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The Real Threat Is Within: What a New Survey Reveals About Jewish Communal Life
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 Jews are facing a storm of external pressures. The past two years have brought a surge in antisemitism; ugly and sometimes violent protests on campuses; hostile city streets; and, abroad, the horrifying October 7 Hamas attack and the brief but intense Iran–Israel war.
For most observers, it would seem obvious that these external threats are the greatest source of stress for Jewish communal leaders and professionals.
After all, these are the people tasked with defending, educating, and sustaining Jewish life in turbulent times. But a striking new report tells a different story — one that should give the Jewish community, and anyone who cares about civic health, pause.
The Hope Study, released this month by M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education, surveyed nearly 950 Jewish professionals across North America and flips traditional thinking on its head.
The report’s findings are sobering. Fewer than one in four respondents reported that they “often” feel hopeful about the future of the Jewish people (24%), a stark contrast with 82% in the general US population.
For the very individuals whose mission is to build that future and who work on the front lines of the Jewish communal world, hope is now the exception rather than the norm.
The most surprising result, however, is what these professionals say is sapping their hope. It isn’t antisemitism. It isn’t the war in Gaza. It isn’t rising security costs or declining synagogue membership.
The single most cited factor is internal communal division — the tensions, mistrust, and open conflict that have erupted within Jewish organizations themselves. As one respondent put it, we are “watching our community tear itself apart.”
This revelation fundamentally upends the common narrative.
For decades, Jewish life in America has been organized around the assumption that our gravest challenges come from outside forces: hostile governments, terrorist groups, bigots, or indifferent neighbors. The classic response has been to mobilize against those external enemies, rallying Jews of all backgrounds in a show of unity. But The Hope Study suggests that this framework no longer matches reality. The greater danger today may lie within our own splintered community.
A Fracture Beneath the Surface
The divides are most visible around Israel. The data show just how deep that fissure runs. A slim majority of Jewish communal professionals (55%) see their connection to Israel as a vital source of hope and meaning, but more than a quarter (26%) say Israel is not important to them at all — the highest rejection rate for any source of hope measured.
That rejection rate is staggering; it means that even within the ranks of Jewish institutions, there is no consensus on whether Israel matters. In staff meetings, classrooms, and boardrooms, this divide lurks beneath every conversation about programming or public messaging.
These tensions extend beyond geopolitics. Generational differences, ideological disputes, and conflicting visions of Jewish identity all play a role. Professionals describe being “caught between competing factions” and “unable to navigate constituency expectations.” This is not just about policy disagreements. It is about who gets to define what Jewish communal life is and whom it serves.
Leadership is supposed to guide communities through such conflicts, but here too the findings are troubling. Executives report higher levels of hope than staff (mean 2.94 vs. 2.77 on a 1–5 scale), a gap that creates a potential leadership blind spot. Many leaders simply don’t see how dire things feel to those on the ground. It is hard to solve a problem you don’t fully perceive.
The consequences are real. When staff feel unsupported or unheard, they burn out, withdraw, or leave the field entirely.
Roughly 10% of respondents fall into what the report calls the “Struggling” category — low hope, low energy, and little sense of connection — with a large share identifying as secular/cultural Jews. If they disappear, the community loses not only workers but perspectives that broaden and enrich Jewish life.
The gender gap is especially striking. Women comprise 78% of the sample and report significantly lower hope than men (mean 2.75 vs. 3.01). This suggests that women may be bearing the brunt of organizational problems and the emotional labor of managing conflict. Any honest reckoning must take this imbalance seriously.
Why This Matters Beyond the Jewish World
It would be easy to dismiss these findings as an internal HR problem, a narrow crisis of a single faith community. That would be a mistake. The dynamics revealed here mirror the challenges facing American civic life more broadly.
Across the country — in churches and schools, political parties and neighborhood associations — polarization has grown so intense that external threats now often feel less destabilizing than internal mistrust.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned more than a century ago that societies depend on shared moral bonds; what he called the “collective conscience.” When those bonds weaken, even well-intentioned groups can splinter into factions. The result is exactly what this survey documents: bitterness, exhaustion, and the slow erosion of purpose.
For the Jewish community, this erosion is particularly dangerous. Historically, Jewish organizations have been exemplars of civic engagement. Federations, synagogues, day schools, and service groups have taught generations how to work together across differences, how to give and receive mutual aid, and how to participate in democratic life. If those very institutions now falter, the ripple effects will be felt far beyond the Jewish world.
The broader American story is similar. When our institutions become arenas for infighting rather than vehicles for collective action, we lose the very mechanisms that allow us to face external challenges together. Whether it’s antisemitism, terrorism, or the fraying of our social fabric, no group can respond effectively when it is paralyzed by internal distrust.
