Eight Jewish Trends to Watch Closely in 2026

Something has shifted in the Jewish world. Across campuses, synagogues, boardrooms, and social media, Jews are being tested as Jews. The question pressing on Jewish life today is no longer, How do we vote? Or What do we believe about Israel? It is more unsettling: Do we still believe, deep down, that being Jewish is something to stand for or something to explain away?

As we enter 2026, eight powerful trends are bringing that question to the surface. They cut across Israel and the Diaspora, young and old, religious and secular. Together, they reveal a Jewish world dividing between confidence and retreat, responsibility and evasion, ownership and apology.

Here are the eight trends shaping that divide.

1. Young Jews Crossing Over to the “Pro-Pali” Camp

For the first time in modern Jewish history, a visible and rapidly growing subset of young Jews, especially in elite Western universities, is not merely critical of Israeli policy but is actively adopting Palestinian nationalist and anti-Zionist frameworks, including language that delegitimizes Jewish sovereignty altogether.

For the first time in modern Jewish history, a visible and rapidly growing subset of young Jews is actively adopting Palestinian nationalist and anti-Zionist frameworks, including language that delegitimizes Jewish sovereignty altogether.

This phenomenon goes beyond policy critique. It includes Jewish students endorsing slogans such as “from the river to the sea,” describing Israel as a “settler-colonial” or “genocidal” project, and affiliating with movements that explicitly deny Jewish peoplehood. On some campuses after October 7, Jewish students were not merely present at anti-Israel demonstrations; they were among the organizers.

Polling data underscores how radical this shift has become. In the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, a Harvard CAPS–Harris poll found that among Americans aged 18–24, a majority expressed greater sympathy for Hamas than for Israel—an astonishing result given the nature of the attack itself. Jewish identity within that age cohort did not provide the insulation it once did.

In progressive spaces, moral status is increasingly granted through alignment with those labeled “oppressed.” Jews, now recast as white, powerful, or colonial, are expected to distance themselves from Jewish power in order to remain morally acceptable. Supporting Israel has become socially and professionally costly; opposing it often brings validation, protection, and belonging.

This represents a historic break. Previous generations of secular or left-leaning Jews might have criticized Israeli governments but they instinctively defended Jewish collective existence. That instinct is weakening and its loss has profound consequences.

2. The Acceleration of Jewish Assimilation in the United States

Jewish assimilation in America is accelerating, and increasingly framed as a moral virtue rather than a neutral lifestyle choice.

The data are stark. According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 married non-Jews, and fewer than one in four non-Orthodox Jews say being Jewish is “very important” to their identity. Jewish literacy has declined sharply, synagogue affiliation continues to fall, and attachment to Jewish peoplehood—especially Israel—has weakened among younger cohorts.

Jewish particularism is often portrayed as exclusionary or parochial, while universalism is framed as morally superior.

What distinguishes the current phase of assimilation from earlier ones is its ideological justification. Jewish particularism is often portrayed as exclusionary or parochial, while universalism is framed as morally superior. Strong Jewish identification is no longer merely optional; it is frequently viewed with suspicion. Downplaying Jewish difference is seen as enlightened.

This has consequences. Assimilation does not merely reduce observance; it erodes Jewish confidence. A generation uncomfortable asserting the legitimacy of Jewish identity will struggle to withstand external hostility and may instead internalize it.

3. A Crisis and Opportunity in Jewish Education

Underlying many of the trends reshaping the Jewish world is a systemic failure of Jewish education, particularly within non-Orthodox Diaspora communities. For decades, Jewish educators and communal leaders have warned that large numbers of Jews were graduating from synagogue-based supplementary schools with minimal literacy, weak attachment, and little sense of Jewish purpose. What once felt like a long-term concern has now become an immediate crisis.

Fewer than half of American Jews can identify basic Jewish beliefs or texts, and only a small minority of non-Orthodox Jews report that Jewish knowledge plays a meaningful role in their lives.

According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half of American Jews can identify basic Jewish beliefs or texts, and only a small minority of non-Orthodox Jews report that Jewish knowledge plays a meaningful role in their lives. Large numbers of young Jews reach adulthood knowing how to attend a Passover seder or recite a few Hebrew prayers, but unable to explain why Jews exist as a people, and what Judaism stands for.

