Competing Fields, Young American Jewish Identity

I used Cameron Bernstein’s sentence in my last piece, she prays for the people on that land but doesn’t need to pray for the state. I read that sentence as evidence of AIPAC’s institutional crisis. But looking at the full AP-NORC poll published in July, I see that sentence as just one edge of a much wider shift, one that isn’t confined to politics but reaches into religious identity itself.

This centrality itself was never a given, it was built at a fairly recent, identifiable moment. Sociologist Jonathan Woocher wrote that American Jewish life rests on a civil religion, built on two central pillars, Jewish survival in a threatening world, and the centrality of the State of Israel. But that pillar wasn’t always there. According to historian Lawrence Grossman, the American Jewish Committee’s 1966-67 activity report buried Israel on page 35, behind headings like ecumenism, workplace discrimination, and civil rights. A year later, after the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel became the report’s lead item and never left that position again, within six years growing to consume nearly a third of the organization’s total budget. As the rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid wrote in 2019, before 1967 Zionism had been one among various alternatives of Jewish identity, but after 1967 the discourse about Zionism became Jewish identity itself, no longer part of a larger conversation but defining the conversation. That June, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, sitting at morning prayers in a Bronx synagogue, recalled a congregant asking whether Israel was about to be wiped out, and feeling himself that they stood on the edge of a second Holocaust. By the time the war ended, Holocaust memory and support for Israel had become the twin poles of American Jewish identity.

One of Bourdieu’s concepts describes this shift precisely, doxa, the pre-reflexive assumption of a field, the thing so taken for granted it never even becomes a subject of debate. Before 1967, attachment to Israel was one competing position within the field of Jewish identity, open to question, open to debate. After 1967 that attachment became doxa, so foundational it no longer even registered as a choice, it simply was what being Jewish meant. What the poll shows today is that same doxa, two generations later, turning back into a position, something open to question again.

Whether that turn is permanent or temporary is a separate question, one scholars have failed to settle for fifteen years. In 2010, Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman argued that young American Jews were growing increasingly distant from Israel and that this gap might not close in the future, calling it the distancing hypothesis. Theodore Sasson, Charles Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe of Brandeis University looked at similar data and reached a different conclusion, that while the young were indeed more distant today, this reflected a life-cycle effect, people tend to grow more attached to Israel as they age, meaning today’s distance isn’t a permanent break but a phase specific to youth. A separate study by Sasson and Saxe found that 58 percent of Birthright trip participants still reported feeling very connected to Israel five to eight years after their trip. That debate remains unresolved, and today’s AP-NORC data doesn’t settle it either, it only shows the present gap, not which reading of it will prove correct.

This gap itself isn’t new either, and the field’s most authoritative study shows it. Pew Research Center’s 2021 report, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” surveyed 4,718 Jewish adults selected from 68,398 screening interviews, the largest sample the field has had. Fifty-one percent of Jews over 50 say caring about Israel is essential to Jewish identity, while that share drops to 35 percent among those under 30, with 27 percent calling it unimportant. The same age gap was present in Pew’s earlier 2013 survey too, meaning this isn’t a 2026 phenomenon but a pattern that’s been there for at least thirteen years. But Pew’s report doesn’t tell a simple one-directional story, young Jews are being pulled toward two opposite poles rather than one, 17 percent of the 18-29 age group identifies as Orthodox, compared with just 3 percent of those 65 and older, while at the same time 40 percent of the younger group identifies as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” compared with 27 percent of the older group. The middle is narrowing while both ends grow.

The poll surveyed 1,022 Jewish adults. Sixty-eight percent identify as religiously Jewish. Even within that group there’s a sharp generational split, emotional attachment to Israel runs at 40 percent among religious Jews, dropping to 11 percent among secular Jews. The share who say support for Israel is a core part of Jewish identity is 48 percent among the religious group, 12 percent among the secular group. About 30 percent of religious Jews under 45 say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, compared with about 20 percent of those over 45.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is useful here. How a person perceives, judges, and reacts to the world doesn’t form in a vacuum, it forms from the traces left by the fields they move through. But what the poll actually shows is more specific, the rupture isn’t a move away from Israel, it’s a change in what religiosity itself contains. Jewish adults under 45 are more likely than older ones to say marking Shabbat or keeping kosher is highly important to their identity. The younger generation isn’t drifting from religion, it’s redefining what religion holds, without placing Israel at the center.

