Most Jewish young adults are engaged with their Judaism, according to an unprecedented new study from the Jim Joseph Foundation. The research, which was conducted by Sense Worldwide is known as Project Prism, and it shows that three quarters of Jewish young adults reporting doing something Jewish in their lives regularly.
The dataset represents more than 2,000 young adults between the ages of 22 and 40 from a variety of different backgrounds, religious identities, levels of participation, family structures, location, and life experiences.
“We wanted to get a current and full picture of what it’s like to be a young Jew in America today.” – Stacie Cherner
“We wanted to get a current and full picture of what it’s like to be a young Jew in America today,” said the Director of Research and Learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation Stacie Cherner. “We haven’t done a study of Jewish young adults since 2018. It was time after the pandemic and everything that has happened in the world.”
Among the 75% of young adults who participate in something Jewish every single day, 45% say this is their only form of participation in Jewish experiences.
Immersive experiences, like Israel travel programs and Jewish summer camp, youth groups, and attending Jewish high school create a sense of belonging, while a key driver of participation in Jewish experiences is already feeling connected to the Jewish community. The Jim Joseph Foundation, which was established in 2006, has awarded more than $900 million in grants to programs that foster Jewish life in the U.S.
“We can begin to translate these insights to action,” Cherner said. “As we continue to support longstanding organizations whose work is affirmed by this data, we’re also learning alongside partners in the field about potential new opportunities the research uncovered. We look forward to this ongoing learning journey, to ultimately help more young adults tap into Jewish life, community, and experiences that bring them meaning.”
The study also looked at what stops young people from engaging in Jewish life, revealing that they want experiences that are flexible and low-pressure. They also crave, “spaces that can hold complexity, plurality, and nuance without social penalty.”
Sense Worldwide developed a probability-based quantitative sample in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago. They combined their research with digital qualitative and cultural research, along with machine learning analysis.
“The breadth and depth of this data is fascinating and actionable,” said Yonah Schiller, Chief R&D Office at the Jim Joseph Foundation. “It affirms much of our early R&D research and points towards new needed areas of exploring impact and designing for a new generation in a quickly changing world.”
The finding that young adults like flexible and immersive experiences lines up with what the Jim Joseph Foundation has discovered as well. The Foundation has an Emergent Strategy that powers its R&D initiative through a public facing platform known as Common Era. It invests in and conducts research outside of the usual channels, funds small experiments, identifies new talent and partnerships, and gives innovators the runway to test under uncertain conditions. While most experiments fail to scale, when an initiative is over, it either captures lessons for the next attempt, stays small and localized, gets handed off to an established partner, or scales into a standalone entity.
Project Ruth is an example of that final path to becoming a standalone entity. Other research – not Project Prism – revealed a practical problem: a significant number of families want a rabbi, cantor, or educator for life-cycle events like weddings or b’nai mitzvah but are not members of synagogues and don’t know where to find these leaders.
Common Era backed two entrepreneurs to solve this gap and connected families directly with vetted practitioners on their own terms. The experimental prototype is now scaling into a major standalone platform. Project Ruth is the first of more than a dozen other initiatives in the pipeline that have been incubated in Common Era’s R&D platform. Other projects address areas such as new forms of community, media edutainment, new approaches to leadership development, and more.
The current Foundation grantees are excited about the findings and encouraged to keep reaching and creating programs for Jewish young adults.
“It affirms that what they are doing is working,” said Cherner. “This research unpacks how much potential there is for us to meet young people where they are at and for the Jewish community to help young people find a sense off connection, meaning, and purpose.”
