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American rabbis, wrestling with Israel’s behavior, weigh different approaches from the pulpit
(JTA) — Rabbi Sharon Brous began a sermon at her Los Angeles synagogue last month with a content warning. “I have to say some things today that I know will upset some of you,” she began.
That same morning, across the country in New York City, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was confessing something to her congregants, too: The sermon they were about to hear “kept me up at night.”
Both women — among the most prominent and influential Jewish clergy in the United States — went on to sharply criticize Israel’s new right-wing government, which includes far-right parties that aim to curb the rights of LGBTQ Israelis, Arabs and non-Orthodox Jews.
In taking aim at Israel’s government from the pulpit, the rabbis were veering close to what many in their field consider a third rail. “You have a wonderful community and you love them and they love you, until the moment you stand up and you give your Israel sermon,” Brous told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The phenomenon even has an informal name, she said: “Death by Israel sermon.”
Brous would know: A decade ago, she was the target of sharp criticism after she encouraged her congregants at IKAR, a nondenominational congregation, to pray for Palestinians as well as Jews during a period of conflict in Israel. The incident didn’t end her pulpit, but she has come to understand why many rabbis choose what she called “the path of silence” when it comes to Israel.
Now, she said, American Jews must depart from that path. “I want you to hear me,” she said in her sermon. “There is a revolution that is happening, and this moment demands an awakening on both sides of the sea, an honest reckoning.”
All over the country, non-Orthodox rabbis are making similar calculations in response to Israel’s new governing coalition, which has drawn widespread protests over its policy moves. (Orthodox communities, including their rabbis, tend to be more politically conservative and skew to the right of non-Orthodox communities on Israel issues.) Israel’s government is advancing an overhaul of the legal system that would sap the power of the Supreme Court, and is also contending with an escalating wave of violence.
Some rabbis feel more emboldened to speak aloud what they have long believed. Others are finding themselves reconsidering their own relationship to Israel — and bringing their congregants along on their journey. A few still feel that criticizing Israel from the pulpit is a misguided and even dangerous venture, one that could splinter American Jewish communities.
What cuts across the spectrum is a belief that Israel has been discussed too little from the synagogue pulpit. Brous said the tendency of liberal rabbis not to talk about Israel lest they anger their more conservative congregants has resulted in a painful reality: “American Jews have not developed the muscle that we now need to respond to this regime.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City launched a new program called Amplify Israel, which he hopes will encourage Reform movement leaders to embrace Zionism even as they navigate a “deeply problematic and even offensive” new Israeli government. (Shahar Azran/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, meanwhile, believes today’s rabbis must be vocal in fending off the influence of “competing values” about Zionism from “various organizations that are either cool on Israel or don’t like Israel or just downright anti-Zionist.”
Last year, angered by a letter signed by dozens of rabbinical students denouncing Israel’s actions during its 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Hirsch launched an initiative based at his New York City Reform synagogue to equip rabbis with tools to counter what he said was “the growing influence of an anti-Zionist element” in the next generation of Jewish clergy.
The initiative, Amplify Israel, is housed at his Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and employs another rabbi, Tracy Kaplowitz, to work full-time to galvanize leaders from across the Reform movement to support Israel. Kaplowitz jokes that her new job won’t be complete “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.”
Hirsch knows the new coalition is complicating his task. “The new government is going to make our promotion of Israel more difficult in the United States,” he said, noting that the government “has elements in it that are deeply problematic and even offensive to most American Jews.”
He and Kaplowitz contend that it is possible, in their view, for rabbis to criticize aspects of the Israeli government from the pulpit while still remaining broadly supportive of the Jewish state and encouraging their congregants to be the same. They also say the need to build Zionist sentiment within the American rabbinate transcends any particular moment, including this one.
“If we have to transform how we connect to Israel each time there’s an election, we’ll be driving ourselves a little bit batty,” Kaplowitz said.
Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz is a full-time Israel Fellow at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. She jokes that her job won’t be finished “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.” (Ryen Greiss/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Hirsch sits on the advisory board of another new pro-Israel initiative, the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. Helmed by Stuart Weinblatt, senior rabbi at Conservative Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Maryland, the group is an interdenominational network of more than 200 rabbis who advocate to ”strengthen the ties between American Jewry and the State of Israel.”