Two voices from this redefinition are worth hearing. Phoebe Wapnitsky, thirty-two, in Connecticut, finds Israel’s military actions out of step with Jewish values. In her own words, standing against oppression and promoting social justice are the roles Judaism plays in her life, adding that she felt disconnected from Israel even before October 7. Ari Pollack, thirty, an arts fundraiser in Wisconsin who grew up attending religious school, thinks Israel’s military operations provide fodder for antisemitism, making everywhere less safe for Jews. Both keep their religious identity intact while rebuilding their relationship to Israel, not by cutting it off, but by fitting it into a different frame.

But this clash of habitus doesn’t run in one direction, the opposing voice is just as real. Susan Boyer, seventy-two, in Southern California, equates supporting Israel with supporting the Jewish people’s right to a homeland. For her and many Jewish Americans of her generation, Israel is an essential refuge against the possible repetition of large-scale massacres like the Holocaust. She recalls being mugged by girls in her class for being Jewish as a child, describing how having to constantly defend herself as a Jew seeped into her daily life. This is a historical layer the younger generation didn’t live through, a period when antisemitism was remembered as a direct, physical threat.

Where Wapnitsky and Pollack’s language actually gets learned is a separate question, because a field doesn’t form in a vacuum. Social justice, standing against oppression, has become an increasingly familiar campus vocabulary over the past fifteen years. The settler colonial framework, institutionalized in academia with the founding of the journal Settler Colonial Studies in 2011, reads the Israel-Palestine question alongside New World settler societies like Australia, Canada, and the US, and this framework has risen noticeably in academic publishing over the past decade. But the framework itself is contested within academia too, scholars including anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod have written that the model doesn’t always map neatly onto Israel-Palestine, because the Zionist movement’s own claim to legitimacy has a different historical source than other colonial projects. There’s also a material layer to this framework’s arrival on campus, a separate but overlapping matter, Qatar became the largest foreign donor to American universities in 2025, at $1.2 billion, more than tripling its funding from the year before. Congress is investigating this flow in connection with anti-Israel incidents on campus, though some academics find that scrutiny crude and politicized. Drawing a direct, proven line between Qatari money and a lecture a student hears in a classroom is a stronger claim than the available sources support, and that shouldn’t be overstated. What’s solid is two separate but temporally overlapping facts, the rise of the academic framework and the growth of Qatari investment in universities. Wapnitsky and Pollack’s own words don’t say how much of either framework they carry, but both belonging to a generation recently out of the university environment makes that overlap hard to ignore.

Three distinct fields emerge from this, all sharing the same label of religious identity while carrying different content. For Boyer’s generation, Jewishness and Israel are nearly inseparable, a bond born of a need for security. For Wapnitsky and Pollack’s generation, Jewishness is defined by principles of social justice and standing against oppression, principles that sometimes clash with Israel’s current policies. Bernstein’s position is a third variant, keeping the religious practice while separating out national attachment, a solution built between the two. What all three share is that none of them have left religion, the poll makes that clear, young religious Jews value Shabbat and kashrut more than the older generation does. What’s coming undone is Israel’s place as an automatic, unquestioned component of that identity, in Bourdieu’s terms it isn’t the field itself that changes but the distribution of capital within it, capital tied to religious practice rising while capital tied to national attachment recedes.

The consequence for institutional Jewish life is significant, whether this proves a permanent break or a stage of the life cycle. For decades the central axis of American Jewish identity was built around attachment to Israel, synagogues, schools, and summer camps were designed to reinforce that axis. Now the younger generation values religious practice more but doesn’t keep that axis in the same place, at least for now. When an institution’s own carrier generation reorders its values, the institution itself has to reshape, either finding a new balance and surviving, or insisting on the old balance and drifting from its own base, even if this generation comes back around as it ages.

That reshaping has already begun. A framework proposed in eJewishPhilanthropy in April 2026 argues that camps, Hillel, and day schools should stop teaching Israel as a single linear narrative and instead build a learning journey that deepens with a child’s age, one that includes the country’s different narratives and different points of view. The Foundation for Jewish Camp, in its five-year strategic plan announced in June 2026, said it aims to reshape Jewish communal life even as it expands the camp experience. This is exactly what Bourdieu’s framework would predict, when a field’s carrier generation reorders its values, the field’s institutions have to rework their own teaching to survive, rather than simply defending the old doxa as it stood.

Coming back to Bernstein’s sentence one last time, what’s there isn’t a loss but a rearrangement. She keeps praying for the people on that land. She doesn’t need to pray for the state. Being able to make that distinction doesn’t reject what she inherited of Judaism, it simply re-chooses which part of that inheritance stays at the center. Maybe that’s what most young American Jews are actually doing, not breaking from an identity, but deciding for themselves which part of it is worth carrying forward.