Israel and Diaspora Jews Split on the Same Questions

A September 2026 survey that asked American and Israeli Jews the same questions found they are drifting further apart on why antisemitism is rising. Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, had called in January for a bilingual magazine so both sides would argue from the same paragraph.

The poll is that experiment, run without the magazine. Israel Diaspora Jews still share family, liturgy, and fear. They do not share a pressure system, and identical wording has not produced identical answers.

The Translator Who Still Wants a Shared Magazine

Klein wrote his editor’s note on January 9, 2026, as a man who already lives in the gap. He was born in the United States, as were all of his grandparents, and he still sounds American. He has spent most of his life in Israel. For more than a decade he wrote about Jewish life outside Israel as a beat Hebrew readers needed. Then he moved to the English paper, about four years before that column, and found himself explaining Israeli politics, security, and the aftershock of October 7, 2023, to Diaspora Jews and to non-Jews who follow Israel closely.

He framed the split with a children’s show. His grandmother used to tape American Sesame Street on VHS and bring the cassettes to Israel, where the local version sometimes matched and sometimes did not. Oscar the Grouch lived in a trash can. Moishe Oofnik was the Israeli grouch in a different kind of can. Klein’s point was that two audiences can watch “the same” program and still receive two countries.

The adult version, as he told it, is a pair of questions that each make sense only inside one life. An American Jew asks why Israel does not simply do X. An Israeli asks why American Jews do not just move, given the hate. Each question fails to grasp the pressure on the other side. Klein said Diaspora Jews take in American politics, campus life, and culture wars first, with Jewish media as a second layer, while Israelis live inside Hebrew outlets with their own pace, codes, and reflexes.

This is not a disagreement. It is a collision between two realities shaped by different voices, different media, different languages, and different rules of engagement.

Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief, January 9, 2026 column

He wanted a weekly or monthly magazine published at the same time in Hebrew and English, with the same investigations, interviews, and photographs, and one editorial table. Agreement was not the aim. Shared ground was. He sketched a six-month trial: one major investigation a month in both languages, paired with an Israeli response and a Diaspora response, then a structured conversation around that text. Repeat it until it became routine.

He already occupies the chair that job describes. English-language Israeli papers and sites reach American Jews every day, and he edits the best-known of them. The column reads less like a launch plan than like a confession that translation, done at industrial scale, had not closed the file.

Pollsters Already Ran Klein’s Experiment

The Jewish People Policy Institute’s Voice of the Jewish People index, dated September 23, 2026, asked U.S. and Israeli Jews the same questions about antisemitism and policy. The U.S. sample is a panel of connected Jews, people with strong ties to Jewish life, not a snapshot of every American with a Jewish grandparent. Israeli Jews got the items on JPPI’s Israeli Society Index. That is as close as a newsroom gets to Klein’s shared paragraph.

The year moved the two publics in opposite directions. Among connected American Jews, the share who said Israeli policy contributes “to a great extent” to rising antisemitism went up. The share who said there was no link at all went down. In Israel, the view that there is no connection strengthened. JPPI’s own write-up said the U.S. shift “widens rather than narrows the gap.”

THE SAME SURVEY, TWO PUBLICS

A year earlier the U.S. “great extent” figure was 31 percent and “no connection” was 32 percent. Israeli Jews who saw no link at all stood at 38 percent then and 44 percent in this round. Connected American Jews who want large policy change rose from 21 percent to the share in the table; those who want no change at all fell from 45 percent. Ideology cuts the American panel more sharply than geography does. Strong liberals land at 68 percent on policy as a driver; strong conservatives land at 1 percent, and 55 percent of them reject any link. Harris voters in 2024 sit at 56 percent; Trump voters sit at 5 percent.

Ties to the country move the needle too. Among Americans who have visited Israel once, 48 percent give policy “great extent” blame. Among those who have lived there, 31 percent do. Even people who have done Klein’s hardest version of shared life, residency, do not collapse into the Israeli distribution.

The same panel is harsher than Israelis about foreign punishment. Connected U.S. Jews are more likely to call an academic boycott, calls for punitive measures over Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state both anti-Israel and antisemitic (64 percent versus 42 percent on punitive measures; 45 percent versus 32 percent on recognition). A boycott of settlement goods, asked for the first time after European steps, came in at 53 percent “both.” Criticism of Israeli policy and a thinner skin for campaigns against Jews are running in the same people. A magazine with identical copy would have to hold both facts at once.

War at Home, Isolation Abroad

Klein’s most useful scene was not about newsstands. A friend who lives in a settlement in Judea went to speak on American campuses. His daughter asked if he was scared. He told her they live in Israel. She was reading viral clips of encampments. He was reading sirens, funerals, and reserve duty. Klein called this the longest war Israel has ever fought, and he said Israelis calibrate danger on that clock.