One of the most prominent Jewish voices to diagnose this was the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who repeatedly warned that Jewish continuity depends not on memory alone, but on meaning. Ritual without narrative, he argued, produces nostalgia, not commitment. A Judaism that teaches “how” without “why” cannot compete with the powerful moral and ideological frameworks young Jews encounter elsewhere.

What makes the current moment different is that Jewish education is now competing in an openly hostile environment. Young Jews are encountering highly sophisticated narratives on campuses, online, and in social media that frame Jewish power as immoral, Israel as uniquely illegitimate, and Jewish peoplehood as ethically suspect. Without a coherent Jewish counter-narrative, many absorb these claims uncritically, or internalize them as moral truth.

In response, many Jewish institutions made a fatal miscalculation: they tried to survive by becoming neutral. Israel was softened or sidelined, Jewish particularism was downplayed, and moral clarity was replaced with balance. The result was predictable. Programs that avoided the hard questions did not protect students; they left them defenseless.

Yet alongside this failure is a genuine opportunity. New educational models are flourishing: podcasts, YouTube channels, Instagram educators, immersive Israel programs, and online learning communities that speak directly to contemporary questions of identity, antisemitism, and Jewish peoplehood. These platforms, like the one I founded, OpenDor Media, reach hundreds of thousands of young Jews, far more than most institutional programs.

The contrast is instructive. Programs that avoid Israel or Jewish particularism in the name of neutrality tend to lose students. Programs that articulate a confident, unapologetic Jewish story, even when challenging, tend to retain them.

The coming decade will determine whether Jewish education renews itself or cedes relevance entirely.

4. A Split Jewish Generation: Assimilation vs. Moral Self-Confidence

These dynamics converge into a single defining reality: the Jewish people are bifurcating.

On one side stands a large assimilating majority—intermarried, disengaged, morally uneasy with Jewish power, and inclined to retreat under pressure. On the other stands a smaller but increasingly visible minority: Jews who are publicly Jewish, unapologetically Zionist, intellectually grounded, and willing to bear social cost.

The Jewish people are bifurcating.

One sees this split vividly on campuses, in workplaces, and online. Two young Jews, raised in similar Western Jewish environments, now embody radically different paths. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard student, chose to confront antisemitism directly, wearing his Jewish identity openly, organizing Jewish advocacy, and ultimately suing Harvard University over its failure to protect Jewish students. He has refused to retreat or apologize for Jewish particularism.

By contrast, figures associated with movements such as IfNotNow represent a different response. Many of its young Jewish leaders define their moral identity through public opposition to Israel, organizing protests, disrupting Jewish institutions, and aligning with broader pro-Palestinian activism. In these spaces, Jewish identity is preserved not by defending Jewish peoplehood, but by distancing from it, especially where Israel is concerned.

The numbers currently favor the latter path. It is easier, safer, and socially rewarded. History, however, suggests that Jewish continuity is shaped less by numerical majorities than by minorities willing to carry Jewish identity openly, even under pressure.

5. The Rise of the Orthodox Jew as the Jewish Exception

If much of the Jewish world today is marked by assimilation, moral uncertainty, and internal fracture, there is one striking and consequential exception: the growing and increasingly powerful Orthodox Jewish community.

While large segments of secular and non-Orthodox Jewry struggle with declining literacy and membership, weakening identity, and discomfort with Jewish particularism, Orthodox Jews are bucking nearly all of these trends. Their numbers are growing rather than shrinking. Their educational systems are expanding rather than contracting. Their Jewish literacy is deep and transmitted intentionally. And perhaps most importantly, they exhibit a level of moral self-confidence as Jews that is increasingly rare outside their world.

This is not accidental. Orthodox Jewish education is not value-neutral. It does not shy away from peoplehood, covenant, or difference. It explains Jewish distinctiveness rather than apologizing for it. As a result, Orthodox Jews tend to understand antisemitism not as a shocking aberration that needs to be the Jewish people’s central obsession, but as a recurring historical phenomenon tied to Jewish survival, values, and visibility. That understanding often inoculates them against internalized self-hatred, even under intense external pressure.

