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Emily Tamkin is no stranger to hostile reactions to her work. A journalist and author focused on the intersection of politics and religion, she routinely writes about contentious topics—her first book, for example, examined the right’s obsession with George Soros. Yet she received more hate mail than ever after an article with a seemingly innocuous title: “Jews you disagree with are still Jews—even if they feel differently about Israel.”
She wrote the column a few weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel as a response to Jewish leaders who denounced anti-Zionist ceasefire protesters as “not Jewish.” “It made me really angry,” she said. “That’s your first reaction? Not to say, ‘You’re wrong,’ not to say, ‘Here’s why I’m right.’ Not to try to convince you, not to try to convince other people, but just to strip someone’s identity from them.”
She hoped that by acknowledging the divisive rhetoric roiling the community, she might also encourage American Jews to engage more meaningfully with one another. Instead, a year later, the divisions have only grown more entrenched.
“One of the things I think is so amazing about American Jewishness and American Jewish history and the American Jewish present is its pluralism,” Tamkin said, pointing to American Jews’ diverse views on everything from what it means to be Jewish to how they should engage in religious practice. When it comes to Israel, however, Tamkin worries that pluralism is being supplanted by polarization.
“If that becomes the case,” she said, “I really do think that something will be lost.”
Tamkin’s concern aligns with what has become conventional wisdom since the Israel-Hamas war began: that Jewish Americans are experiencing a sense of conflict cutting across generations, within families, among friends, and throughout communities, creating an us-versus-them drawing of lines that is a microcosm of our larger divided political system. The anniversary of the October 7 attack was accompanied by a string of articles acknowledging, lamenting, or celebrating this fracturing of the American Jewish community. And since the election, there has been even more ink spilled as people wonder whether this rift moved Jewish Americans—long a liberal voting bloc—further to the right.
In light of these circumstances, I was curious to know: What does the polarization among Jewish Americans look like from the perspective of the journalists who cover them? And how is it affecting the way they think about and report for their audiences?
As a communication scholar who has spent the past decade researching the relationship between journalism and the public, I have learned that if you want to understand a group of people, you could do a lot worse than asking the journalists writing for and about them. So, over two weeks in November, I interviewed fifteen journalists and editors who contribute to or work for news organizations dedicated to the American Jewish community. These organizations include those focused on local Jewish communities, such as J. The Jewish News of Northern California and the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as well as those focused on the broader American Jewish community, such as daily news sites like The Forward and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), and online magazines such as Jewish Currents and Tablet.
While most journalists are increasingly interested in understanding and engaging with their audiences, journalists with the Jewish press have spent the past year enduring the disorienting experience of watching their own audiences change. “I serve an audience today that is changed from October 6 of last year,” said Rob Golub, the editor of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. “It’s almost like a different community.”
Last October, the New York Times observed that some Jewish Americans were changing their news media habits by tuning in to Fox News for the first time in their lives. More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Jews were becoming more actively engaged in their faith.
The journalists I spoke with have seen these changes up close. They hear about them from readers who email them or stop them at events or in the supermarket. They follow their audience’s reactions to their stories on social media. They see the changes as symptomatic of a community grappling with a profound sense of hurt and vulnerability.
“Before I was serving an audience that cared deeply about having a Jewish community,” Golub said. “Now I’m serving an audience that cares deeply about having a Jewish community while in pain.”
In response, some American Jews who may not have been thinking as explicitly about their faith and identity prior to the October 7 attack are undergoing what Jodi Rudoren, The Forward’s editor in chief, calls an “awakening.” “These October 8 Jews,” she explained, comprise “people who felt a strengthening in their Jewish identity.”
Many of the journalists I spoke with agreed. “People who were not particularly engaged with their Judaism or engaged with a Jewish organization, after October 7 they were looking desperately for some way to engage with the fact that they were Jewish,” said Chanan Tigay, the editor in chief of J. “October 7 awakened something Jewish in them.”
Those who pointed to this awakening were quick to also state that it varies from one American Jew to another.
“There is definitely a cohort for whom October 7 gave them permission to or an excuse to get closer to Jewishness,” said Alana Newhouse, Tablet’s editor in chief. “How they define that Jewishness is disaggregated.”