A Call to Confront the Real Threat
In moments of crisis, it is natural to fix our gaze outward. And there is no question that the external threats facing the Jewish people are real and relentless. Rising antisemitism, hostile campuses, violent protests, and geopolitical dangers demand vigilance and strong, decisive action.
But The Hope Study makes clear that these external dangers are only half the story and perhaps not even the most urgent half. A community that cannot govern and organize itself cannot defend itself. Ignoring the fractures within Jewish communal life will not make them fade. If anything, outside pressures will magnify them, turning every external attack into another round of internal recriminations.
History shows us what happens when institutions become brittle. Communities that lack internal trust crack under stress. They grow weak, reactive, and paralyzed. The rifts revealed in this report are not mere personality conflicts or abstract debates; they are corrosive forces eating away at the very foundations of Jewish civic and religious life.
Repair will not come through platitudes or surface-level fixes. It will require courage from leaders and from the rank and file alike. Leaders must be willing to see clearly and speak plainly, to set real boundaries and articulate shared ideals. They must foster spaces where hard truths can be spoken openly, not suppressed. Belonging must be rebuilt not as a marketing slogan or membership drive, but as a lived experience of mutual responsibility and solidarity.
Jewish history offers countless examples of resilience in the face of external enemies. The challenge today is to summon that same resolve inward. If Jewish organizations cannot restore their own internal cohesion, they will be poorly equipped to defend against external hatred and even their strongest outward defenses will ultimately ring hollow. This is why so many Jewish students on college and university campuses have felt abandoned and alone since October 7.
The choice is stark. Either we confront the true threat — the one within — or we allow our institutions to fracture beyond repair. The future of Jewish communal life, and by extension the strength of our shared civic life, depends on which path we choose. The time for evasions has passed. The time to act is now.
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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Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance
From the beginning, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil denied claims that the protests at Columbia University after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel were antisemitic.
In his book, No Land to Stand On, released Tuesday, he stands by that.
Khalil, who became the face of the anti-Israel campus movement after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, reiterates his anti-Zionist stance in the book while detailing “a life of exile, refuge, and resistance.”
Recounting the endless interviews with journalists that made him the face of a campus movement, he writes that the question of whether the protests were antisemitic kept coming up.
“I explained, repeatedly, that the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a strategy to stifle righteous criticism of Israel,” writes Khalil, who added that many Jewish students were involved in the protests. “Such weaponization of antisemitism was designed to place a state and its crimes beyond criticism by wrapping them in the protections owed to a faith and its people.”
The memoir weaves Khalil’s beliefs and frustrations through stories from his life, from where he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled to Lebanon at age 18, to the protests at Columbia, his detention and finally his release. He uses the book as an opportunity to say his detention was unjust, and to critique the government’s case against him.
He notes a memo from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that states his detention was a result of “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” adding those activities were “otherwise lawful.”
“Otherwise lawful,” writes Khalil. “They had written it themselves. My beliefs were lawful, and they wanted to deport me for them.”
Khalil argued that the administration was disingenuous in deporting him for alleged antisemitism, pointing to Trump’s personal visit with the openly antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. He also accused the administration of platforming “white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism.”
Further, Khalil claimed pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Despite his status as a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, the federal government apprehended him on March 8, 2025. Khalil spent 104 days in ICE detention, famously missing the birth of his first child.
His imprisonment sparked a fierce debate over free speech, along with a debate over what his beliefs were to begin with. Khalil clarified his stances in an April interview with the Forward saying he acknowledged “a Jewish connection” to Israel, but that “rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism.”
He reiterates in the book that he does not “endorse” Hamas, though he told the Forward he was unsure if Hamas targeted civilians on Oct. 7, something that has been widely documented and substantiated.
While he expressed disdain for the way the university handled the protests and its messaging after Oct. 7, Khalil said the university was failing its Palestinian students long before 2023. He pointed to the school’s Tel Aviv Global Center, which opened this past summer despite protest.
“Columbia wanted to open an institutional outpost, funded in part by our tuition, in a place that had a policy of refusing entry to people like me, and call it a center for global learning,” he wrote.
He also took aim at Columbia’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University.
“The dual-degree stream was largely built around Jewish Israeli students who had served in the Israeli army,” writes Khalil. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if I were in Palestine, some of these students would be stopping me at checkpoints, raiding my university, piloting the drones surveilling my community, killing my neighbors.”
Returning home to New York from the ICE detention center in Louisiana, he wrote that he was met with praise — and harassment.
When people approached him asking if he was the Khalil they’d seen in the news, he was unsure: “Whether they wanted to shake my hand or spit in my face, say ‘Thank you for what you’re doing’ or follow me through Midtown yelling ‘Am Yisrael Chai.’”
He saw all of those reactions and more, he wrote.
The 208-page book is dedicated to Khalil’s wife, to the Columbia students who participated in the protests, to ICE detainees and “Palestine, until you are free.” He will launch a book tour on Tuesday at a shop just two blocks from Columbia’s campus.
