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Jewish America’s Future Depends on All Its Communities — Not Just the Coasts
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
American Jewish life has long been anchored in a small number of powerful metropolitan centers. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and a handful of others remain indispensable. They house national institutions, sustain Jewish education at scale, train professionals, and shape the public face of American Jewry. Any serious strategy for Jewish continuity must acknowledge their central role.
But it must also acknowledge something equally important: a people that concentrates too much of its institutional life, talent, and imagination in a narrow geographic band risks fragility rather than strength.
That insight animates a recent essay by Joe Roberts, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, published in eJewishPhilanthropy under the pointed title, “American Jewry’s Future Lies Not on the Coasts, but in Its Heartland.” Roberts’ argument is not anti-coastal. It is pro-resilience and deserves careful attention from communal leaders and donors alike.
Every system weakens when too much weight rests on too few pillars. Conservatives have long made this case about government, markets, and civil society. Jewish communal life is no different. America’s largest Jewish communities remain strong, but they are under strain; rising costs, professional burnout, institutional consolidation, and an increasingly hostile cultural climate. These pressures do not diminish their importance, but they expose the danger of assuming a small number of metros can carry Jewish America indefinitely.
Roberts names the risk plainly: when smaller and mid-sized Jewish communities quietly thin out or disappear, American Jewry loses more than numbers. It loses geographic confidence, national presence, and the connective tissue that makes Jewish life feel broadly American rather than narrowly coastal.
Too often, Jewish communities outside the major hubs are described exclusively in terms of vulnerability. Sometimes those concerns are real. But they are not the whole story. In smaller communities, impact is magnified. Five young families can stabilize a synagogue. One capable professional can reverse a decade of attrition. One serious donor can change the future of an entire community. The evidence is already visible: Nashville’s Jewish population has grown substantially over the past decade; Birmingham has maintained institutional stability through deliberate investment in day school affordability and professional retention. These are not anomalies. They are proof of concept.
This aligns with what broader research tells us about community life beyond large cities. A growing body of work, including my own research from the American Enterprise Institute, has pushed back against elite assumptions about rural and small-town America. Many residents of smaller communities report stronger social ties, greater trust in neighbors, and higher satisfaction with their quality of life than those in dense urban centers. Those conditions – trust, stability, mutual responsibility – are precisely the soil in which Jewish life has historically taken root.
There is also a hard-headed argument here. From a stewardship perspective, smaller Jewish communities often offer greater marginal returns. In major metros, new funding may sustain existing infrastructure. In heartland communities, the same resources can create it: leadership pipelines, educational access, intergenerational continuity. A diversified communal portfolio is more durable than one concentrated in a handful of prestigious markets, no matter how successful those markets appear today.
Demographic reality reinforces this logic. Younger Americans, including younger Jews, are increasingly mobile and increasingly priced out of coastal cities. Many are choosing mid-sized metros for affordability, family life, and rootedness. Jewish life will either follow them intentionally or lose them quietly.
Much of the growth in heartland Jewish communities is Orthodox or traditionally observant: young families drawn by housing costs, community cohesion, and the opportunity to build institutions from the ground up. If the future of American Jewish demography is increasingly traditional, then ignoring where traditional families are actually settling is not merely a strategic error. It is communal denial.
But there is another migration pattern that deserves attention. Remote work has enabled a different kind of Jew to leave coastal cities: younger, less affiliated, professionally mobile, often disconnected from legacy institutions. These are Jews who might drift away entirely without intentional outreach or who might, given the right invitation, become the next generation of engaged leaders. Heartland communities have an opportunity that coastal institutions often lack: the chance to form relationships before habits calcify, to offer belonging before indifference sets in.
Roberts rightly emphasizes Israel education as a priority, and the point deserves amplification. In the post-October 7 landscape, confident identification with Israel has become socially costly in many elite coastal environments – on campuses, in progressive professional circles, in cultural institutions that once seemed like natural homes for Jewish participation. Smaller communities are often less saturated by these pressures. They may be better positioned to cultivate the kind of unapologetic, literate Israel connection that coastal institutions increasingly struggle to sustain. Geographic dispersion is not only demographic insurance; it may be ideological shelter.
None of this minimizes the urgency of security. Rising antisemitism is real, and protecting Jewish institutions is essential. But security alone cannot sustain a people. Jewish continuity depends on confidence and the belief that Jewish life is not merely something to defend, but something worth building. Smaller communities often grasp this instinctively because survival depends on meaning, not scale.
