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You see an ugly ottoman or a faded armchair; she sees a lost history waiting to be revived
Even when she was a little kid, Ruti Wajnberg knew her grandma’s brown ottoman was ugly. She loved it anyway. Whenever she and her sisters would make the trek from New Jersey to visit their grandmother in Brighton Beach, they would roll around on the mushroom-shaped seat.
“It’s in all my memories of her apartment,” Wajnberg told me at her upholstery studio in Brooklyn. “It was my grandma’s, it’s tied up with my memories of her, and I wish I had it.”
To be clear, the brown would have to go. “I would have ripped that fabric off that stool so fast,” said Wajnberg, 41, a former product manager and software developer who started her reupholstery business Find the Thread two years ago to give new life to old furniture. “It would be so meaningful to me to have it, to watch my kids roll on it; that would bring me to tears.”
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the daughter of Jews who were expelled from Communist Poland in 1968, Wajnberg doesn’t have many heirlooms. More than once, her family has been forced to leave everything behind — including, in her grandparents’ cases, the loved ones who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
When Wajnberg’s parents fled Poland as teenagers — her mother’s family to Israel and her father’s to New York via Italy — they could take very little with them. Her mother told her she’d tucked a portrait a friend had painted of her in her suitcase. It was confiscated.
“That always struck me as so sad, that experience of just arriving completely empty-handed,” said Wajnberg, who wrote her undergrad thesis at NYU about her family history. This sense of loss is part of what drew her to saving and reviving furniture imbued with personal meaning.
“I don’t have that line of connection to anything in the past. I don’t have photographs of my great grandparents, anything that belonged to them,” she said. “Possessions carry a lot of stories. They’re a reason to talk about the person and remember them.”
As ugly as the brown ottoman may have been, she wishes she’d had the foresight to ask for it when her grandmother — who was her “bestie” when she was young — died in 2016. “When we go to Brighton Beach, I talk about my grandparents, because I’m in their space,” she said. “But I’m never in their space in my space.”
These days, people come to her with all kinds of projects: thrift finds that need zhuzhing, built-in window seats that require oddly shaped cushions, salvaged church pews that could use dressing up, fabric purchased on vacation that they want to put to use, faded furniture they don’t want to part with, and pieces they inherited.
“Most often I get, ‘This was my grandma’s,’” she said. “That’s my favorite. If it was your grandma’s, I’m in.”
Finding the thread
The first thing Wajnberg ever upholstered, coincidentally, was an ottoman. “I found an upholstery class in the East Village that sadly doesn’t exist anymore, and I signed up for it, having no idea that I would like it. I just wanted a creative outlet,” said Wajnberg, who was working as a product manager at the time. She still has the ottoman she made from scratch. Looking back with a more expert eye, she said, “it’s not very well-made.” But she loved the process. The tactile, physical experience reminded her of the time she spent working in the garden on a kibbutz in Israel, and she craved more of it.
Like many first-generation Americans growing up with immigrant parents, Wajnberg didn’t always imagine this path. “The idea of an artistic life or career was not really presented as an option,” said Wajnberg, the third of four girls. Music was a huge part of her childhood in New Jersey — all the kids played piano and another instrument and sang in choirs — and she always loved making things. But the arts felt more like “a hobby option.”
“My parents understandably had this feeling that nothing that you have is yours, except for your education,” she said. “People can take your stuff and people can take your passport, and the only thing you really have is your brain.”
Wajnberg started college at NYU thinking she’d study journalism, but quickly switched to history, and interned at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. After graduation, she moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz for six months and spend time with her other grandparents in Tel Aviv. She ended up staying for three years, earning an MBA from Reichman University and taking on her first jobs in tech.
When she returned to the States, Wajnberg worked as a product manager and later pivoted to become a software developer. All the while, she kept up her upholstery hobby. After her first son was born, she remembered, she’d often put him to sleep, then head down to the unfinished basement of their building, “and just rip things up and put them back together.” She was taking online courses, watching YouTube videos, and traveling occasionally for courses wherever she could find them.
“I just knew I loved it. But I also liked my job,” she said. “I fantasized about being an upholsterer and I would meet women my age-ish who had their own shop, and it just felt so unattainably cool to me and not really a practical option,” she said. “I really had to work to shed the practicality of what I thought I needed to be doing.”
Then the pandemic hit. Wajnberg had just had her second son and when she returned from leave in the midst of lockdown, she realized she didn’t like working remotely, without the human interactions that were her favorite part of the job. She went down to four days a week so she could work Fridays at the Brooklyn upholstery studio Stitchroom.
“After a couple of weeks, I was just like, ‘This is all I can think about. This is all I want to do,’” she said. She parlayed it into a full-time job as the shop’s head of production. Three years in, she felt ready to open up a shop of her own.
‘Making things’
Wajnberg’s studio is nestled on the third floor of a building with office lofts and artist spaces across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A window in the back corner spills natural light onto a small desk and three sewing machines. Up front there’s a large worktable and a couple projects in progress pushed against the sides of the space. On the day I visited, there was a Victorian sofa half-dressed in yellow, green and blue flowers, and a chair waiting to be adorned in gold chenille.
Her apron, hanging by the door, is covered in leaves and flowers, a cheerful mess of reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, and greens. “I, you may have noticed, am a floral gal,” she said.
“They make me smile. They make me happy. They make me feel lighter,” she added. “I just want to be drenched in flowers while I upholster things in flowers.”
The jubilant fabrics and the warmth of Wajnberg’s personality belie what has been, in some ways, a difficult first chapter. “I’ve really only had this business in times of great pain,” Wajnberg said. She started Find the Thread in September 2023, just weeks before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. “I have a lot of people there,” she explained, people she loves and worries about in Israel, including all of her family on her mother’s side and friends she made while living there. “It’s painful, regardless of what your political beliefs are.”
“Like many people who come from a lineage of trauma, I have a very busy, anxious mind,” Wajnberg said. “And I really feel centered and calmer when I’m working with my hands.” To offer others the same kind of outlet — and an introduction to upholstery — she’s been giving monthly classes in her studio, teaching participants to make throw pillows or reupholster one of their own dining room chairs.
“People are really craving tactile accomplishment,” she said. At the end of each workshop, when everyone pauses and looks at what they’ve created, “there’s this real sense of pride in the room. Like, ‘I made this, I just made this thing with my hands,’” she said. “It feels so good.”
Reviving and renewing
There’s an armchair that’s been sitting in Linda Ellman’s living room in Brooklyn for decades. It was there when her two daughters were growing up, and it’s there now when her four grandchildren come over after school — the perfect cozy spot to cuddle up and read together. It always conjured up memories of a similar chair that Ellman used to sit in to read with one of her parents or her grandma when she was a kid.
“One of the important things we do with children is we hold them close, we read things to them that help them think about themselves and the world,” Ellman, a retired teacher, told me over the phone. “I’m continuing the tradition. I lived near both my grandparents and they were very much in my life, and these kids are very much in my life.”
When the fabric started falling apart, Ellman considered buying a new chair. But she was attached to the chair she already had and the many years of memories it held. So she decided to reupholster it instead, and a friend referred her to Wajnberg.
After prospective clients reach out for an initial quote, the first step is fabric selection. Wajnberg works primarily with “regular people,” rather than interior designers and other industry professionals, so she often has to guide them to figure out what they want. “I think I’ve gotten really good at pulling other people’s style out of them,” she said.
At first, she’d ask people what they were looking for and bring samples to them. Until she realized most people have no idea. Now they usually come to her studio, so she can observe their reactions closely and pull from her entire library. They may think they want one thing, and ultimately fall in love with something else. Ellman, for instance, was looking for a romantic floral pattern to echo the muted red fabric she’d had, but ended up with a bright jungle print.
“You can always say no later, so this is the moment to push yourself out of your comfort zone and have fun and explore,” said Wajnberg, who sends clients swatches so they can put them in the room, mull it over, solicit opinions, “let their pet play with it and see if they can destroy it,” and “come to a leisurely decision.” And, she said, “if you get home and you want beige, you get beige.”
Judy Mann was looking for green. Her armchair had been fading in the sun. “It was going from this magnificent pattern to kind of grayish nothing,” she told me on Zoom. She turned to Wajnberg, her neighbor, for help. “She’s warm and charming and has a sparkle to her,” said Mann, who is the retired COO of Jewish Funders Network.
Mann’s armchair project cost around $2,300, including about $800 in labor costs. It was more than she’d intended to pay to replace or refresh her chair, mostly because of the pricey fabric. According to Wajnberg, people often underestimate the cost compared to the now-ubiquitous fast furniture. Reupholstering a simple dining chair might run $100, while a complex sofa might be $4,000 or $5,000. But Ruti “conveys confidence,” Mann said. “So if I was gonna spend this kind of money, I was quite sure it was going to be worthwhile.”
Together, Mann and Wajnberg selected an arresting pattern of colorful, overgrown flowers — “wild meadow free spirit vibes,” as Wajnberg put it on Instagram. It was a departure from the green “tribal” pattern of the original chair but still fit the color scheme. “It ended up being way better than I imagined,” Mann said.
“It’s extraordinarily beautiful, in my opinion,” she said. “I’m always shocked if someone comes in and doesn’t comment about the chair.”
For Mann, Ellman, and others who have a sentimental attachment to the furniture they bring her, Wajnberg has a surprise: She makes them a small pillow out of the original fabric. “Oftentimes it’s the fabric underneath the cushion or somewhere out of the way that reveals the true color,” she said. “I’ll try to find a piece that’s vibrant, which I think is really emotional for people, because sometimes they haven’t seen it that way in so long.”
In the two years since Wajnberg started Find the Thread, she’s reupholstered everything from a settee inherited from a late grandfather’s vintage store to the chairs at Pitt’s, a new Red Hook restaurant by Agi’s Counter chef Jeremy Salamon, to a neighbor’s grandparents’ Torah scroll.
Wajnberg can’t say for sure that this is the final stop on her winding career path, but right now, it feels right. “I feel so much more like I’m part of this humming local economy than I used to when I was making things on the internet that faraway people would use,” she said.
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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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