The most important variable, when it comes to determining how American Jews have chosen to engage with their faith, is their political leanings, particularly their feelings about Israel. For example, journalists for the Jewish press observed that, for mainstream liberals supportive of Israel (who a Pew study suggests constitute the bulk of the American Jewish community), this awakening took the form of a creeping awareness that they had fallen out of step with other progressive communities.
“Jews who consider themselves liberal but also hold a strong bond with Israel tend to believe they have been betrayed by the left,” said Arno Rosenfeld, a reporter for The Forward. “The line is kind of, ‘We’ve been in allyship with other marginalized communities…and now all these communities we thought had our backs are saying we’re colonizers.”
Tanya Singer, the former community engagement general manager for Tablet, described this sort of awakening as she and her colleagues experienced it firsthand. “Right after October 7…we held a Zoom series about lost friendships because people felt like ‘My whole community dropped me. I reacted to October 7, they saw my reaction, and they were like, “You’re out.”’ That’s hard to square…when so many Jews, and this has been said so many times, we’ve shown up for so many other people.”
Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor at Brandeis University and one of the leading historians of American Jewry, explained why American Jews felt so jolted by this sense that they were “out of sync with liberal culture.”
“That’s what they’ve grown up with,” he told me. “Indeed, they believe there cannot be any distinction.”
Graham Wright, a political scientist working as an associate research professor at Brandeis, put this even more succinctly: “A lot of liberal Jews are concerned about anti-Semitism from their ostensible political allies on the left.”
Some have wondered if this sense of disconnect among liberal, pro-Israel Jewish Americans might lead some of them to shift political allegiances. “There is a lot of regret and unhappiness among some Jews who traditionally vote Democrat with how the party grappled with October 7 and the aftermath, how it seemed to be accommodating the far left and condemnation of Israel,” said Ron Kampeas, the Washington bureau chief for JTA.
Did this unhappiness result in formerly left-leaning Jewish Americans voting for Trump in the presidential election? Exit polls suggest this was not the case. However, these polls did not include the states that represent the bulk of the country’s Jewish population, such as New York and New Jersey. “You can’t talk about the Jewish vote if you exclude New York and New Jersey,” Sarna said. “That’s ridiculous.”
Political scientist James Druckman, who coauthored a report on Jewish Americans’ political preferences that came out just before the election, believes it is likely that there was indeed a rightward shift among American Jews. “I’ll be very surprised if the Jewish population did not vote for Trump at a rate that is significantly higher than they did in 2020, as was the case with many groups of Americans,” he said.
Wright, however, thinks that our profoundly polarized political landscape makes the prospect of liberal Jewish Americans switching allegiances unlikely. “A lot would have to happen for them to actually shift allegiance in such a polarized climate all the way from one side to the other,” Wright told me. “But that doesn’t mean they might not become more swingy in some sense.”
Of course, not all American Jews began their awakening from a liberal, Zionist perspective. As Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, which embraces an anti-Zionist stance, points out, a sizable number of Jewish Americans began thinking about their connection to Judaism for the first time and found themselves aligned with the anti-Zionist movement. Their awakening was therefore very different. Like liberal American Jews supportive of Israel, they felt excluded. Yet their sense of exclusion stemmed less from their treatment by fellow progressives and more from their treatment by fellow Jews.
“I’ve had a dozen of these conversations over the last year with folks who have said, ‘You know, I’ve always been politically involved in progressive politics. And I’ve had not much of a connection to Jewish life. And suddenly this year, I just found myself being consumed by these issues,’” May told me. “‘And I went to a synagogue for the first time in however long, and the rabbi was hysterical about students on campus, while there are children being killed in Gaza. And I just felt like the only place that I saw anything that felt sane to me was in Jewish Currents.’”
Many of the journalists I spoke with discussed the impossibility of separating American Jews’ identification with their faith from their opinions about Israel. As they explained, although awakenings take different forms, they are almost inherently tied up in staking out an opinion about Israel, which means that people’s increasing engagement in their religion has become as much a political act as one of faith.
“This is just a year where a lot of folks are feeling like their Jewish identity is a political issue for maybe the first time in their lives,” May said.
The journalists I spoke with were consistently clear that the October 7 attack and Israel’s actions since did not create a rift so much as intensify an existing one.
“All of the themes and trends that we saw before October 7 have escalated in intensity,” Rosenfeld said. “But most people were already kind of in their corners before October 7.”
Sarna likewise views the past year as a deepening of existing divisions. “Wars tend to exacerbate differences. They may not create them, but they exacerbate them.”
