Project Prism: Why We Invested in a New Study of Jewish Young Adults

For years, conversations about Jewish young adults have often been framed through a familiar lens. Within the Jim Joseph Foundation, we’ve referenced the “30%” who are actively served by Jewish organizations and institutions (the audiences for our Deliberate Strategy) and the “70%” who are underserved or not served at all by Jewish communal institutions (the audiences for our Emergent Strategy).

That framework is an important strategic lens through which we view our work. Yet we also know that to more effectively serve and design for all our desired audiences, we need to better understand the nuance that often gets lost in larger strategic outlooks. People today exhibit a range of complexities, contradictions, and subtleties in their life. For Jewish young adults, we see these qualities in the many different modalities and ways they engage or don’t engage in Jewish practice and with communal organizations. Measuring their level of institutional participation is only one data point among many that show how they relate to Jewish life, identity, purpose, and community. On its own, this data point does not provide a full picture of Jewish young adults today. We know that any serious strategy for the future of Jewish life will require us to deeply understand both the young adults who are most engaged and the majority who are not.

This positioning led us to commission Project Prism, a multi-method study of Jewish young adults in the United States conducted in partnership with Sense Worldwide, with NORC at the University of Chicago serving as the quantitative survey partner.

From Programs to People

Many years ago, the Foundation adopted a strategic framework centered on helping young Jews experience greater connection, meaning, and purpose through Jewish learning. That work challenged us to move beyond traditional measures of Jewish engagement and instead ask how Jewish experiences contribute to flourishing in people’s lives.

As we explored research from the learning sciences, we became convinced that effective education begins not with curriculum, but with recognizing that people carry personal histories, motivations, assumptions, relationships, and mental frameworks that shape how they interpret the world. Beyond transmitting knowledge, education is about the experience of information being processed by learners who have multiple and varied inputs that form opinions, beliefs, values and behaviors. Centering the learner thus deeply informs how to support and create educational interventions that lead to connection, meaning, and purpose.

Our work exploring audiences also led us to question some of the language long used across the Jewish communal sector. Describing people as “engaged” or “unengaged,” “affiliated” or “unaffiliated,” often flattens perceptions more than it enriches. Many young adults live vibrant Jewish lives outside traditional institutional frameworks. Others are deeply curious yet remain disconnected from existing opportunities. Still others carry multiple identities that shape how Judaism fits into their broader lives. If we truly aspire to design Jewish learning experiences that resonate with the full diversity of Jewish young adults, we need timely and rich studies of those people that describe where they show up, how they make meaning and construct identity, how the broader culture shapes their lives, and how Judaism fits (or doesn’t fit) within that larger picture.

A Multi-Method Approach

We partnered with Sense Worldwide to lead this project through multiple complementary research approaches. Their team specializes in uncovering the cultural, emotional, and behavioral dynamics that shape people’s decisions, often revealing insights that individuals themselves may struggle to articulate directly, thus helping organizations turn understanding into action.

Rather than relying on a single research method, Project Prism combines online qualitative research, a nationally representative survey, consumer culture analysis, semiotics, and machine learning. Each method helps answer a different set of questions and brings a different perspective, and together they create a more complete picture than any one method could on its own.

The qualitative phase helps surface stories, tensions, and lived experiences. The quantitative survey measures how widespread those experiences are by looking for patterns at scale. Consumer culture analysis examines the broader cultural forces shaping young adulthood in America today. Semiotic analysis explores the symbols, narratives, and cultural codes through which young adults construct meaning. Machine learning techniques allow the researchers to use complex data modelling to identify patterns and relationships in the data that traditional descriptive analysis may overlook.

Importantly, while qualitative research provides depth, we wanted confidence that the insights emerging from those conversations reflected the broader population of Jewish young adults in the United States. That required an exceptionally rigorous quantitative survey design. We needed research that could reach a broad and representative population of Jewish young adults, including many whose lives rarely, if at all, intersect with Jewish organizations or communal institutions.

NORC’s expertise in rigorous probability-based survey research is widely recognized and helped ensure that the findings would reflect the diversity and complexity of Jewish young adults across the United States, producing findings that reduce sampling bias and that can be generalized with confidence. The result is a dataset representing more than 2,000 Jewish young adults between the ages of 22 and 40 that spans a remarkably broad spectrum of backgrounds, family structures, religious identities, levels of participation, geography, and life experiences.

Research in Service of Engaging More Jewish Young Adults

As the world experiences rapid change, Project Prism gives educators, organizations, innovators, and funders an accurate and fuller picture of how Jewish young adults experience their lives today. The research builds on past studies (see one example here) and adds to a knowledge base that can inform how Jewish education and life can be relevant to more people. By investing in deeper understanding today, we hope to help the field create more relevant, resonant, and impactful Jewish learning experiences for tomorrow.

Curiosity is one of the Foundation’s guiding principles and Project Prism is, at its core, an expression of that curiosity. Over the next few months, we look forward to sharing Project Prism’s findings through a variety of formats (recorded webinar, multiple reports, and a quantitative data set) and eventually engaging in larger field-wide learning and action. We hope these insights spark as many new questions and thoughtful conversations with you as it has with us.