We Need a Fuller Picture 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.

Why we wanted a multi-method approach

Sense Worldwide, which led this project through multiple complementary research approaches, specializes in uncovering the cultural, emotional and behavioral dynamics that shape people’s decisions. This research often reveals insights that individuals themselves may struggle to articulate directly, thus helping organizations turn understanding into action.

Project Prism combines online qualitative research, a nationally representative survey, consumer culture analysis, semiotics and machine learning. These methods together create a more complete picture than any one method could on its own. Moreover, NORC’s expertise in rigorous probability-based survey research 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 (including many whose lives rarely, if at all, intersect with Jewish organizations or communal institutions), spanning a remarkably broad spectrum of backgrounds, family structures, religious identities, levels of participation, geography and life experiences.

Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

Stacie Cherner is the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation.