9 minute read
Education
National Survey On Youth EducAtion
And Religion Raises Concern About Gen-Z Jews — And Questions About How To Understand Them
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By Asaf Shalev and Ella Rockart
Members of USY, a Jewish youth movement, visit Millennium Park in Chicago. (Screenshot from YouTube)
(JTA) — A massive survey conducted over the past year found that even as young Americans are rejecting traditional organized religion, they are still embracing faith and spirituality, broadly defined.
The pollsters behind the Springtide Research Institute, a new nonprofit dedicated to research about the “inner and outer lives” of young people, say their poll, of more than 10,000 Americans between 13 and 25, is without recent precedent in its size and breadth. They also said Jewish respondents — 215 in total, a sample size they identified as statistically significant — appeared to be among those thriving the least in their religious and spiritual lives.
The Jewish results, shared exclusively with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, confirm some elements of conventional wisdom about Gen Z Jews in America and challenge others. They also raise longstanding questions about whether Jews can effectively be studied the same way as people from other religious backgrounds.
It’s difficult to study how Jews compare to other religious groups because some individuals may identify as culturally, but not religiously, Jewish, according to Richard Flory, a sociologist serving as the executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
“A person can say ‘I’m an atheist, but I’m a Jew,’” Flory said. “Well, how do you deal with that? It’s a problem.”
The Springtide researchers opted to sort survey respondents into a wide range of categories: Jewish appears alongside other religious identities, as well as agnostic, atheist, “nothing in particular” and “something else.”
The respondents who identified themselves as Jewish stood out from their peers from other “major religious groups” — Protestant Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus — in several ways, the Springtide poll found. Young Jews, more than members of any other group, said they were “not flourishing” in their relationships with friends, family, teachers, or other trusted adults. The same was true when asked about their physical health, mental health, social and online lives, and “faith lives.”
Young Jews also led the pack with the highest percentage rejecting the sentence, “In general, I feel very positive about myself.”
And some 40% of young American Jews in the study said they do not need “a spiritual community,” the highest rate among major religions — a potential point of alarm for those who are hoping to increase young Jews’ engagement with synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
“This should be a call for greater urgency for those positioned to care for young Jews, including teachers, employers, coaches, and especially leaders of synagogues,” said Springtide CEO Josh Packard. “There is real need and opportunity to start leading with relationships to help young Jews flourish.”
See GEN-Z JEWS on Page 30
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New Study From Hillel And ADL Finds A Third Of Students On Campus Experienced Antisemitism In Last Year
By Philissa Cramer
A student bikes across campus at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
(JTA) — A third of Jewish college students say they have personally experienced antisemitism in the last year, according to a new survey conducted jointly by Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League.
The two groups recently announced a partnership aimed at combating antisemitism on college campuses; the survey represents one of the first fruits of the relationship.
The results add data and texture to the picture of Jewish life on campus that has been built in recent years in large part on anecdotes and firestorms. They suggest that the majority of Jewish students at American colleges feel safe and supported on campus — but that a significant minority have experienced antisemitism or obscured their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitism.
The survey offers a “strong validation of the reality that Jewish students are facing, which is a significant and unacceptable level of antisemitism and other anti-Jewish bias,” Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Fifteen percent of students who responded to the survey said they had “felt the need to hide” their Jewish identity and 6% said they had felt unwelcome in a campus organization because they were Jewish.
Often, the survey found, students reported being or feeling excluded because of their actual or perceived support for Israel. Conducted online in July and August, the survey captured sentiment shortly after the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in May contributed to a spike in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses and beyond.
The survey included 756 selfidentified Jewish college students on 220 campuses and had a margin of error of 4%. It drew from a national sample of college students, meaning that students surveyed were not all engaged with Hillel or other aspects of Jewish life on their campuses. Those that did engage with activities were more likely to say they have experienced antisemitism, the survey found, but they were also more likely to report feeling safe on campus as Jews.