Weinblatt hews to an early generation’s view of how rabbis should approach Israel from the pulpit. He told JTA that he believes his colleagues should always be supportive of Israel in public, even if they choose to pressure the Israeli government and advocate against certain policies in private — which, he says, is “the appropriate vehicle” for voicing concerns. “My position has always been that support for Israel should be unconditional,” he said.
“If we as rabbis are sharply critical of Israel, the result can often lead to a distancing from Israel, which ultimately may diminish the connection people feel to Judaism and the Jewish people,” he added. “People do not always distinguish and differentiate between opposition to a particular policy and broader criticisms of Israel which can do lasting damage.”
Asked whether the Israeli government could ever conceivably take a step that would necessitate a public response from American rabbis, Weinblatt ruminated for days. He ultimately told JTA that the current debate around proposed changes to the Law of Return, the Israeli policy that allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to claim citizenship, would be such an example, as that is a policy that would have a direct effect on Diaspora Jews.
Tightening who is eligible under the Law of Return is in fact a goal of some elements of Israel’s governing coalition, although the Diaspora minister assured an audience in the United States that, unlike with the proposed changes to the government’s judicial system — which have earned criticism across the political spectrum — there would be an effort to build consensus and no changes would happen overnight.
Still, the prospect of such a change so alarmed Rabbi Hillel Skolnick of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, that he traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, Israel’s lawmaking body.
“The members of my congregation and my movement have a spiritual connection with Judaism and also a political connection because we live in a democracy, so they see a Jewish democracy as an ideal that they can look to as a light unto the nations,” he said, in a speech he delivered as a representative of the Conservative/Masorti movement.
“By even questioning the idea of the Law of Return,” he went on, Israel “takes away from both the Jewish connection and the democratic connection they have with this country.”
Skolnick suggested that he was unsure of how to speak to his congregation about the new government and its agenda. “My question to you is, what message can I go home with?” he asked.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, founder and chair of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, shown with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Weinblatt believes American rabbis’ “support for Israel should be unconditional,” and that disagreements with its government should be hashed out in private. (Courtesy of Stuart Weinblatt)
This week, hundreds of American rabbis will be returning to their congregations with messages honed by a week in Israel. The Reform movement just concluded its biennial convention, which was held there for the first time since before the pandemic. Their visit coincided with major developments in the country’s twin crises: The Knesset advanced the judicial reform legislation, and three people were killed in a Palestinian shooting and subsequent settler riot in the West Bank.
In a sign of the balancing act that American rabbis are navigating, the Reform movement’s leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who has been among the earliest and most outspoken critics of the new Israeli government, will also be a featured speaker at Amplify Israel’s conference this May aiming to encourage Zionist sentiment among Reform Jews.
At the convention, the leader of the Central Conference of American Rabbis called for Reform clergy to move away from defining Israel in stark black-and-white terms — an apparent reference to Jews who speak of “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” forces.
“In order to connect better with those in our communities around Israel in a nuanced and meaningful way, we must be able to move beyond the pro/con dichotomy which only serves to divide us in ways that are a distraction to the actual issues at hand,” Rabbi Hara Person told the attendees. During the conference, the rabbis attended and voiced support for Israeli protests against their government.
“We are seeing a shift for the better, in my opinion, about how Jews are feeling comfortable critiquing Israel’s policies,” Rabbi Sarah Brammer-Shlay told JTA last fall, before the Israeli elections. Brammer-Shlay was a signer of the 2021 rabbinical students’ letter who graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and today is a rabbi and chaplain at Grinnell College.
That kind of shift has Weinblatt worried. “Sometimes, rabbis are actually out of sync and out of touch with their congregations, who do want to hear messages of support of Israel,” he said.
That may well be the case, particularly at synagogues with aging populations, but survey data suggests that American Jews are moving to the left on Israel at the same time that Israel itself has shifted to the right. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of American Jews, in 2021, found that most have a negative opinion of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; only one-third think Israel is making a sincere effort to achieve peace with Palestinians; and 10% support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
While rabbis typically consider what they think their congregants want to hear, they aren’t bound to say it. And some rabbis say this moment is a time to take a stand, even if there is blowback.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, announced in December that his congregation would no longer recite the Prayer for the State of Israel, part of most congregations’ Shabbat morning liturgy since 1948. He said the extremism of Israel’s leadership meant the words no longer applied, and replaced the prayer with the more generally worded Prayer for Peace in Jerusalem.
