Two Young Jews, Two Extremes, One Question

By Karen Lehmann

Two eighteen-year-olds, one in Israel and one in America, both Jewish, are about to vote for the first time, a week apart. Israelis go to the polls on October 27; Americans on November 3.

One may be drawn to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit. The other may be drawn to a candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

Their politics could hardly be further apart. Yet both are answering the same question: Will the world they are inheriting be secure enough to build a life in?

For the young Israeli, especially after October 7, security means survival. Many are about to put on a uniform; they are voting on policies they may soon be ordered to carry out. They are not a small group. Roughly 550,000 young Israelis will be eligible to vote for the first time, enough for an estimated 10 to 12 Knesset seats, and in a September Channel 12 poll, 74 percent of them described themselves as right-wing or center-right.

For the young American Jew, security means something else: an apartment they can afford, a job that leads somewhere, proof that hard work still pays. The spring 2026 Harvard Youth Poll found that just 29 percent of young Americans expect to do better financially than their parents, and 45 percent are struggling to make ends meet. Only 15 percent trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, the lowest figure in the poll’s 26-year history.

Young American Jews are not immune to the pull of the left. In a July 2025 poll, 67 percent of New York Jews aged 18 to 44 backed Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member who went on to become mayor. Nationally, a June 2026 AP-NORC surveyfound more American Jews approve of Mamdani than of Netanyahu, as younger and more liberal Jews grow disillusioned with the Israeli government.

One is voting for the security of the country. The other is voting for the security of a future inside it. Both are looking for answers outside the political center, and the movements offering those answers deserve scrutiny.

Ben-Gvir’s roots run to Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was barred from the 1988 Knesset elections under a law banning parties that incite racism, then outlawed after one of its followers committed one of the worst acts of Jewish terrorism in Israel’s history. On Purim in 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor living in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and opened fire on Muslim worshippers at prayer, killing 29. In 1995, a teenage Ben-Gvir dressed as Goldstein for Purim and called him “my hero.” He kept Goldstein’s portrait in his living room until 2020, taking it down only in hopes of joining Naftali Bennett’s electoral list. In 2007, an Israeli court convicted him of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Today he is Israel’s national security minister.

The DSA deserves the same scrutiny. Its grievances about housing, wages and inequality are real. But at its 2017 convention, it voted overwhelmingly to endorse BDS. The day after October 7, New York City DSA promoted an anti-Israel rally in Times Square that was widely condemned by Democratic leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the chapter later deleted its post and apologized. In 2024, the DSA withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez after she hosted a panel on antisemitism. Its conditions had included opposing all funding to Israel, Iron Dome included.

This is where the two stories collide. The young American drawn to the DSA is joining a movement that has demanded its candidates oppose funding for the missile shield protecting the young Israeli. The young Israeli drawn to Ben-Gvir is empowering the face of Israel that makes it hardest for that American to defend Israel at all. Each, without intending to, makes the other’s position more precarious. Most Jewish New Yorkers still reject the DSA. A Siena poll found they disapprove of the group 75 to 17 percent. But the generational gap is real.

The two movements are not equivalents. One holds power in a country at war; the other is an insurgency inside a major American party. Still, their appeal raises the same question: Have young voters rejected their parents’ values, or only lost faith in the institutions their parents trusted?

Earlier generations also came of age in upheaval. Vietnam shaped young Americans in the 1960s. The Yom Kippur War fed the disillusionment that ended three decades of Labor dominance in 1977, an election Israelis still call the Mahapach, the “upheaval.” Every generation carries its formative years into the voting booth.

What sets this generation apart is how it learns about its world. The Israel Democracy Institute’s May 2026 survey of first-time voters found that social media is their single most important source of political information, and that most do not go looking for political content; it finds them through their feeds. History arrives as a fragment, an image or a claim repeated until it feels true. The question is whether a generation formed this way can tell understanding history from being persuaded by it.

The same study offers reason for hope. Among 576 Israelis aged 18 to 22, Jewish and Arab, between 80 and 95 percent in every group said they will or probably will vote, and more than four-fifths believe their vote can change things. Their top priorities: national security and the cost of living, the very two concerns that define our two eighteen-year-olds.

But the IDI also found something more troubling: “a clear distinction between support for democratic principles and confidence in the institutions” meant to uphold them.

That distinction may be the thread connecting young Jews on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both still believe in democracy. What they doubt is whether the institutions they inherited can deliver it. An Israeli old enough to vote may soon carry a rifle in defense of the state. An American Jew of the same age may wonder whether a first paycheck will ever lead to a first home.

Both want what their parents wanted: safety, opportunity, dignity and a future worth building. If the center cannot convince them it still can, the extremes will keep making the offer.

Karen Lehmann is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and photographer who writes on American politics, public policy, Israel and culture. She is a columnist for Man and Culture and a blogger for The Times of Israel, and her work has appeared in the Washington Examiner, JNS, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, among others.