Data for Your Kishkes: Project Prism Confirms Jewish Culture Is Key Driver of Purpose & Identity

Who taught more people about the human toll of the Holocaust? Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, or Steven Spielberg?

Here is what we know: Night sold over 10 million copies and The Diary of a Young Girl sold more than 25 million. Schindler’s List sold about 30 million tickets and garnered 65 million American TV viewers in a single night in February of 1997 (along with the tens of millions of DVDs, VHS tapes, and digital downloads).

So, who wins?

It’s a question that I, as an author, the Founder of the CANVAS Collaborative Fund for Jewish Arts and Culture, and a champion of Jewish creativity for more than 25 years now, often ask audiences.

It’s also a trick question: We can’t really know. Even with all that data. Even with all those metrics.

But wait, you say, of course we know. In our kishkes (guts) we know these works forever impacted the way we, as Jews, understand and perceive ourselves. They are also primary sources of information for how non-Jews come to understand us.

Now, the Jim Joseph Foundation’s Project Prism research on Jewish young adults provides the data to support what our kishkes have been telling us all along: for Jewish young adults, culture is a leading source of purpose, second only to family.

It should come as no surprise that, especially in the 21^st century, film, food, music, books, humor, and art are so central to our identities and development.

Culture is not a soft or secondary point of entry to Jewish life — it’s the second-largest lever driving Jewish meaning-making.

Art and Culture: From Abstraction (kishkes) to Statistics (takhles)

Pew Research Center’s 2021 report found that six of the 10 most popular “Jewish practices” of American Jews involve arts and culture. But Project Prism takes things further – much further.

Pew’s report told us how many Jews do cultural things. Prism helps explain what young adults get from it, and why culture and belonging matter for engagement.

Prism’s segmentation finds that 51% of young adults fall into two groups for whom culture is the main way in: the 29% it calls “Culturally Connected,” and the 22% “Dipping In,” whose lighter-touch engagement is carried by culture, holidays, food, and the like. For the Culturally Connected, “Jewish identity is personally meaningful but lived mostly on their own terms. Earlier experiences established strong cultural foundations and a largely positive legacy rooted in curiosity and relationships. Participation is broad and consistent, especially through culture, friendships, and everyday tradition.” Within that Culturally Connected group, 54% say they engage specifically because they enjoy Jewish culture.

More importantly, 68% of Jewish young adults report a high sense of direction or purpose in general, but only 23% say being Jewish plays a strong role in it. Across all respondents, 38% say cultural expression (food, music, books, humor) is a leading way being Jewish gives them direction, second only to family traditions (42%). For those for whom Jewishness plays a strong role the number is even higher, with  61% citing cultural expression as a key way to experience Jewish identity.

Prism’s machine-learning analysis goes further: informal participation (holidays, food, friendships, conversation) predicts Jewish connection and purpose better than formal participation does. That matters for the 58% of young adults who do not have two Jewish parents, who report weaker connection, and are less likely to take part in Jewish institutions.

Supporting the artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians who make the culture these young adults will, or already do, engage with is clearly a worthy investment. The respondents themselves also may be interested in creating Jewish culture to share with peers. If cultivated, their interest in artistic expression has the potential to become more deeply connected to who they are as Jews. Among that 68% with a strong general sense of purpose, 37% name creative projects (music, art, writing, design) as that source.

Thankfully, there is a wealth of new Jewish culture for them to dig into, respond to, find meaning and purpose in, and build upon. At CANVAS, we support and champion what we see as a 21^st century Jewish Cultural Renaissance. Since 2019, the CANVAS Funder Collaborative has invested more than $18 million to support this sector. But the size of the field is large, and the need is far greater. Creatives struggle to provide metrics to justify this work. But Prism makes clear the importance and impact of their efforts.

Who Leads the Renaissance?

When the Jewish story is told well, it becomes a profound source of pride and connection for our people. The Jewish Arts and Culture sector is also vital for bridge-building in a time of alarming antisemitism.

Leaders in this sector are some of our most visible and reach beyond the Jewish community to audiences of every race, religion, and denomination. That makes them highly influential, setting the Jewish conversation for generations. It also makes them some of the most vulnerable. In a 2025 survey of more than 600 arts professionals and artists, CANVAS found that 65% of Jewish artists surveyed say their careers have been adversely impacted since October 7, 2023. Sixty-six percent experienced loss of personal or professional relationships over their opinions on Israel (45% on Palestine).

Through a strategic and coordinated combination of grantmaking, advocacy, and leadership development, CANVAS has funded dozens of Jewish cultural institutions who represent over 3,500 Jewish creatives. Through our Amplify Grants, we also support the production and presentation of contemporary Jewish creativity in secular and mainstream venues.

But perhaps our most lasting investment is the one we make in sector leaders and their organizations through the CANVAS Leadership Development Program, which has reached a new level of sophistication and impact thanks to shared learning with our philanthropic allies. Together with CANVAS’s more than 13 partners, we designed a program that ensures leaders of Jewish arts and cultural organizations are strongly united in a community of practice, and are served with regular access to professional development opportunities, large in-person gatherings, smaller educational experiences, materials, tools, and deep, one-to-one mentorship experiences with experts at the top of their fields. Through the program, professionals gain knowledge, skills, a strong network of peers, and ongoing support they need to succeed.

Participation in CANVAS fieldwide leadership sessions grew from 122 individuals in 2024 to 286 in 2025 — a 130% increase — providing evidence of a genuine need. In our recent evaluations of the CANVAS Leadership Development Program, 89% of Executive Mentorship participants report increased confidence in leadership and advanced arts-management skills. All Regional Gathering participants report stronger relationships with fellow grantees and increased understanding of the field, and 83% report increased leadership/capacity-building confidence.

As one participant reflected, “I am more frequently in arts settings with mostly diverse cultural communities and feel a need to understand how other Jewish leaders are navigating this particularly charged and polarized moment.”

A field that once felt ephemeral and “nice-to-have” has articulated contours and is indisputably (measurably) essential to our communal work. Whether your priority is education, community engagement, community vibrancy and Jewish joy, or confronting bigotry and hatred, if we are not applying a cultural lens to the work and, most importantly, enlisting the Jewish creative community, we are falling far short of our potential impact. Project Prism shows why this work matters and why the planning, quality, and follow-through of Jewish cultural productions is so critical, since “merely attending an activity is less predictive of positive outcomes than whether the participant felt they belonged.” These productions can be nothing less than the best because, in a world of infinite cultural choices, people will not choose them simply because they are Jewish.

If we invest in the people and organizations who curate Jewish culture, we invest in what Prism proved matters when it comes to Jewish identity and purpose.

In other words, you can – at last – trust your kishkes. The next Steven Spielberg is counting on it.

Lou Cove is the founder of CANVAS, author of Man of the Year: A Memoir, and a producer of the award-winning Jewish Partisans documentary Four Winters. He has spent the past 25 years tinkering at the intersection of art and Jewishness, but works hardest at being a good dad.