One of the biggest challenges in our modern media ecosystem is breaking out of the echo chambers that so many are locked into. 

Ezra Klein’s New York Times column this week, headlined “Why American Jews No Longer Understand Each Other,” is a worthwhile example of how even the best-intentioned columnists can struggle to understand the world outside their own social and informational bubble.  

The column portrays a vocal minority of anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish community as much larger than it actually is. The characterization of a roughly even divide within the Jewish community between Zionists and anti-Israel Jews is at odds with numerous reputable polls tracking Jewish public opinion. 

Public polling serves as a useful reality check to much of the framing in the column, and underscores the breadth of Jewish support towards Israel. An April 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 72% of Jewish Americans held a favorable view towards Israel. A fall 2024 poll of Jewish voters commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute found 86% of Jews considering themselves “a supporter of Israel.” A spring 2024 survey of Jewish voters commissioned by the Democrat-affiliated Jewish Electoral Institute (JEI) found 81% of Jewish respondents were emotionally attached to Israel.

This doesn’t paint the portrait of a community that is meaningfully divided over Israel — even amid the wave of negative, if not hostile, coverage towards the Jewish state in recent months. 

Klein’s column interviews four Jewish voices — from anti-Israel polemicist Peter Beinart to the publisher of the anti-Zionist Jewish Currents publication to the rabbi of a deeply progressive Park Slope synagogue to self-proclaimed “progressive Zionist” Brad Lander — while just one (former Biden antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt) reflects the mainstream Jewish majority.

The other canard advanced in the column is that younger Jews, in particular, have become hostile towards Israel. And while Gen Z Jews’ level of support for the Jewish state is not as high as their older counterparts, the degree of support towards Israel among the younger Jewish generation is still significant — especially when compared to their non-Jewish counterparts on campuses. 

A November 2023 poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee asked: “Thinking about what being Jewish means to you, how important is caring about Israel?” Two-thirds of Jewish respondents between the ages of 18-29 said it was important — with 40% saying it was “very important.” (Over four-fifths of Jews older than 30 responded in the affirmative.)

A February 2024 Pew Research Center study found a 52% majority of Jews ages 18-34 considered Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas to be acceptable, while 42% disagreed. By a 61-26% margin in the same poll, Gen Z Jews also favored the U.S. continuing to provide military aid to Israel to help it defeat Hamas. 

In a thorough study and survey of Jewish student public opinion in the summer of 2024, Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh flagged that the source of anti-Israel Jewish student opinion is almost entirely concentrated among the “very liberal” faction of Jewish students on campus, which make up 18% of the Jewish population. That closely matches the 22% of Jewish students who said they feel no connection to Israel at all.

By comparison, an outright 54% majority of Jewish college students said they “feel their own well-being is connected to what happens to Jews in Israel.” 

“We see that the gaps between liberals and very liberals (the former more moderate, the latter further left) are enormous. In fact, they vastly exceed the gaps between conservatives and liberals,” Hersh concluded. 

Indeed, the biggest disconnect on college campuses these days is between Jewish students, who still largely support Israel, and their non-Jewish counterparts, who have become downright hostile towards the Jewish state — or, among elements of the right, have become more apathetic towards Israel. 

For example, Hersh’s survey found that 51% of Jewish college students blamed Hamas for the conflict in Gaza, while 18% blamed Israel. But among non-Jewish college students, more blamed Israel (35%) than Hamas (18%) for the current war. Nearly one-third (30%) said both, in a sign of apathy and exhaustion towards the conflict. 

Those findings are consistent with a new analysis from political science professor Eric Kaufmann in Tablet, which found that far from becoming more critical of Israel, liberal Jews on campus have instead become more isolated from their non-Jewish peers while moving more towards the political center. 

“Ivy League Jews went from being well to the left of the median Ivy League student to leaning right of the average,” Kaufmann concluded. “In the Ivy League, Jews now self-censor more than conservatives do.”

New York Times editor Bari Weiss was gearing up to write a book about censorship and the policing of free speech in the 21st century. Then a gunman opened fire at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, killing 11 Jewish worshippers. 

Weiss, a native of Pittsburgh, had celebrated her bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue. The scourge of deadly antisemitic violence had hit closer to home than she ever thought possible. And that attack and its aftermath made it clear to Weiss that the book she really needed to be writing in this moment was How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which will be published tomorrow.  

“Antisemitism is something that I had been following closely my whole life,” Weiss told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “But it had sort of remained mostly something that was happening to other people in other places.” 