Indeed, journalists within the American Jewish press push back against the notion that a singular community existed in the first place.
“I don’t like the term ‘American Jewish community,’” Rudoren said. “I think that’s like a misnomer. And I think when people talk about it or write about it, I think they mean the organized Jewish world or the mainstream establishment Jewish organizations or maybe the people that those organizations think they represent.”
These journalists say that the divisions have not only grown more intense, but have also become more front and center in discussions about Jewish life, threatening to overtake nearly every other issue.
“We knew about the rift before October 7,” said Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, the CEO of J. “The Bay Area is where Jewish Voice for Peace [JVP] was founded.… But it wasn’t really the driving issue for people.”
One potential upside of these trends is a greater engagement with Jewish news and affairs.
“Our audience has grown significantly and meaningfully,” said Rudoren. “It grew even more in the fall, but it’s leveled off to a place that’s higher than it was.”
Yet this increase in readership has been accompanied by politicization in how news is consumed and critiqued.
“Jews are joining a lot of the college activist coalitions pushing to ban Zionists from their campuses,” said Andrew Lapin, who covers anti-Semitism and college campuses, among other topics, for the JTA. “There’s a lot of insistence of ‘We’re Jewish too.… We’re not being represented by the mainstream Jewish institutions.’… There’s a lot of defensiveness emerging from all these different camps, and it’s being expressed in different ways.”
While Pew recently found that, as of this past fall, 28 percent of American Jews say “Israel’s military operation has gone too far” and only a minority (42 percent) have confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lapin emphasized that the Jews in the anti-Zionist coalitions are still in the minority of all American Jews. “You’re more likely to see large groups of Jews organizing against them, whether on the donor/political level or in the form of counterprotests, than you are to see large groups of Jews siding with them.”
Journalists who have attempted to cover this growing divide are watching this sense of hurt and exclusion unfold on both sides, and witnessing its impact in real time on the dialogue—or, more often, lack thereof—between the two.
“The whole coverage seems to have gotten way more political,” Kaiser said. She described how each time her newspaper covers an anti-Israel protest organized by JVP, readers write to ask, “Why are you giving space to these people?” Her response: “They’re Jews. They’re Jews who are protesting Israel. It’s a Jewish story.”
Kaiser’s impression of these reader reactions echoes Tamkin’s: that a certain proportion of the American Jewish community would prefer to exclude, or at the very least ignore, those with whom they disagree.
“They want us to pretend that these Jews who are against what Israel is doing don’t even exist,” Kaiser said. “And of course the folks who are anti-Zionists are furious with us because they feel like we’re giving too much space to Israel and they write us letters all the time.”
I heard variations of this story from many of the people I spoke with. For example, Toby Tabachnick, the editor of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, described hearing from readers who were upset that her paper gave front-page coverage to an anti-Israel protest that took place outside a Jewish Federation event.
“We had done a preview of the Federation event the week before. At the event, there was an anti-Israel protest in front of the building. And we did an article about that with a photo on the front page of the protesters. We got so much negative feedback,” Tabachnick said. “It was like, ‘Why did you do that? The Federation event got three or four hundred people; there were a dozen people protesting. Why wasn’t there a big photo of the Federation event on the front page?’”
In light of these circumstances, journalists I interviewed described feeling intense pressure when making the everyday decisions that go into reporting and editing, such as which stories to cover, what photos to present, and even which words to use when there’s an understanding that every element of a given piece of reporting will be intensely scrutinized for signs of bias.
“We’re having to really consider every single story that we tell around these issues to see ‘Are we being as accurate as possible? Are we taking an angle that is really reflective of what we’re seeing in the community?’” said Kaiser. “We’re not worried about offending anyone, but what we’re worried about is losing trust and making people feel like we don’t see them.”
It’s precisely because of these concerns that Kaiser recently implemented a social media policy within her newsroom. “It’s been really hard for reporters because they can’t, in their personal lives, go off and express themselves the way they want to express themselves, because the situation is just way too fraught,” she said.
Rudoren pointed to something that seems to elude those who wish to see less coverage of anti-Zionist protests within the Jewish press: many of those engaged in these protests are doing so as Jews.
“It drives the legacy groups crazy, but the extent to which the pro-Palestinian movement on campus has had a strong Jewish minority as leadership figures, and that they’ve made the Jewish observance a key part of their activism, is also really interesting,” Rudoren said. “If you’re super active in JVP and setting up a solidarity sukkah for Gaza, you’re pretty Jewish. And your Judaism is totally engaged with Israel.”
May similarly described the Jewish Currents staff’s investment in anti-Zionism as being indelibly bound in their Jewish identities.
“There is a story that gets told about a place like Currents that we’re not caring about other Jews and not actually invested in Jewish life,” May said. “Our project makes no sense if that’s your view, because we’re consumed by questions of Jewish life and Jewish politics. The emphasis for us is not simply what is done to Jews, but what do Jews do?”
Those I spoke with described their audiences in a way that is rare among American journalists, with an emphasis on emotions. Rather than framing their audiences in terms of the topics they were most or least interested in, the journalists I interviewed described their audiences in terms of how they were feeling.
“Community journalists have to understand where their community is at emotionally,” Golub said. “Otherwise you don’t even have the ability to serve them. Because you don’t know who you’re serving.”
Typically, journalists describe their audiences in terms of their expectations for how the news should be presented (e.g., long-form articles, short videos, podcasts) or what topics it should focus on. The journalists within the Jewish press appear to be as focused on meeting their audiences’ psychic needs as their informational ones.
“One of the ways I understood what I was doing pre–October 7 was that there was a horrible situation happening on the ground, and I needed to bring awareness to it,” said Joshua Leifer, a former editor at Jewish Currents and the author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, published in August. “If people’s feelings are upset by that, then too bad, because what’s happening is more important than that. Post–October 7, I became more circumspect about the efficacy of that strategy.”
Indeed, often the words that journalists for the Jewish press used to describe their audiences focused on their feelings: exhausted, isolated, grieving, despair. As Rudoren said, “It’s really, really emotional. You know, I find myself writing back to people and being like, ‘I get it. I know how hard it is right now.’”
These journalists, unsurprisingly, have begun considering their audiences’ emotional state as they go about reporting for and on behalf of them. “We’re always thinking about the sensitivity of our audience and the emotional toll,” said Tabachnick. Her community has been grieving since October 27, 2018, when a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood left eleven people dead and six wounded.
“Our community is still raw from that,” she said. “We’re still on edge.”
But Tabachnick was far from the only journalist I spoke with who described an emphasis on understanding how American Jews’ emotions were shaping their interactions with their news, their politics, their communities, and one another.
“Fundamentally, what I am really interested in is the emotional panel of Jews,” said Newhouse. “I am interested in what they feel right now, what they are afraid of, what they are angry about, what they feel is thrilling, what they’re drawn to. Those are emotional questions. And they feel much more interesting to me—questions of emotions and aesthetics are much more interesting to me than instrumental questions of politics or coverage.”
Some of the journalists I spoke with see it as part of their job to help a frightened and dispirited community make sense of a world they no longer feel is safe.
“I spend a lot of my time trying to contextualize what’s going on for an audience that is very freaked out and alarmed,” said Rosenfeld.
Others see it as the job of journalists to go beyond helping American Jews deal with their fear—to help them work through disagreements within their own community.
“I understand that many, many American Jews are very afraid. I understand that many after October 7 felt isolated,” said Tamkin. “But I also understand the group identity is fluid and expansive and has room for people who disagree, or should have room for people who disagree.”
And still others—particularly those at Jewish Currents—see it as their responsibility to acknowledge their audience’s emotions while being careful not to center Jewish Americans’ emotional turmoil over the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government.
“It has been an ongoing and very challenging question to figure out how you both respond to the emotional lives of American Jews while also calling into question whether that is actually what is most relevant in terms of what we should be responding to at this moment,” May said.
Just as American Jews’ unfolding divisions in many ways mirror our increasingly polarized public, so do the challenges facing journalists covering the American Jewish community. Like their counterparts working in local and national newsrooms (or what those working in the Jewish press call “secular” news organizations), journalists working in the Jewish press are navigating a lack of resources and a struggle to maintain audience attention and support.
“We’re hanging on by our fingernails, like every other Jewish newspaper, and just doing the best that we can,” said Tabachnick, whose organization recently became the only Jewish publication to receive a $100,000 grant from Press Forward. “We’re all underpaid and overworked.”