A community once considered marginal or insular is increasingly becoming the backbone of Jewish continuity, education, philanthropy, and institutional leadership.

Institutionally, the change is just as significant. In past decades, secular and non-Orthodox Jews largely carried the leadership of major Jewish organizations—philanthropic, political, and cultural. Today, many of those roles are being filled by Orthodox Jews. They are leading federations, advocacy groups, educational institutions, media platforms, and philanthropic foundations. They are not only more willing to assume responsibility, they are increasingly the ones with both the financial resources and ideological commitment to sustain Jewish institutions over time.

As large segments of non-Orthodox Jewry disengage and assimilate, they are effectively abdicating roles they once held.

The result is a quiet but profound reordering of Jewish life. A community once considered marginal or insular is increasingly becoming the backbone of Jewish continuity, education, philanthropy, and institutional leadership.

The widening gap between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews raises difficult questions about shared language, mutual understanding, and collective responsibility. These pressures will grow in 2026 with the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred.

6. The Re-Emergence of Right-Wing Antisemitism

Left-wing antisemitism has rightly dominated attention since October 7, after it erupted openly in the language of anti-Zionism, moral inversion, and calls for Jewish erasure masquerading as human rights activism. But while focus has remained fixed on the left, right-wing antisemitism has been steadily re-entering the mainstream, often in older, more familiar forms.

Like its left-wing counterpart, this resurgence rarely announces itself explicitly as Jew-hatred. Instead, it appears through coded language: denunciations of “globalists,” obsession with “financial elites,” demographic panic, civilizational decline narratives, and conspiracy theories about hidden power.

Figures such as Tucker Carlson have repeatedly flirted with classic antisemitic tropes, platforming conspiratorial thinking about Jewish influence, defending or minimizing known antisemites, and framing Jews as shadowy actors behind national decline. Even more explicit is Nick Fuentes, whose overt antisemitism, Holocaust relativization, and calls for Jewish exclusion have gained him a disturbingly large online following, particularly among younger right-wing audiences. Likewise, figures such as Candace Owens have increasingly trafficked in rhetoric that portrays Jews as manipulative elites or uniquely malevolent actors, normalizing suspicion toward Jews within populist conservative discourse.

The danger for Jews is not choosing the “wrong side” of the political aisle; it is assuming that either side ultimately offers protection.

The Anti-Defamation League reported record levels of antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023 and 2024, noting significant contributions from both ideological extremes.

The danger for Jews is not choosing the “wrong side” of the political aisle; it is assuming that either side ultimately offers protection. The left increasingly demands Jewish self-negation: abandon Jewish power, Jewish sovereignty, and Jewish particularism to earn moral legitimacy. The right, in its darker populist forms, demands Jewish scapegoating: blame Jews for cultural decay, economic anxiety, or national decline.

Jews are being squeezed from both sides, pressured to dissolve themselves on the left and targeted as symbols of corruption on the right. The result is familiar to Jewish history: Jews have no safe ideological home.

7. Israeli Society Is Moving Rightward—and Staying There

Many Diaspora Jews continue to interpret Israel’s political shift to the right as a temporary reaction to war, trauma, or a particular leader. This misreads Israeli reality.

Israel’s rightward movement is structural, driven by demographics, lived experience, and disillusionment with failed paradigms. Generations shaped by suicide bombings, rocket fire, and repeated diplomatic collapse no longer find abstract peace theories persuasive. October 7 did not create this realism; it confirmed it.

Polling consistently shows Israeli Jews prioritizing security over naïve diplomatic optimism, across socioeconomic and ethnic lines. To Israelis, this is not ideological extremism but earned skepticism. The gap between Israeli lived reality and Diaspora moral abstraction is widening, and misunderstanding it deepens internal Jewish fractures.

Israel is now the only Western democracy in which younger voters are more right-wing—and more traditional or religious—than their parents’ generation.