The deadly shooting changed that view, and deeply affected Weiss. She opens her book in a very personal way, detailing her reactions and experiences in Pittsburgh in the days after the attack. It is hard not to hear despair, anger and fear in her opening words, after not just one but two deadly synagogue shootings in the span of six months. 

“It was clear after the Poway attack [in April] that Jews — never mind everyone else living in a divided nation awash in weapons owned by people who could radicalize themselves in front of computer screens — had reason to be afraid in America,” Weiss wrote. 

But by the book’s conclusion, Weiss sounds a much more optimistic note, championing a defiant, joyous Judaism that refuses to back down, and an unapologetic love for the State of Israel, flaws and all. The book’s final chapter exhorts Jews to “practice a Judaism of affirmation, not a Judaism of defensiveness” as a way to combat the dark forces of antisemitism, and to not being afraid to call out antisemitic sentiments from any part of the spectrum. 

“My intent with the book was always for it to have a really energizing, positive message for people,” she said. “I think Jewish history teaches us nothing other than that.” And in the book’s opening, she said, “I really tried hard to take myself back to that morning [after the Pittsburgh shooting], and tried to help the reader go there with me.”

In just 200 pages, Weiss lays out a brief history of anti-Jewish bigotry, her classification of the three categories of antisemitism — from the right, the left and radical Islam — and her proposals for how Jews around the world can fight the ancient hatred. 

While Weiss had always known about and studied antisemitism around the world, she was shocked when it reared its ugly head in the United States. Could Jews in the U.S. one day contemplate emigrating — the way many French and British Jews have in recent years? 

“I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t think that was in some ways a possibility,” she told JI. “Does it worry me right now that if you are a man walking around Crown Heights with a kippa and tzitzit out, that you might be physically assaulted? That to me is a pretty wild state of affairs, and one that has been largely overlooked in the past.” 

The New York Times columnist pulls no punches in calling out the insidious antisemitism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, including that emanating from the White House. 

“In the nearly three years he has been in office, Donald Trump has trashed — gleefully and shamelessly — the unwritten rules of our society that have kept American Jews and, therefore, America safe,” she writes. “He has, at every opportunity, turned the temperature up rather than down. And he has genuinely appeared to have relished his role as the fomenter of chaos and conflict.” 

But Weiss still opines in her book that “anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous… calling out politicians like Steve King is easy. Calling out Ilhan Omar is not. That is because Omar is herself targeted by racists and lunatics who wish her harm because of her faith, her gender, or the color of her skin.” She makes it clear that “two things can be true at once: Ilhan Omar can espouse bigoted ideas. And Ilhan Omar can herself be the hate object of bigots, including the president of the United States.”

While Weiss doesn’t believe she is entirely alone in calling out antisemitism across the political spectrum, she said it can be disheartening to watch people let one or the other slide. 

“There are lots of people who are loath to look at the ugliness on their own side,” she told JI. “The reality is that 75% of Jewish Americans vote for Democrats. We live in blue states… what does it mean when the place we thought was our natural home starts to look less and less hospitable?”

Weiss has penned a book that is both personal and academic, and one that she hopes will appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. 

“I want people to have the sense that they’re listening into the conversations that our community has around our Shabbat dinner table,” she said. While she notes the core appeal of the book is to the Jewish community, “I think that anyone who knows anything about history understands that a society where antisemitism thrives is a society that is dead or dying. And there are lots of signs that America in its current state is in a sort of spiraling period.”

The developer Bruce Ratner will succeed Robert M. Morgenthau, the former Manhattan district attorney, as chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, The New York Times reports. 

(L-R) Bruce Ratner, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and Jay Z

Mr. Ratner will initially serve as chairman-elect, a new position created to help in an orderly succession. Following a transition period, Mr. Morgenthau will become chairman emeritus – also a new position, created to recognize his service as chairman since 1982.

 

Mr. Ratner has served on the board since 1996. He was the co-chair of the building committee, and his firm, Forest City Ratner Companies, provided pro-bono construction project management for the museum’s expansion, the Robert M. Morgenthau Wing, which opened in 2003.

 

The museum, which is located in Battery Park City and opened in 1997, is dedicated to educating people about Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust.

 

“I strongly believe that Bob’s sense of justice and the power of the law are derived directly from his involvement with these issues,” Mr. Ratner said in a statement.

 

“The Museum of Jewish Heritage reminds us that we must always be vigilant,” he added, “and that we must all be prepared to say ‘Never again.’ ”