A Poll Muddles the Picture of What American Jews Think

Early Monday, the news in the Jewish press was that American Jews overwhelmingly supported the new US and Israeli war on Iran. A poll conducted by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israel-based think tank with close ties to the Jewish federation system in the US, had found that 68% of what it calls “connected” US Jews backed the war. The subject line of JTA’s daily newsletter that morning read: “US Jews more supportive of Iran war than Americans overall, poll finds.”

The new poll seemed to offer important evidence in support of the Jewish establishment’s pro-war stance. Jewish establishment groups have tried to present American Jews as broadly supportive of the war, even as Americans in general overwhelmingly oppose it.

It’s not the first time that JPPI has produced data that conveniently proves that American Jews agree with the leaders of the American Jewish establishment. In November, weeks after Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoralty despite the vociferous opposition of the city’s mainstream Jewish leaders, JPPI announced that its survey had found that “the predominant emotion among American Jews following Mamdani’s win is concern.”

The results of JPPI ’s surveys of US Jews, which it conducts monthly, are widely reported in Jewish outlets like the Jerusalem Post and JTA. But what JPPI is measuring with these surveys is not the opinion of American Jews in general, but rather the opinion of the American Jews it decided to solicit.

JPPI says its polls are tracking the views of “connected” American Jews. Its methodology is dramatically different from polls like the Washington Post survey of American Jewish opinion on the Gaza war from last fall, for example, which built out a random sample of around 800 Jewish Americans, and then weighted their responses to match the demographics of the American Jewish community at large, as measured by the gold-standard Pew Research Center report on American Jews from 2020.

The JPPI poll looks nothing like that. The think tank has gathered a group of around 700 American Jewish volunteers who it polls each month. It describes the panel as “a group whose degree of connection to the Jewish people, the Jewish community, Jewish institutions, Jewish identity, and/or Israel is strong,” but offers few details on how it found them. One of the authors of the survey, the journalist Shmuel Rosner, a fellow at JPPI, told Jewish Currents that the panel was recruited through “various means including emails, social media, newsletters, prizes etc.” A person on JPPI’s panel who spoke with Jewish Currents said that they had been recruited through their local Jewish federation, which invited them to an online meeting to hear about the project.

JPPI doesn’t weight the responses to its surveys to match the demographics of American Jews at large, but only to maintain the consistency of the panel from month to month. “JPPI’s KolHaam poll does not reflect US Jewish opinion,” Rosner said, using the Hebrew name of the survey, which is referred to in English as the Voice of the Jewish People Index. “It reflects the view of a group we call ‘connected Jews,’” Rosner said.

The JPPI relies on this slippery notion of “connected” Jewish opinion to explain its use of a sample of American Jews that is significantly more religious and more politically conservative than the Jewish community at large. In the most recent JPPI survey, 28% of respondents said they were politically conservative, compared to 16% in the 2020 Pew report on American Jews. Reform Jews make up 23% of the JPPI’s latest panel compared, to the 37% of American Jews calculated by Pew.

“They seem to be surveying a convenience sample of Jews in their own network and then using the descriptor ‘connected’ to put a positive spin on the resulting biases,” said Matthew Berkman, a political scientist and assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College.

In a methodological statement from last year, JPPI says that it polls this group of “connected” Jews because a “certain dominance can be ascribed to it in setting the American Jewish community’s ‘agenda.’” That may or may not be true—Berkman calls the assertion that the bias of its sample mirrors the bias of communal leaders “unproven but not totally implausible.” But what it means in practice is that JPPI has set up a tool that will return survey results that are reliably more politically right-leaning and supportive of Israel than polls of Jews that use standard methodologies. Its track record bears that out: Last October, 25% of respondents to a JPPI poll said that Israel had committed war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, a month after the Washington Post poll of American Jews found that 62% thought that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. And in November, 70% of respondents told JPPI they identify as Zionist, vastly more than Jewish Federations of North America’s March 2025 survey, which was weighted to reflect the Jewish population as a whole, and found that only 37% of American Jews identify as Zionist.

The right-leaning, pro-Israel bias of JPPI’s sample reflects the institutional milieu of the JPPI itself. The group was founded by the Jewish Agency for Israel in 2002, and today has close links to Jewish federation system in the US, which provides significant financial support to the Jewish Agency. JPPI’s executive board includes the CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, the CEOs of the Jewish federations in New York and Cleveland, the former president of the Jewish federation in Chicago, and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative foreign policy hawk.

In presenting its results as representative of “connected” Jewish opinion, JPPI implies that connection to the American Jewish community means connection to the institutions of the Jewish establishment. “Jews are connected to each other, to a sense of Jewish peoplehood, to their anti-Zionist synagogues and havurot, to the millennia of Jewish tradition before the Zionist political movement,” says Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. “Anti-Zionist Jews are deeply connected. It’s that we’re not connected to genocide-supporting institutions.”

In the American Jewish and Israeli press, the JPPI surveys are frequently miscast as representing American Jewish opinion at large, as they initially were in JTA’s headline on Monday. JTA later updated the headline to note that the survey is meant to reflect the opinions of “connected” Jews. JTA editor Philissa Cramer said on the social media site Bluesky on Monday that the JTA did not initially use the word “connected” in their headline because “the word doesn’t really mean anything to readers without context.”

It’s the use of that squishy word, though, that has allowed JPPI to push its poll, and the vision of a right-leaning American Jewish polity it presents, into the communal discourse. “They have to redefine what a Jew is into the Jews who are likeliest to agree with them,” says Fox. “Connected to what, or to whom?”