Put bluntly: a Judaism that can only thrive where it is fashionable is a Judaism that has already lost something essential.
Roberts writes as a federation executive, and federations remain the most plausible vehicle for the cross-communal investment he envisions. But honesty requires acknowledging the model is under strain: declining campaign totals, aging donor bases, tension between local priorities and national allocations. The question is not only whether federations should redirect resources toward heartland communities, but whether they can and whether donors are willing to support that redirection even when it means less visibility per dollar spent.
What would meaningful investment look like? National foundations could establish heartland fellowships that place talented young professionals in smaller communities with multi-year salary support. Legacy donors could endow positions – executive directors, educators, rabbis – in communities that cannot currently compete for top-tier talent. Federations could create flexible innovation funds that empower local boards to experiment without proving ROI to distant program officers. These are not radical proposals. They are the ordinary work of institution-building, redirected toward communities overlooked for too long.
American Jewry became strong by building institutions wherever Jews settled, not only where it was easiest or most fashionable. That instinct created synagogues, schools, and communities across the map. If we want Jewish life in America to remain confident, resilient, and recognizably American in the decades ahead, we must recover it – deliberately, strategically, and now.
The future of American Jewry will not be decided in one city or one region. It will be decided by whether we have the wisdom to invest in all the communities that make us a people.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Leaves the Left Party Over Anti-Israel Stance, Lack of Support Amid Death Threats
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has resigned from the Left Party, citing a rise in antisemitism within the ranks, relentless personal attacks, and a party climate that has become intolerable.
“I struggled with this decision for a long time, as I have felt a deep connection to the party over many years,” Büttner wrote in a letter to the party leadership, as reported by German media.
“But I have reached a point where I must acknowledge that I can no longer remain a member of this party without betraying my own convictions,” he continued.
According to several German media reports, the commissioner, who had been a member of the Left Party since 2015, said he was resigning over the party’s handling of antisemitism, internal expulsion proceedings aimed at removing him, and relentless personal attacks.
“The fight against antisemitism is a task that transcends party lines,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to witness within my own party for years.”
He criticized the Left Party’s rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, noting that the party falsely regards it as a tool to repress protest while continuing to relativize antisemitic rhetoric.
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016.
Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
In his letter, Büttner also condemned the Left Party in Lower Saxony, a federal state in northwestern Germany, for its position on Zionism, insisting that challenging Israel’s right to exist is unacceptable — especially after the state convention passed resolutions branding Israel a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state.”
“These resolutions are no longer acceptable to me,” he said.
In recent years, Büttner has faced not only external threats but also a sustained campaign of insults and defamation from members within his own party.
“The way my own party has handled attacks against me is particularly troubling,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “Instead of clear solidarity, I have too often experienced silence.”
Federal party leader Jan van Aken expressed regret over Büttner’s resignation but rejected any accusations of antisemitism within the Left Party, reiterating that the party “stands unequivocally against antisemitism.”
Earlier this year, Büttner endured two personal attacks within a single week, the second escalating into a death threat.
The Brandenburg state parliament received a letter threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
A former police officer, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
In the week prior to this latest attack, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red, inverted Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking what was at the time latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
In August 2024, swastikas and other antisemitic symbols and threats were also spray-painted on his personal car.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to newly released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the country reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials have noted that the real number of antisemitic crimes registered by police is likely much higher, as many do not get reported.
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Over 100 Groups Call on University of California to Address Campus Antisemitism
Illustrative: Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
Over 100 Jewish advocacy groups have signed a petition imploring the University of California (UC) system to confront faculty antisemitism amid the fallout over a new AMCHA Initiative report which argued that professors accelerated the campus antisemitism crisis by promoting the use of their platforms to promote anti-Jewish tropes in the name of opposing Israel and Zionism.
“We urge the [UC Board of Regents] to act now: stop faculty and academic units from using UC authority, resources, classrooms, and UC-branded platforms to advance political advocacy as institutional practice by strictly enforcing UC’s existing rules, and strengthening them where needed,” said the petition, which has so far amassed 124 signatures from groups, as well as 4,000 individuals. “This is not about policing faculty speech. It is about enforcing the crucial boundary between private speech and institutional advocacy.”
It continued, “When that boundary disappears, academic norms break down and students face harassment, intimidation, and exclusion. We call on you to protect students, restore the university’s academic integrity, and rebuild public trust in the University of California.”
The petition’s signatories include Alums for Campus Fairness, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, The Lawfare Project, Zionist Organization of America, and Students Supporting Israel (SSI).