”I couldn’t just say, ‘God, please guide our leaders well,’” Kalmanofsky said, pointing specifically to the fact that extremist politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were now government ministers who would be the beneficiaries of such prayer. “The things that they’re saying cannot possibly represent the Israel that I want to support.”
Kalmanofsky had not previously been outspoken as a critic of Israeli policy. He said he has faced some tough feedback from some in his community, including from those who believe this is a moment that demands more, not less, prayer for Israel — “not an unreasonable response,” he said. But a month into the liturgy change, he said he is confident he has made the right decision.
“Something really meaningful had changed in the public life of the state of Israel,” he said. “That deserved real recognition, and a real response.”
Continuing to focus on preserving a Jewish connection with Israel without “dealing like grown-ups” with its “very serious problems” would render the rabbinical voice irrelevant, Kalmanofsky said. “At best, we’re kind of like, ‘blind love, blind loyalty.’ And at worst, we’re totally obtuse, and have nothing meaningful to say about the real world.”
“If you’re going to have a pulpit,” Kalmanofsky added, “you’re going to have to use it once in a while.”
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Europe’s smallest Jewish community gets a home of its own — complete with geothermal mikvah
(JTA) — REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Until recently, this city located near the Arctic Circle was one of the few places in Europe where organized Jewish life did not exist — no synagogue, no ritual bath, no communal building. That changed this week, as the Jewish community in Iceland opened the Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland, the country’s first-ever Jewish center.
The center is housed in a renovated, roughly 9,000-square-foot building in downtown Reykjavik that once operated as a bar and, before that, as the headquarters of a political party. It sits just minutes from where the husband-and-wife team of Rabbi Avraham and Mushky Feldman have lived and worked since arriving on the island in 2018. The project has been funded largely through community donations.
The center includes a synagogue, a seminar room seating nearly 80 people, a kosher shop, a community kitchen, a youth center, a library lounge and a security center, amenities the community has never had access to in one place.
There is also a mikvah, or ritual bath, that is heated geothermally, using the abundant underground volcanic heat that provides much of the country’s power.
“Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community,” Avraham Feldman said of the years before the couple’s arrival, “and it has been amazing to fill that need.”
Community members agree.
“Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here,” said Michael Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland since 2020.
“The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish center that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation,” added Klein.
Jewish life in Iceland has always been sparse and intermittent. Jewish traders are known to have passed through as early as the 1600s. Still, the organized Jewish presence dates to the late 1800s, and the first practicing Jew believed to have settled permanently was Fritz Natan, a businessman who, in 1917, built Iceland’s first five-story building.
For decades afterward, Jewish life in Iceland survived on the efforts of a handful of dedicated volunteers who coordinated informal gatherings, often meeting in rented spaces or in the basement of Hallgrímskirkja, the country’s most recognizable church. The U.S. Navy base in the town of Keflavík, near the international airport, occasionally provided Jewish chaplains until it closed in 2006. But there was still no permanent institution, no resident rabbi, and no dedicated building, a gap that led some to call Reykjavik the only European capital without a synagogue.
That began to change in 2018, when the Feldmans relocated from the United States to Reykjavik to establish a Chabad-Lubavitch presence, becoming Iceland’s first permanently stationed rabbi and his wife in the country’s documented history of a thousand years. The couple started small, hosting Shabbat dinners and holiday services out of their living room. Estimates of the community’s size hover around 300 self-identified Jews, out of Iceland’s total population of about 400,000.
Momentum built quickly. In 2020, the Jewish community celebrated its first native Torah scroll, commissioned by a donor in Switzerland and completed with the help of the Icelandic congregation. A year later, the Icelandic government formally recognized Judaism as an official religion, opening the door to officially recognized Jewish weddings and allowing residents to direct part of their religious tax to the community. How many have done so is not public information.
By 2024, the community had outgrown its rented rooms and church basements and purchased the building that became the new Jewish center, roughly tying one in Fairbanks, Alaska, as the northernmost Chabad houses in the world. The building sits in Reykjavik’s compact downtown, just blocks from the iconic Rainbow Street and Harpa Opera House that make the city one of the most Instagram-friendly sites in the world.
