Leonard Saxe

This study attempts to identify the nature and prevalence of Jewish students’ experiences and concerns about antisemitism on campus in the 2025-26 academic year and discusses them in the context of the experiences of Asian, Black, and Muslim students regarding anti-Asian, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim prejudice. The analysis also investigates whether students who hold antisemitic views also hold prejudiced or discriminatory views toward other minority groups. The data for the study were collected in the first semester of the 2025-26 academic year from a national sample representing over 300 four-year colleges and universities. Nearly 4,000 undergraduate students responded to the survey (including nearly 750 Jewish undergraduates).

This report focuses on the experience of summer 2025 US participants in Birthright’s 10-day trips. Summer 2025 marked a year and a half since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. Although a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel had been agreed upon six months earlier, Israel was still experiencing regular Houthi missile and drone attacks from Yemen. Having made the decision to travel to Israel during this precarious time, many participants found themselves confronting an outbreak of a new war that erupted between Israel and Iran in June 2025. Birthright, which was already tasked with operating successful, safe, and meaningful trips during a time of intense conflict, was additionally faced with mounting an evacuation operation of all its participants by boat to Cyprus and then to their home countries.

The report aimed to understand the characteristics of participants; how they perceived the program; and how participation affected their relationship with Israel, their Jewish identity, and their Jewish connections. The findings are based on a pair of surveys: one survey conducted prior to the trip in spring 2025 and the other conducted several months after the trip in the fall of 2025.

Ensuring that Jewish educational initiatives address the growing diversity of the US Jewish community requires, in part, understanding the background characteristics of participants and how a given educational program affects the trajectory of Jewish engagement for those with little, moderate, or a substantial amount of prior Jewish education and experiences. The present paper undertakes this analysis using the example of Birthright Israel. First, using latent class analysis, we develop a data-informed typology for classifying different religious and cultural childhood experiences of American Jewish young adults. We then examine the extent to which each group in the typology is impacted by participation in Birthright Israel, using an analytic approach that compares pre- and post-trip responses for both individuals who participated in Birthright Israel and a comparison group of those who applied but did not participate. We find that for some measures, Birthright Israel has a significant impact on participants with a variety of background experiences, while for other outcomes, Birthright Israel’s impact is concentrated among those with the least exposure to Jewish life.

Since October 7, 2023, antisemitism on American campuses has become a contested political issue. Scholars of antisemitism argue that the relationship between antisemitism and political ideology follows a "horseshoe" pattern, with higher levels of antisemitic hostility on both the far right and far left. However, existing empirical research has yet to establish this connection, in part because antisemitism may be expressed differently on opposite sides of the left-right political spectrum. To address this challenge, we develop a measure of antisemitism grounded in both formal definitions and empirical data about how US Jewish college students perceive anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements and then measure the prevalence of these attitudes among non-Jewish US college undergraduates. We find that explicit anti-Jewish attitudes are more common among those with far-right political identities, and beliefs about Israel that formal definitions and most Jewish students find antisemitic are more common among those who identify with the political left.

The 2024 Northeast Florida Jewish Community Study creates a portrait of the characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors of the Jewish community in Northeast Florida.  The study is based on an analysis of data collected from 846 eligible households between April and June 2024. We found the community has grown rapidly, with one quarter of all Jewish adults having moved to the area within the previous five years.

This study explores how faculty at US universities think about contentious political issues and how these issues are addressed in the classroom. We examine the political identities and viewpoints of faculty, their levels of political activism, their concerns about being targeted because of their political views, their approach to addressing current political controversies in the classroom (climate change, racism in America, Donald Trump and American democracy, Russia-Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine conflict), and the extent to which they hold hostile views about Jews and Israel. The study is based on a survey conducted in spring 2025 of more than 2,200 faculty at the 146 Carnegie-2021 classified R1 universities, who taught undergraduates in the 2024-25 academic year. This study provides insights about the role faculty play in shaping the climate on campus, in light of the intense focus on US institutions of higher education around issues of viewpoint diversity and antisemitism and the ongoing related federal investigations and funding cuts to university programs.

Jewish Maine: The 2024 Community Study is the first ever in-depth assessment of the size and characteristics of the Jewish community throughout Maine, and the first study to cover Southern Maine since 2007. The study provides a comprehensive portrait of the state's 19,000 Jews; their families; their Jewish attitudes, affiliations, and behaviors; their health and financial well-being; and other measures of their engagement in Jewish life.