American Jews have been calibrating something else. The American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America 2025 report, released February 10, 2026, from interviews with 1,222 Jews between September 26 and October 29, 2025, found that 91 percent of American Jews feel less safe after the Passover arson at the Pennsylvania governor’s residence, the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum, and the firebombing of a Boulder, Colorado, hostage march that killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond.

We need Americans to wake up to the reality of what their Jewish neighbors are experiencing. Right now, in America, when Jews gather, whether at synagogue or a community event, it’s routinely behind metal detectors and armed guards.

Ted Deutch, CEO, American Jewish Committee

AJC 2025, IN BRIEF

• Two-year rise: 86 percent say antisemitism increased in the two years after October 7, 2023.
• Personal targeting: 31 percent say they were a target in the past year, and 80 percent of that group changed their behavior.
• Younger Jews: 47 percent of those 18 to 29 report being targeted, against 28 percent of those 30 and over, including a 7 percent share reporting a physical attack against 2 percent.

Campus life is the other daily weather system. Forty-two percent of Jewish college students in the 2025 report said they experienced antisemitism in school, up from 35 percent in the 2024 edition. Eighty percent of parents of Jewish high school students said campus reports matter at least somewhat in college choice, up from 68 percent. the chant Globalize the Intifada would make 88 percent of U.S. Jews feel unsafe to some degree. Klein’s Israeli traveler and his American daughter were not misreading the same clip. They were standing in different blast radiuses.

HOW AMERICAN JEWS CHANGED THEIR DAYS

• Hidden markers: 41 percent avoided wearing or showing things that might identify them as Jews, up from 23 percent in 2022.
• Quieter feeds: 39 percent avoided posting content that would mark them as Jewish or reveal views on Jewish issues, up from 27 percent in 2022.
• Skipped rooms: 30 percent avoided places, events, or situations out of concern for safety or comfort, up from 16 percent in 2022.
• Leaving, at least as a thought: 17 percent considered leaving the country because of antisemitism in the past five years, up from 13 percent in 2024.

Fifty-five percent changed some behavior in the past year. In 2019, 42 percent said Jews in the United States were less secure than a year before. In this survey, 66 percent said so. Online, 73 percent experienced antisemitism by seeing it or being targeted, the first time AJC’s series has gone above seven in ten. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all rose. That is the media system American Jews actually inhabit. It is not a Hebrew news cycle, and it is not a joint magazine.

Klein wrote that after October 7 many Israelis felt antisemitism on their own skin while traveling, a shock because sovereignty was supposed to have ended the old Diaspora condition. American Jews, in the AJC figures, never got that illusion. They got metal detectors at the JCC and a debate about whether a chant is politics or a threat. Shared photographs would not make a siren and a dining-hall freeze feel like one event.

Why American Jews Still Say They Care About Israel

The walk-away story is already in circulation, the claim that American Jews are preparing to treat Israel as a debt to repay. Pew’s survey of 12,574 U.S. adults, fielded May 4 to 17, 2026, and released July 9, does not read that way among Jews, even as the broader public sours.

Among U.S. adults, a favorable view of Israelis fell to 52 percent in 2026, from 67 percent in 2022 and 64 percent in 2024, with 42 percent unfavorable. Favorable views of the Israeli government dropped to 32 percent, with 62 percent unfavorable. Favorable views of the Palestinian people sat at 50 percent, nearly level with views of Israelis. Adults 18 to 29 gave the Palestinian people 58 percent favorable and the Israeli people 32 percent. Democrats’ favorable view of Israelis fell to 43 percent; Republicans held at 65 percent.

Jewish adults are not that map. 83 percent of Jews viewed the Israeli people favorably, down from 89 percent, which is a real softening and still a different country from the general public. Jews under 50 were at 76 percent, against 88 percent among older Jews. Favorable views of the Israeli government sat at 41 percent under 50 and 52 percent among older Jews. Attachment to people is not a blank check for a cabinet. That distinction is the American Jewish sentence Klein keeps hearing as “why doesn’t Israel just do X.”

JPPI’s connected panel, a more engaged slice than Pew’s Jewish oversample, still treats delegitimizing campaigns as hate even when it blames policy for the climate. The academic-boycott line in the table is the tell. A public that was abandoning the country would not land at that share. It would shrug. This public argues, donates, visits, and then grades the government like a noisy relative, which is a family fight, not an exit.

Half the Panel Already Knows Hundreds of Hebrew Words

Klein’s magazine treats language as the missing pipe. JPPI’s September extra findings include a fact that sits badly with that pipe: half of the connected respondents know hundreds of Hebrew words or more, with the strongest familiarity among people who have lived in Israel. These are not tourists who have never seen a letter. A large share of the people he most needs already have enough Hebrew to fail at his test in two tongues.