In a city that caters to tourists, and for a community built largely from immigrants, longtime Icelandic Jewish families, and people who married into Icelandic life, the new center represents something rare: a shared physical home.
“It’s been clear for a long time that we need a home for our community,” said one Jewish resident in Iceland, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all of his colleagues know he is Jewish. (Iceland’s relatively small number of Jews means that there is little record of antisemitism; anti-Israel sentiment is strong, with the country one of five to boycott the Eurovision song contest this year over Israel’s participation.)
“It’s not like we’ve been hiding or aren’t a strong community; we celebrate holidays together, and there are Shabbat dinners,” he continued. “But I think it’s important that we have this center. Seeing it opened is very moving and important.”
Like many Jewish institutions in Europe, the center will ensure security by being open only to members of the community or visitors who reach out in advance.
Avraham Feldman said the space will hold a display case with three small prayer books donated by early Jewish residents, the only known surviving physical remnants of Jewish life in Iceland before his arrival, a reminder of how recent, and how hard-won, this permanence has been.
“The result of this center is a combination of home, family, and permanence that was unimaginable when I started visiting 14 years ago and was only a mere dream when I moved here in 2020,” Klein said.
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Armenia’s Jews hope Israeli recognition of 1915 Ottoman genocide will jumpstart bilateral ties
(JTA) — YEREVAN, Armenia — Last Friday night, 13 mostly Russian-speaking Jews and three Arab Muslims gathered under a cherry tree next to the popular Common Grounds coffee shop in Yerevan — capital of the world’s oldest Christian country — to welcome Shabbat.
Samson Karapetyan — the son of an Armenian Christian father and a Jewish mother from Azerbaijan — recited the Hebrew blessing for wine over a glass of Georgian Palavani kosher merlot. Karapetyan, 29, stood at the head of a table piled high with hummus, falafel, pita, stuffed grape leaves, babaganoush and other Middle Eastern delicacies supplied by a local Lebanese caterer.
Then everyone, including the three invited Arabs, joined in a spirited rendition of “Lecha Dodi” — with printed transliterations in English for those not familiar with the traditional Jewish melody.
“I’m so glad we have a community here,” said Ekaterina Goldschmidt, 32, a tattooed landscape architect who showed up to the Shabbat dinner with Teya, her little black Kokoni dog.
The dinner was organized by Yerevan Jewish Home, a social network formed by Russian-born journalist and blogger Nathaniel Trubkin in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That ongoing war spurred a large exodus from both countries and brought as many as 2,000 Jews to Armenia — boosting the ex-Soviet republic’s tiny Jewish population tenfold and injecting new blood into what had been a stagnant, dwindling community of mostly pensioners.
The explosion of Jewish life came against the backdrop of frosty ties between Armenia and Israel, the country that absorbed the most Ukrainian and Russian Jewish emigres since the war’s start. The chill has been a consequence of Armenia’s close relations with neighboring Iran as well as Israel’s unwillingness to offend Turkey by naming as a genocide the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.
Another key obstacle has been resentment over Israel’s extensive weapons sales to neighboring Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has fought several border wars in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Those obstacles may be falling away. Last year in Washington, predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and mostly Christian Armenia signed a peace treaty at the urging of U.S. President Donald Trump — garnering praise from Jewish leaders in both countries.
And on June 29, Israel’s Cabinet unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the 1915 genocide. That declaration now goes to the full Knesset where, despite intense lobbying from both Turkey and Azerbaijan, it will likely be ratified — making Israel the 36th country to take that step.
“The Jewish community here is happy that Israel has finally recognized this genocide,” Trubkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Every self-respecting Jew knows what happened to the Armenians, though of course many Armenians are asking, ‘Why only now?’ It’s all about politics.”
Added Karapetyan: “Everyone understands that our two nations have a similar heritage, with a similar destiny. It is impossible, when you speak about the Shoah, to not also speak about the Armenian genocide. If we study one of them, we need to study the other.”
Both Turkey and its ally, Azerbaijan, immediately condemned the Cabinet vote; the chief rabbi of Azerbaijan’s Ashkenazi congregation in Baku, Shneur Segal, has already urged Israel to reverse it immediately.