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance appeared first on The Forward.
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Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion?
Jewish internet spaces are alight this week with reports that actress, model and political lightning rod Sydney Sweeney was spotted in the pews on Rosh Hashanah.
According to GreenwichTime and The Free Press, Sweeney — who is not Jewish — attended services at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her boyfriend, music mogul Scooter Braun (who grew up there). Gossip rag DeuxMoi has since claimed that Sweeney, who has been linked with Braun since at least June 2025, is also contemplating conversion.
One can speculate on whether the most in-demand actress on the planet might be leaning a bit too hard into her Marilyn Monroe character arc. At the Forward, though, we’re wondering whether Sweeney’s Jewish beau picked the right holiday to bring her to shul.
After all, there’s a wide range of experiences when it comes to prayer services, and you want to make a positive first impression. You’d want their day in shul to be accessible, fun and not too long. That’s a Sydney Sweeney movie, though, not Rosh Hashanah services. So without further ado, here’s the official undisputed rankings of Jewish calendar days on which to bring your non-Jewish partner to shul.
Going from least to most desirable:
Erev Tisha B’av
I would have to respect the audacity of someone bringing their partner to synagogue for the first time on Tisha B’av, the day Jewish people grieve the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It’s an intentionally unpleasant time to be in shul — you’re sitting on the floor, reading Lamentations. Also, you’re not supposed to greet people at all, which would almost certainly be awkward for a first-timer, considering how uncomfortable it is for regulars. On the flip side, if you’re Sydney Sweeney, that rule means no one can bother you for a selfie, either.
Shemini Atzeret
We pray for rain, which is an ancient word that means sustenance, but at this point everyone’s running on fumes for the High Holiday season, so you probably won’t get your senior rabbi delivering the sermon. Some years (including this one), your synagogue might be reading Ecclesiastes, which is both melancholy and long. Hard sell.
Passover
Passover isn’t known for its prayer services — the main event is, of course, the seder. If you’re taking a non-Jewish partner to services for the first time on Passover, it usually means one of two things: 1) You don’t want anyone to meet this person, because nobody goes to shul on Passover or 2) You didn’t have enough fun at the seder, because if you did, you’d be sleeping in with the rest of us.
One Passover plus: On the Shabbat that falls during the holiday, services also include the reading of the Song of Songs, the most risqué text in the Jewish canon.
Shavuot
In the height of summer, we read the story of Ruth — Judaism’s great conversion story. (Hint hint.) We also celebrate the receiving of the Ten Commandments, which your partner may already be familiar with from the movies, if not public school.
Shavuot morning is also a good service to go to because — at least in synagogues that observe two days of the holiday — the first day’s early services are led at a breakneck pace so that people who stayed up all night studying Torah the night before can go straight to sleep. No sermon! You’ll be out of there faster than you can say Na’aseh V’nishmah.
Simchat Torah
Like Sukkot, but swap out the lulav and etrog for Torah scrolls, which don’t smell as good or shake as well. Many synagogues (over-)serve alcohol on this holiday, which is a double-edged sword for a day you’d prefer everyone to be on their best behavior.
Yom Kippur
I’m gonna call this one underrated. There are surprisingly some things going for the Jewish day of repentance. The themes of atonement and forgiveness have universal appeal, and Jewish people do them well. You’ll probably get one of the rabbi’s strongest sermons of the calendar cycle. There’s a strange ecstasy that comes from being trapped in a room with hundreds of fasting people; the story of Jonah and the whale is one of our highlights. (This is also the only holiday I can attest to: My parents had their first date — ever! — on Yom Kippur services, and they’re still together.)
At the same time, Yom Kippur tends to have the longest prayer services of the year. It’s a fast day, so there’s no free food at the end of afternoon services (though you might get bagels at the break-fast). You usually have to pay to get in, plus there’s often a fundraising appeal woven into the service. And due to the prohibition on wearing leather shoes, you’d also be surrounding your partner with people wearing Crocs with dress clothes, which may scare them away from Judaism even if you try to explain it.
Sukkot
People like to call this our most pagan holiday, but marching around in circles with a giant asparagus and lemon is objectively fun, and the Four Species can represent basically anything you want. Let’s just hope your partner isn’t a willow.
Rosh Hashanah
Scooter Braun isn’t the first person to drag their partner to shul on Rosh Hashanah, and for good reason. Everyone wears their finest clothing, the shul will be beautifully decorated and the prayers are musically extravagant. The rabbi’s sermon will emphasize renewal and the commitment to doing better. There’s a decent chance apples dipped in honey will be served in the lobby. And above all else, the shofar blowing — done right — is arguably the highlight of the year in shul.
