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.

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Illustrative.

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.

What we are learning

There is a lot going on in the lives of young Americans; to understand Jewish young adults in the U.S. today, we have to start from the texture of their everyday lives. The pace is fast, the demands are layered and the emotional load is constant. Given this context, the insights from Project Prism are eye-opening in some instances and affirming in others. Here are just five examples:

• It’s heartening to see that a lot of meaningful Jewish life is happening informally and “off-site.” Three out of four Jewish young adults say they do something Jewish in their lives on a regular basis, often at home with family or friends, and 45% of all Jewish young adults say this is the only mode of participation for them. For Jewish young people, informal participation is often substantial, social and meaningful. Celebrating holidays with friends or family, enjoying Jewish food and other cultural practices, and talking about Jewish topics with friends and family are the most common recurring informal activities. This is significant because it suggests that for many young adults, Jewish connection is not disappearing; it is simply taking place in more informal, flexible and lived ways.
  
• Jewish young adults don’t lack a sense of purpose. They’re finding purpose closer to home — but the role that Jewish identity contributes to a purposeful life is underdeveloped. While 68% of Jewish young adults report they have a high sense of direction or purpose in life, only 23% say being Jewish plays a strong role in that. The primary sources of purpose in life are helping others, personal growth, work or career, and supporting family. The broader cultural research shows this generation is responding to instability, overload and institutional distrust by investing in activities where their effort leads to a visible result. An opportunity exists to connect the everyday sources of meaning young people already trust and pursue —helping others, supporting family, sharing meals and connecting with neighbors — to a larger Jewish framework of continuity, ethics and belonging. 

• Immersive, ongoing and socially intensive experiences were especially likely to generate a sense of belonging and to have a lasting positive impact. Respondents most commonly reported they felt a sense of belonging in experiences of Israel travel programs, Jewish summer camp, bar or bat mitzvah experiences and regularly participating in Jewish teen and campus groups. Belonging or fitting in, not mere exposure to a program, is what appears to convert participation into a lasting positive legacy for Jewish experiences. Merely attending an activity is less predictive of later positive outcomes than whether the participant felt they belonged.
  
• A key driver of participation in Jewish experiences is already feeling connected to Jewish people or communities. When designing for Jewish life, we’ve generally thought of connection as an outcome, but it is actually also one of its preconditions. Jewish connection is relational before it is institutional. While connection depends on close and emotionally grounded relationships, we know young adult life today does not make those relationships easy to build. Jewish organizations and institutions do contribute to feelings of connection, but these feelings are generally built on top of a foundation created by family, friendships and shared culture. 

• There is an opportunity to design experiences for young adults who do not have two Jewish parents (58% of the respondents) or who say they were raised either partly Jewish or not Jewish (55%). These Jewish young adults report a lower sense of connection, have fewer Jewish background experiences and are less likely to participate in Jewish experiences currently. However, many say they are open to engaging more in Jewish life. Because they report less familiarity with the norms of Jewish spaces, we should not assume a universal approach is the answer to engaging these young people.

This research, conducted December 2025 through April 2026, was a natural opportunity to learn how events impacting Jewish people in the U.S. and internationally in the last few years have reshaped feelings of connection and engagement. Eleven percent said the recent events caused them to engage more in Jewish spaces, 18% said they engaged more selectively, 11% said they engaged less and 10% said they disengaged in participating in Jewish spaces altogether. Among the 39% who said they engaged more selectively, less or disengaged, the most common barriers cited were hostile or toxic conversations, lack of room for nuance and one-sided messaging in those spaces. These barriers to participation are being raised across a spectrum of backgrounds and identities. 

These insights are illuminating. 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. For anyone who aspires to design Jewish learning experiences that resonate with the full diversity of Jewish young adults, we need to fill our field’s knowledge gap with more timely and rigorous studies of these people. We need to learn 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. In turn, we need to act on these new insights, thinking about the current opportunities that are most impactful, and thinking about new opportunities yet to be created or scaled. 

It’s also important to acknowledge the broader challenges around connection and belonging in young adulthood today. The research shows that across the sample, building close, emotionally grounded relationships takes real effort in the context of busy schedules, declining third spaces, more mobile lives and the pull of online or curated forms of connection. In that sense, the Jewish-specific findings sit within a bigger social picture: young adults are trying to build meaningful connections in a world that does not always make that easy, which highlights the important role the Jewish community could play in their lives. 

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. By investing in deeper understanding today, we hope to help the field create more relevant, resonant and impactful Jewish learning experiences for tomorrow.

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