Hillel has made one key finding — that while 80% of Jewish students say they are proud to be Jewish, only 62% of them say they are comfortable telling people about that pride — the centerpiece of a social media campaign that launched earlier this month. The #OwnYourStar campaign has been seen more than 1 million times since it began, according to Lehman.
In many of the posts associated with the campaign, Hillel professionals, student leaders and their supporters have been sharing their campus experiences. One wrote this week about her fear upon seeing a Star of David etched into a bulletin board and not knowing the intention of the person who left it there. The director of Hillel at Miami University in Cincinnati, Ohio wrote, “Our students are constantly being asked where their horns are (don’t have any!), why they killed Palestinian babies (they don’t), or have their mezuzah dropped from their dorm doors.”
Lehman said Hillel’s student cabinet, a group of 22 Jewish student leaders from campuses around the world, had made a conscious decision to make combating antisemitism the focus of their social media advocacy.
“We know we cannot simply bury our heads in the sand in the face of rising antisemitism and hope it will disappear,” he said. “We feel a responsibility to take these issues on.”
The Hillel-ADL findings dovetail with another major report about antisemitism in the United States released this week. The American Jewish Committee’s annual antisemitism study found that 20% of American Jews said that over the last five years, they or someone they personally knew had experienced antisemitism on a college campus.
They also dovetail with a slew of reports about challenging conditions at individual campuses. Some of those reports have emerged through Jewish on Campus, an Instagram account that launched last year to let students share anonymous stories about antisemitism and has quickly become emblematic of efforts to combat antisemitism taking place outside of the traditional infrastructure of Jewish life on campus.
Hillel and the ADL say the survey’s findings point to a number of steps that colleges and universities should take, including incorporating instruction about antisemitism into any diversity training that students and faculty receive and making it easier for students to report antisemitism that they experience. The vast majority of students experiencing antisemitism said they did not report it, and 40% of those who did report incidents to campus staff said they felt their reports were not taken seriously.
Lehman said the formal reporting structure that Hillel is establishing with the ADL, which has for years chronicled antisemitic incidents in the United States, is an important step.
“The more venues for students to report the better, particularly given the content of massive underreporting,” Lehman said. But he added, “The more that we can have students doing reporting through official channels, the better because then we end up with a clear ability to track issues and incidents over time and a more simplified and credible set of data to take to our administration partners.” ì
Independent REFORMER vs Puppet of out-of-state RADICALS? It’s your choice on Saturday, December 11… and that’s why it is important you and your family be sure to VOTE!
REFORMER: WE’VE KNOWN SHERIFF GUSMAN ALL HIS LIFE
l Sheriff Marlin Gusman tore down or decommissioned 13 dilapidated buildings and built a safer, modern, state-of-the art
Orleans Justice Center l He reduced inmate population by 85 percent, from 6800 to less than 900 men and women l Worked with federal and city administrations to gain funding for a modern medical infirmary to care for inmates with health needs He’s about people, not politics.
PUPPET OF THE RADICALS: WHO IS SUSAN HUTSON?
HONESTLY… WE DON’T KNOW!
l Her campaign is funded and supported by out-of-state
‘dark money’ interests from
New York, Boston, San
Francisco and Moscow, Idaho 1 l Her out-of-state funders and supporters demand absolute allegiance to a radical agenda of abolishing the police and closing jails 2 l The City’s Inspector General called for her to be fired as the Orleans Police Monitor for illegal activity 3
1. Campaign finance report for PAC for Justice:
https://ethics.la.gov/CampaignFinanceSearch/ViewScannedFiler.aspx?FilerI
D=302015
2. NO police abolish jail:
https://antigravitymagazine.com/feature/a-new-orleans-without-police/
3. Unethcal behavior, illegal acts:
https://www.nola.com/news/crime _police/article _ e8c66a6c-2b8b-5a20ae5c-8f0c7feca5e9.html#incart _ river