Plus, everyone’s there, so you can introduce your partner to everyone they need to know in one fell swoop. The only downside is you usually have to buy a ticket. (And on behalf of synagogue offices everywhere, if you’re the Jewish partner in the relationship, don’t try to arrange this over email 24 hours before the holiday.)
Purim
This is one thing Nobody Wants This got right: Purim is the ideal holiday for introducing a non-Jewish partner to the community. What better way to show up than in costume? You learn a foundational story of Jewish survival, a tradition that transforms our vulnerability into comedy. It’s also a family-oriented holiday — kids in face-paint, everyone with their graggers — which makes it a perfect picture-this set piece.
But the best thing about Purim? Thanks to the tradition of drinking ‘til you drop — if the relationship doesn’t work out, no one will remember a year later.
The post Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion? appeared first on The Forward.
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How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’
To wander into a screening of You Had to Be There, Nick Davis’ documentary about the famed 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, is to have a Jewish come-to-Jesus moment.
The first thing you hear, after the voice of a 22-year-old Martin Short, testing a microphone in a furtive recording taken at the Royal Alexander Theatre, is a shofar sounding a tinny tekiah. It’s maybe not what you’d expect from a musical built around the Gospel of Matthew. But the film, which features interviews with original 1972 cast members Eugene Levy and Victor Garber, composer Stephen Schwartz and the production’s musical director Paul Shaffer, makes a strong case for Jewishness being the secret sauce that made the show take off.
Davis, who grew up in a secular Jewish home, began this project as a Godspell skeptic, trying to understand how so many subversive comedic talents broke out in a “hippie-dippy musical about Jesus.”
“I could imagine SCTV ripping Godspell apart with the Godspell that I knew,” Davis said in a video call from Chicago, where he was in town for a screening at the Music Box Theater. “Almost from the very beginning, they were like, ‘You don’t understand what Godspell was.’”
The show was picketed by Christians who took exception to the apostles, and Jesus himself, depicted as clowns clad in overalls. The key to the success of the Toronto Godspell, one of a number of regional productions that sprang up in the 1970s, was its invitation to performers to improvise within a sacred text.
“My feeling now is they were attracted to this material because this material encouraged them to be their biggest, best, most brilliant comic selves,” said Davis.
In the case of Hamilton, Ontario-native Eugene Levy or Gilda Radner, who came over from Detroit to audition, this meant introducing a Jewish sensibility to a work that was rooted in the writings of a First Century Jew. Whether they knew it or not, the cast was soon following a Jewish schedule of worship.
Perhaps more legendary than the show, composed by an early career Schwartz, later to write Wicked, with a book by his Carnegie Mellon classmate John-Michael Tebelak, were the after-parties, dubbed “Friday Night Services” and held at the shared home of Short and Levy.
It was here, with some chemical assistance — that the cast and their friends, among them John Candy, developed bits and worked on characters. (Thankfully, they had the presence of mind to record these confabs, which can be heard in the film and are animated in a style a la The Brady Kids.)
It wasn’t quite Bible study, but in his interviews, Eugene Levy briefly reflects on the significance of his turn as Jesus, following Victor Garber and Don Scardino, who later became a prolific comedy director for shows like 30 Rock and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
“I think I was the first Jewish-looking Jesus that any of the productions had,” Levy says in the documentary. “They went more Ronald McDonald with that look but I definitely was sporting my ethnicity and a little hair.”
Levy refused to manscape for the role of Jesus, who traditionally makes his entrance in just his boxers, and so he had to wear an undershirt. At one point the actor considers if, in the moment after Jesus is “crucified” on a chainlink fence, and lifted by the company in a sort of resurrection, he was doing something sacrilegious.
In the end, he concludes, it just felt like good theater.
The call of Godspell remains strong, Davis said. Not every member of the company — some of whom are related by marriage — still sees each other in person, but they’re all on an email chain. Davis embarked on the film thinking it would be a study on “the fickleness of fame,” with the cast of 10 about evenly divided between household names and ones who didn’t quite hit, but from the first interview he found people asking when he’d arrange a reunion.
The moment finally arrived in 2025, which, due to the exigencies of scheduling, happened to be the first night of Passover. There was a cake, but you can see Paul Shaffer electing to snack on matzo. (When cast member Valda Aviks asks him if he shouldn’t be at a Seder, he simply says “eh.”)
“I did bring a Seder plate that we had, a little fun thing for them to play with if they wanted,” said Davis. “All they wanted to do was sing by the piano.”
Davis considers Godspell, the Jesus musical written by a “nice Jewish boy from Long Island,” an example of the way Jews succeed through assimilation and entertainment. While he came in thinking the show was cornball, he now understands how it paved the way for the barrier-breaking comedy its alumni would produce
“There’s something Jewish fundamentally at the core of it,” Davis said. Like the Jewish teacher at its center, it is “radical.”
The post How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’ appeared first on The Forward.