WHAT ALREADY LOOKS LIKE SHARED TEXT

• English Israeli news: Diaspora readers already get daily Israel coverage in English, including from the paper Klein edits, and the misunderstanding he describes has not receded.
• Identical survey items: JPPI put the same antisemitism-and-policy questions to connected American Jews and to Israeli Jews in September, which is the six-month experiment in miniature.
• Hebrew on the panel: Half the connected U.S. sample already knows hundreds of Hebrew words, so the wall is not the aleph-bet.
• Lived time in Israel: Even respondents who have lived there, at 31 percent on “great extent” policy blame, do not match the Israeli 28 and 44 split.

Intellectual traffic is lopsided in the other direction too, and Klein is honest about that. Most Israelis, he wrote, have never heard of the authors American Jews debate about Israel. American Jews do not know the essayists, podcasters, and books that structure Israeli arguments about war, democracy, religion, and identity. Gala speakers on the American circuit are often unknown to ordinary Israelis. A bilingual magazine could put those names on facing pages. It could not make a reservist and a sophomore need the same name.

Divide and Rule Meets a Walk-Away Story

The public argument about this split has almost nothing to do with mastheads. One camp treats talk of a gap as a tactic. Eylon Levy, a former Israeli government spokesman in the October 7 war, put that version in March 2025: the anti-Israel mob, he wrote, is trying to play divide and rule, “to tell Diaspora Jews that they can only be safe if they turn against half of the Jewish world.” He called it a trap.

The other camp treats the gap as a moral break that ends with American Jews walking away from Israel and making amends. That story is loud and it is not what the connected panel or Pew’s Jewish sample is doing. Major American Jewish institutions have not peeled off either. The institutional layer still organizes missions, lobbying, and security, while the survey layer argues about blame. Those two layers can both be true in one week, which is why a reader can be told the split is a lie and a crisis in the same feed.

Rep. Daniel Goldman of New York pushed a third line in August 2026, after a fight over campus speech: people may want a clean split between “Israel” and “Jews,” he said, but violence against American Jews in the name of opposition to Israel makes that distinction academic. AJC’s report sits with him on the ground. The D.C. and Boulder attackers, in charging papers the committee cited, shouted “Free Palestine” during the acts. American Jews are being targeted as Jews for a war they do not vote in. Israelis are being told, from abroad, that their wartime choices explain the targeting. That is the collision Klein named. It is not a missing sidebar.

Former Knesset member Einat Wilf, speaking on the paper’s own channel weeks before Israel’s October 27 election, went further in the other direction. She said Israel had abandoned Diaspora Jews after October 7 and that the state’s neglected front is the world’s Jews, not only Gaza or Iran. That is a government-priority claim, not a typography claim, and it landed because Israeli attention has been on the war Klein said Americans do not feel in their bones.

Wilf’s charge and Klein’s magazine can be offered in the same newsroom because both are trying to fix a bond with a tool the other side does not think is the tool. One wants a ministry of the Diaspora with teeth. One wants a joint issue. The September index says the argument is about whether Israeli policy is a cause of hate, and whether the answer is to change the policy. Paper stock does not settle that.

What the October 27 Election Will Not Fix

Israel votes on October 27, 2026, the first general election since October 7, 2023. Connected American Jews are watching and mostly cannot touch the lever.

THE 2026 CLOCK ON A JANUARY WARNING

1. January 9, 2026: Klein publishes the bilingual-magazine proposal and the Sesame Street diagnosis.
2. February 10, 2026: AJC releases the 2025 antisemitism report from fall fieldwork, with safety and campus figures at new highs for the series.
3. May 4-17, 2026: Pew fields the survey that later shows U.S. views of Israelis at 52 percent favorable.
4. July 9, 2026: Pew publishes those findings, including the 83 percent Jewish figure for the Israeli people.
5. September 23, 2026: JPPI posts the index in which the same questions widen the U.S.-Israel gap on policy and blame.
6. October 27, 2026: Israel holds its election; 8 percent of JPPI’s connected U.S. respondents are eligible to vote.

On that panel, 57 percent prefer an opposition victory and 17 percent prefer the current coalition, with 8 percent expressing no preference and 19 percent saying it is not their place to say. Seventy-seven percent follow the race very closely (31 percent) or somewhat closely (46 percent). Among those who have lived in Israel, 45 percent follow it very closely and 92 percent follow it at least somewhat. Among those who have never visited, 13 percent follow it very closely and more than a third do not follow it closely. Attention tracks airplane hours. Ballots do not.

Klein’s grandmother’s tapes, he wrote, showed that different versions of the same story can still feel like home, and that small shifts in language can change how people see the world. The September index is a small shift in the other direction: the same wording, a wider gap. A joint magazine can still be worth putting out, as a habit of respect. It will not turn a reservist’s calendar into a campus security briefing, and it will not make 57 percent of a voteless panel feel heard by a coalition 17 percent of them prefer. On October 27, Israelis will count ballots. American Jews will read about them, in English, and argue from there.