The AMCHA Initiative report, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California” examined the “antisemitism crisis” across UC campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. It included dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.
“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report said, adding that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) alone holds at least 115 faculty endorsers of the BDS movement, according to the report. Meanwhile, dozens of its academic departments issued statements of support of the pro-Hamas encampments which struck college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic school year and became the hubs of antisemitic assault and discrimination.
It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”
UC Office of the President spokesperson Rachel Zaentz reportedly said the UC system was taking AMCHA’s report “seriously” and reviewing it. However, UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof expressed concerns about the methodology used to compile the data.
“While we appreciate this organization’s dedication to confronting antisemitism, it is unfortunate that no apparent effort was made to seek information directly from the campus and/or confirm information, some of which appears to have been gathered from unreliable sources,” Mogulof told The Daily Californian.
The AMCHA report followed previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.
In February, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.
The AMCHA Initiative has explored faculty antisemitism before.
In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students.
Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding acceptance of the BDS movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first step toward its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FSJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.
“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Support for Israel Craters Among US Democrats, According to New Poll
“Hands Off Lebanon & Iran” Protest, March 8, 2026, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Screenshot
A new national poll reveals the extent to which support for Israel among Democratic voters in the US has dropped dramatically since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of the Jewish state, a trend that has raised alarm among analysts and pro-Israel advocates who warn that the long-standing bipartisan foundation of the US–Israel alliance may be weakening.
According to a new NBC News survey, just 13 percent of Democrats now have a positive view of Israel, a massive dip from 2023, when the figure stood at 34 percent before the war in Gaza. As for those who view the Jewish state negatively, the percentage skyrocketed from just 35 percent in 2023 to a majority, 57 percent, today.
In contrast, the poll indicates that Republican support for Israel remains overwhelmingly strong, although not to the same extent as before the Oct. 7 attack. According to the survey 54 percent of Republican voters continue to view Israel positively, a nine-point drop from 2023. The percentage of those who view the Jewish state negatively increased slightly from 12 percent to 18 percent,
The poll also reveals a sharp generational divide in attitudes toward Israel, with support declining across every age group but falling most steeply among younger Americans. Among Americans aged 65 and older, support for Israel slipped modestly over the past three years, declining from 64 percent in 2023 to 55 percent in 2026. During the same period, negative views toward Israel rose from 12 percent to 21 percent.
The drop was more pronounced among Americans aged 50 to 64. In that group, support for Israel fell from 59 percent in 2023 to just 37 percent in 2026, while unfavorable views doubled, climbing from 15 percent to 30 percent.
Among those aged 35 to 49, support declined from 34 percent in 2023 to 20 percent in 2026. At the same time, 43 percent of respondents in this age bracket reported negative feelings toward Israel.
Younger Americans expressed the most critical attitudes. In the 18–34 age group, only 13 percent said they support Israel, while 63 percent reported unfavorable views.
The results highlight a growing partisan and generational divide in American attitudes toward the closest US ally in the Middle East, with Republicans largely framing Israel’s recent military actions as a legitimate exercise of self-defense against terrorism. Analysts note that this alignment reflects broader trends within the Republican Party, where support for Israel has become an increasingly central element of foreign policy identity and where sympathy for Israel significantly outweighs sympathy for the Palestinians.
For decades, Israel enjoyed broad support across the American political spectrum. While Republicans have generally been more strongly aligned with Israel in recent years, Democratic leaders historically remained supportive of the Jewish state’s security and its strategic partnership with the United States. The latest polling, however, suggests that this bipartisan consensus is under growing strain.
Some supporters of Israel argue that the polling shift reflects the success of a sustained global campaign to delegitimize Israel following the Oct. 7 massacre. They note that Israel’s military operations in Gaza are aimed at dismantling Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that openly calls for Israel’s destruction and continues to embed its fighters within civilian areas.
The political implications could be significant. US military aid and diplomatic support for Israel have historically depended on bipartisan backing in Congress. If Democratic public opinion continues to move away from Israel, analysts say it could influence future policy debates over arms transfers, diplomatic support at the United Nations, and the broader US approach to the Israeli-Palestinian
At the same time, many Democratic lawmakers remain firmly supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.
A major analysis of Democratic voters released last week suggests that despite increasingly vocal criticism of Israel in some activist circles, especially among the party’s youth, the broader Democratic electorate remains largely supportive of the US–Israel relationship.