Three years after Oct. 7, JFNA says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’

(JTA) — Levels of engagement in Jewish life have risen overall, establishing a “new normal” three years after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a survey released Thursday by the Jewish Federations of North America.

Thirty-eight percent of Jewish respondents surveyed by the federation umbrella group in May and June said they had increased their Jewish engagement in some way in the last three years, an increase of 7 percentage points over rates in 2025 yet down from the 43% rate in March 2024, in the months after the attacks. The survey had a margin of error of 1.8 percent.

JFNA researchers say the results demonstrate that this initial spike in engagement — which the organization dubbed “the Surge” — has had a lasting effect, prompting people to deepen their involvement in Jewish life even three years on.

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“I think the fact that people are continuing to engage with community during a difficult time is a good thing, and it’s an opportunity for us to meet people’s needs in this moment,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact and growth officer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the release of the findings Thursday morning. 

The number of “Surgers,” she said, includes Jews who were already engaged but have found ways to become more engaged since the attacks.

Many in the Jewish community feared that Jewish engagement “would continue to decline as we got further out from the events of Oct. 7, and that likely people would return to something like their behavior prior to Oct. 7,”  Kravetz said. “That is usually what happens after a major incident.” 

JFNA surveyed more than 2,800 Jews by text message in May and June of this year. Follow-up questions were generated by AI, which Kravetz said allowed researchers to ask open-ended questions about respondents’ relationship to Jewish community and quickly sort the answers by category.

This approach unlocked new insights. A top motivator for Jewish engagement was “social or interpersonal” connections in informal settings, such as Shabbat dinners or personal invitations to Jewish events. And in what seems like an encouraging sign for congregational Jewish life, 65% of Jews who “Surged” were turning to synagogues — though Kravetz noted that not every shul’s membership has grown as a result. 

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose adherents place a premium on interpersonal connections and often operate in environments lacking in other Jewish communal infrastructure, was the second-most-popular engagement option. 

Jews who had increased their levels of engagement were also more likely to voice support for Israel, the findings said. Ninety-three percent of “Surging” Jews said they were “emotionally attached to Israel,” compared to 51% of Jews whose level of engagement did not change. Additionally, 75% of Jews who grew their engagement agreed that “in general, Israel makes me proud to be Jewish,” compared to 36% who did not “Surge.” 

Overall, respondents’ most frequently cited barrier to participation in Jewish life was Israeli politics. Large numbers of Jews said they struggled to connect with Jewish community spaces because they felt misaligned on Israel in one direction or another — data that JFNA said it did not quantify because it came out of the open-ended section of the survey. 

The most common complaint, Kravetz said, was that Jews were seeking spaces they thought of as “apolitical.”

Kravetz said that many of those Jews, instead of dropping out of Jewish life, indicated they eventually found communities that aligned better with their values.

“These aren’t people who are walking away,” Kravetz said. “These are people who are leaning into Jewish community and are experiencing this tension. And usually, what we see is people are interested in finding Jewish spaces that meet their needs.”

The challenge for Jewish leaders, Kravetz said, is “to make sure that we have and support that diversity of spaces for people, so that they can find the right space that meets their needs.” 

But that diversity has limits, as many prominent Jewish leaders — including heads of JFNA — have also urged Jewish communal spaces to reaffirm a commitment to Zionism at a moment when more and more Jews feel divided on Israel. Some Jewish leaders have explicitly called to reject anti- and non-Zionist Jews.

Kravetz doesn’t see those values as contradictory or damaging to the “Surge.” She pointed to another recent JFNA survey, released earlier this year, querying Jews about their relationship to Zionism. 

While that survey found that only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist, it also found that 88% of the same population agree with what has historically been a basic tenet of Zionism: that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state.”

“I think being supportive of the premise of Zionism, and in how we define Zionism, is very much aligned with engaging the majority of the Jewish community,” she said. PJC