elected to the City Council in 2021 — after serving as the city’s census czar during the 2020 count — she devoted her first town hall meeting to the issue. The virtual forum, attended by hundreds of constituents, brought together antisemitism experts and law enforcement officials to discuss how to report and prevent hate crimes. The meeting followed two incidents in her Upper East Side district. One involved a social media post by a popular comedy club that likened COVID-19 vaccination mandates to the Holocaust. Menin’s condemnation prompted a defamation lawsuit against her, which was dismissed. The other was the discovery of a swastika stamped on a $100 bill withdrawn from an ATM by a local woman.
Menin stressed the need to build relationships with other faith communities and “take the temperature and the rhetoric down” by focusing on “our commonality of spirit, not the differences.”
When she served as chair of the Community Board 1 in the 2000s, Menin supported the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero, despite facing significant opposition and death threats. Menin mentioned in the interview a Muslim high school student in her district who formed a Muslim-Jewish club with a Jewish best friend after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as an example of shared values.
Menin said she will continue the tradition of leading a City Council mission to Israel during her tenure, a contentious issue in recent city elections. In 2021, the Democratic Socialists of America local chapter required candidates who sought their endorsement to pledge not to travel on a sponsored trip to Israel. Her predecessor, Adrienne Adams, was the first speaker to break that tradition, in 2022, citing budget negotiations.
Favorite dish at the Shabbat table
Menin is an active member of Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Midtown Manhattan.
Her mother, Agnes Jacobs, and grandmother survived the Holocaust hiding in a cellar in Hungary, and her grandfather was killed. They first lived in Sydney, Australia for 6 years and then settled in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City’s neighborhood of Yorkville, known as “Little Hungary.”
Her favorite dish on the Friday night dinner table is palaschinta, a Hungarian crepe, using the toppings her grandfather liked — apricot jam and walnuts, and layered with chocolate.
Her bagel choice: sesame with scallion cream cheese.
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