Looking ahead to the 2026 national elections, all indicators point to a decisive victory for right-wing parties, including religious and nationalist factions. The elections are expected to ratify changes that have been building for years: deep skepticism toward failed peace paradigms, prioritization of security over abstraction, and growing confidence in Jewish sovereignty exercised without apology.

What makes Israel’s trajectory especially striking is its generational character. Israel is now the only Western democracy in which younger voters are more right-wing—and more traditional or religious—than their parents’ generation. This runs directly counter to trends in Europe and North America, where younger cohorts consistently move leftward and away from religion. In Israel, the opposite is true.

Younger Israelis have grown up amid suicide bombings, rocket fire, repeated wars, and failed diplomatic experiments. They have little patience for peace theories detached from reality but laden with real security risk. October 7 did not radicalize them; it confirmed conclusions already reached. To them, security-first policies are not extremism, but realism forged through consequence. From the Diaspora, this is often misread as a slide into fanaticism.

By 2026, Israel’s movement toward a more right-leaning and traditional society will no longer be a trend to debate. It will be a political and demographic fact.

8. American Jews Intervening Aggressively in Israeli Policy

Finally, a destabilizing trend is the growing intervention of Diaspora Jews not only in Israeli political debates, but in Israeli policy itself, frequently through international advocacy, donor pressure, and external leverage, despite not living with the security, military, or societal consequences of those policies.

Increasingly, American Jewish activists, donors, intellectuals, and clergy seek to influence Israeli decision-making from the outside, funding political NGOs, issuing public moral condemnations, and pressuring international leaders to apply diplomatic and political pressure on Israel, often in rigid moral terms that allow little nuance, despite not living in Israel, not serving in its army, and not raising children under constant security threat.

An Israeli reservist who has spent months away from family under fire does not experience Diaspora moral lectures as solidarity.

To many Israelis, this behavior is troubling for two reasons. First, it represents judgment without skin in the game, demands issued by those who will not bear the cost of the outcomes they advocate. An Israeli reservist who has spent months away from family under fire does not experience Diaspora moral lectures as solidarity. He experiences them as judgment imposed from a distance, detached from the reality of danger and loss that he and his peers must navigate daily.

Second, and less acknowledged, this judgment is often impaired. Many Diaspora Jews today operate under intense pressure regarding Israel. They face workplace hostility, campus intimidation, social-media harassment, and professional risk. Their public criticism of Israel frequently functions less as dispassionate ethical analysis than as anxiety management and reputational self-protection, a way to signal moral acceptability in environments increasingly hostile to Jewish particularism. Distance from consequence does not purify judgment; in this context, it often distorts it.

This inverts moral authority. Israelis living with daily risk are portrayed as driven by fear, emotionalism and excess, while Diaspora Jews far from the consequences assert calm moral clarity. In reality, lived consequence often produces greater sobriety, not less, which in turns sharpens moral clarity.

By 2026, this dynamic threatens to erode Israel–Diaspora trust more profoundly than any single policy dispute. Advice and concern are welcome. Empathy and support is even more important. Pressure without consequence is not.

What Will Carry the Jewish Future

Taken together, these eight trends point to a single reality: the Jewish future will be shaped less by external enemies than by internal clarity.

The Jewish future will be shaped less by external enemies than by internal clarity.

Antisemitism is not new. It has always adapted its language to the moral fashion of the age—religious, racial, political, or humanitarian. Jews have never survived by imagining it away. We survived by knowing who we were even when the world denied it.

What is new is the scale of Jewish uncertainty from within.

A Judaism reduced to culture alone, ethics detached from peoplehood, and universalism stripped of covenant has repeatedly failed the stress test of history. It does not equip Jews to endure sustained pressure. When Jewish identity is treated as morally suspect, it collapses precisely when it is most needed.

At the same time, a countercurrent is unmistakable. Across Israel and the Diaspora, a smaller but growing number of Jews, many of them young, are choosing a different posture: public Jewishness, moral confidence, and responsibility without apology. They are unwilling to let pressure define them.

The question facing the Jewish world in 2026 is this: Will Jews meet that pressure as a people unsure of its right to exist, or as a people who remember its mission and that their survival has never depended on permission?