The reaction from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was cold. Suggesting that Israel is motivated purely by geopolitics, he told reporters the day the change was announced: “We believe that not entering into the issue of the weaponization of the Armenian genocide is in the interests of the Republic of Armenia. Therefore, we do not see any need for a response.”
Other external factors appear to be drawing Yerevan and Jerusalem closer together.
Late last month, some 350 women representing the Israeli labor federation Histadrut gathered at Yerevan’s Megerian Carpet Restaurant to mark International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The event featured popular songs in Hebrew by prominent Georgian vocalist Kristi Japaridze as well as a performance of traditional Armenian music and dance.
The Histadrut visit — the largest such Israeli delegation to tour Armenia in years — was organized with help from Israeli House, an NGO based in Jerusalem. Founded in 2012 by former Jewish Agency official Itsik Moshe, the network promotes Israeli culture and business, and now operates in 30 countries including both Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Moshe, who is also president of the Israel-Georgia Chamber of Business, said Israeli House will open its next outpost in Armenia sometime in August or September.
Assisting Moshe is Andranik Arakelyan, an educational consultant at Yerevan’s National Polytechnic University, though a specific location has yet to be decided. In its final form, he suggested, Israeli House could include a business center to showcase Israeli tourism as well as innovations in agriculture and medicine.
“I consider Israeli House as a cultural first step for strengthening ties between our two nations. The rest is up to politicians and diplomats,” said Arakelyan, 36, a Christian who spent four years in Glendale, California, a predominantly Armenian suburb of Los Angeles.
“This is the best time for our countries to get closer,” Arakelyan said, while acknowledging that “a small minority” of Armenians hold antisemitic views. “Many parties here question the timing of this [genocide] recognition, calling it a political maneuver. But when the draft becomes resolution in the Knesset, Armenians will see that it wasn’t fake.”
Marina Kozliner, a community activist who has long campaigned for this recognition, said reaction among the 10,000 or so Armenian Jews and Christian living in Israel has been mixed.
“On one hand, there is real happiness. Our community has waited for this for decades,” said Kozliner, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Armenian atheist mother who is based in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “On the other, many people feel it came at the wrong political moment. Because of that, something that should have been a moral decision has become a political tool, and that has taken away part of the joy.”
She added: “Still, I prefer to look ahead. Armenia is making real efforts to move toward peace and to normalize relations with its neighbors, including Azerbaijan. That gives many of us hope for a more stable future in the region.”
In fact, the same day Trubkin and his friends were celebrating their Shabbat dinner in Yerevan, Narek Mkrtchyan, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, received prominent pro-Israel philanthropist and Trump supporter Miriam Adelson in Washington, D.C.
“We had an interesting and substantive conversation regarding the Armenia-U.S. agenda, investment opportunities in Armenia, and the country’s rich historical and cultural heritage,” Mkrtchyan posted on Facebook, adding, “Mrs. Adelson expressed great interest in considering a visit to Armenia.”
Eric Hacopian, a political analyst who made his career advising Democratic candidates in southern California, suggested that such a meeting “could not have happened a few months ago.”
But when it comes to Armenian-Israeli relations, he said, it’s important to take a long-term view of the genocide declaration from Jerusalem..
“I think something like this five to 10 years ago would have meant a lot more. It means a lot less now,” he said. “One reason is that [Prime Minister Pashinyan] is particularly anti-nationalist and more focused on normalization of ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan, so they won’t engage directly with Israel.”
He predicted a long-term shift. “I’m very confident that over the next 10 or 15 years, we’re going to see a switcheroo, in which Israel will have much better relations with Armenia, and more problematic relations with Azerbaijan,” Hacopian said. “I see relations improving, mostly because Turkish-Israeli relations are going downhill, and Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan are entirely transactional — oil for weapons and access to Iran.”
And if and when the Islamist regime in Iran collapses, Azerbaijan’s strategic importance to Israel declines as well, and Armenia’s increases. For one thing, Hacopian noted, Armenia’s economy is booming. In 2018, per-capita GDP was around $4,500; this year, it’ll likely surpass $10,000 — helped along by the presence of information technology giants including AMD, Synopsis and Invidia.
“The one ‘X factor’ no one notices is that the IT business is booming. Israeli IT firms are already here, and data centers are being built,” he said. “You cannot be in the IT business in this region if you don’t have relations with Israel.”
Meanwhile, Jewish life is taking root in Armenia, thanks largely to the efforts of Trubkin and his friends in the Yerevan Jewish Home network.
Goldschmidt, the tattooed landscape artist with the dog, was born and raised in Saratov — a major city southeast of Moscow. She left Russia in 2023, about a year after it attacked Ukraine.
“When everything started, I shared my opinions and told everyone what I thought. Eventually, I had to leave; otherwise I’d have ended up in jail,” said the young woman, who moved to Berlin and then spent four years in Limassol and Nicosia with her Cypriot ex-boyfriend. She’s now been in Armenia for the past six months — where she proudly wears a Star of David necklace — and wants to open an art gallery here.
Karapetyan, who recently spent a semester at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, sees a future for liberal Judaism among the newcomers to Armenia.
“Jews here cannot relate to the Orthodox way of life. They like their freedom, and they’re not used to having separate seating for men and women,” he said. Karapetyan said that he has discussed joint projects with Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, who has led Yerevan’s only synagogue — the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of Armenia — since 1996.
Trubkin says his Telegram chat has around 600 people.
“Every week, I meet several new people asking about Jewish life in Armenia — people from Russia, from Israel, from Moldova. For some of them, it’s their second round of emigration,” he said, adding that he’s looking to establish a physical presence for Yerevan Jewish Home. “And we’re also establishing a new Armenian-Israeli organization for business and culture.”
The sense of optimism is palpable, even with an undercurrent of concern about the influence that Turkey plays in the region. But if Israel fails — for whatever reason — to formally recognize the Armenian genocide after raising expectations, all bets are off.
“I sincerely hope that the Israeli government will complete this process and that the Knesset will adopt an official resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide,” said former Knesset member Alexander Tsinker, co-chair of the Armenia-Israel Public Forum. “Otherwise, it would be, to put it mildly, unacceptable.”
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Americans’ views of Israelis have grown more negative, survey finds
(JTA) — While Americans view Israelis far more favorably than the Israeli government, their opinion of the Jewish state’s residents has continued to decline, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The survey, which surveyed 12,574 U.S. adults from May 4 to May 17, 2026, found that 52% have a favorable opinion of the Israeli people, compared with 42% who held an unfavorable opinion.
A similar share held a favorable view of Palestinians, with 50% saying they held a favorable opinion while 44% had unfavorable views. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
The survey found that Americans’ views of Israelis have grown increasingly negative in recent years, while views toward Palestinians have remained steady. In 2022, 67% of U.S. adults held a favorable view of Israelis, dropping to 52% this year, while views of Palestinians have dropped from 53% to 50%.
Unfavorable views of Israelis rose from 25% in 2022 to 42% this year, while unfavorable views of Palestinians rose from 39% in 2022 to 44% this year.
In contrast, the majority of Americans, 62%, held unfavorable views of the Israeli government, while 69% said they held an unfavorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, and 84% said they had an unfavorable view of Hamas.
The Pew survey was conducted prior to Hamas’ announcement Monday that it will dissolve its government in Gaza ahead of its transfer to the Palestinian technocratic committee that was established by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
The survey comes as a number of recent polls show, for the first time, Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
Opinions of Israeli and Palestinian people were split among Republicans and Democrats, with 65% of Republicans holding a favorable view of Israelis compared to 43% of Democrats. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats held a favorable view of Palestinians, compared to one-third of Republicans.
Just over half of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israelis, up from 31% in 2022. Among Republicans, the share that held a negative view towards Israelis also rose from 17% in 2022 to 31% in 2026.
U.S. adults under 30-years-old were also more likely to hold a favorable view of Palestinians, at 58%, than Israelis, at 32%. According to pollsters, the attitude was largely driven by young Democrats, of which 72% held a positive view toward Palestinians and just 26% held a positive view of Israelis.
Among Jewish respondents, the poll found that attitudes toward the Israeli people and government had declined in recent years. Since 2024, their favorable views of the Israeli people had fallen from 89% to 83%, and favorable opinions toward the Israeli government had fallen from 54% to 47%.
It also found that 40% of Jewish adults in the U.S. view the Palestinian people favorably, compared to 58% who said they viewed Palestinians unfavorably. Just 10% of Jewish adults said they held a favorable view toward the Palestinian Authority, and 2% said they held a favorable view of Hamas.
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