American Jewish journalists are dealing with their polarized audiences the same way their counterparts everywhere are—within the tough constraints of diminished, precarious business models and social media platforms that encourage a team-sports, argumentative approach to current events rather than any sort of meaningful, deliberative discussion.
“It’s a great privilege to be at a Jewish outlet that is trying to be objective and trying to play it down the middle,” said Lapin of working at the JTA, a wire service that embraces an ideologically neutral approach to its reporting and provides news content for Jewish outlets at points all along the political spectrum. “Maybe it’s a fool’s errand in the larger journalism ecosystem.”
Part of the issue is the divisive nature of social media platforms, which at their worst promote misinformation and sow extremism. In light of these circumstances, several journalists I interviewed have leaned into other forms of news dissemination, such as print and podcasts.
“I steer more towards print, and that has actually worked out post–October 7,” Golub said. “It’s a little bit more siloed. I can speak to my audience with less of that risk of anti-Semitism.”
The other issue is revenue. For decades, the news industry has struggled to find a sustainable business model, and this struggle has been even more dire for local and community news outlets, which tend to be more modest in size and resources compared with their wider-reaching counterparts (for example, The Forward’s 2023 expenses were about $6.7 million, which is roughly $11 million less than Mother Jones’s). As more and more newsrooms turn to nonprofit models that privilege donations rather than digital advertising or subscriptions, some in the Jewish press are finding that brings with it its own set of challenges. For example, Leifer argued that it is difficult for Jewish news organizations to cover the news without needing to accommodate donor preferences. The result is what he refers to as implicit “red lines around what you can and cannot say.”
“So many of these publications are basically donor-backed,” Leifer said. “You can’t run a story that the board really doesn’t like. I mean, you can, but it’s complicated. It’s much harder.”
Perhaps these circumstances are the reason a number of the journalists I spoke with cited someone outside the Jewish press—Ezra Klein—when talking about a journalist they feel has done an excellent job engaging in cross-cutting discussions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. The New York Times columnist and podcaster has conducted interviews with figures on both sides of this story in a way that some I spoke with feel would be much more challenging to accomplish within the actual Jewish press.
“The reason why Ezra Klein is able to deal with the issues that he’s been dealing with so publicly at the Times is that at the Times, there are no official communal stakeholders,” Leifer said. “That gives him much greater freedom to transgress what would otherwise be communal red lines.”
Many indeed see a rift unfolding among American Jews that predates October 7 but has grown more all-encompassing since.
“I think we’re incentivized to disagree with one another and to be outraged so that we disengage further,” said Jake Wasserman, The Forward’s engagement editor. “And that if we stopped that, maybe there would be a chance that we could listen to one another better, and find middle ground in terms of solutions and understanding the divisions amongst us.”
The journalists I spoke with were mindful of the challenges of overcoming people’s entrenched ideas about themselves and the people with whom they disagree.
“To the extent that journalism can maybe do something, it is providing people with information or arguments or whatever that allows people to either think differently or see that they’re not the only one who thinks what they do,” Tamkin said. “Ideally, it’s both.”
Some wondered if diminishing the polarization within the American Jewish community should be a goal, even if it were within their power.
“I’m not so self-impressed as to believe that I can fix the divisions, and frankly, I’m not sure that is my role,” said Tigay. “But can my paper be a place where those in the community who disagree come together and at least acknowledge each other, and see each other represented? Yes, I think so.”
That doesn’t mean there are no journalists in the Jewish press trying to make an argument with their work. While May doesn’t see it as Jewish Currents’ goal to persuade people who have grown more entrenched in their positions since October 7, he does hope his publication appeals to—and wins the support of—younger Jews who are less intensely supportive of Israel. Indeed, Pew survey data collected since October 7 shows a generational split, finding that American Jews are starkly divided by age.
“We’re not really interested in persuasion insofar as trying to convince the rabbi at the big conservative synagogue in town,” May said. “What we are interested in doing is talking to that person’s kids.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus described the magazine’s prospective audience similarly in The New Yorker last September: “Currents offers sanctuary and a place of instruction for a generation of Jews who love their parents but have split with them.”
The journalists I interviewed agreed that the debate around the intersection of politics and religion—particularly as it relates to Israel—would continue to be heated and challenging, mirroring our polarized country more broadly. After all, our opinions about these things are deeply tied up with the stories we tell about who we are.
“These conversations, these debates, these discussions, the pitch sounds so high because you’re talking about your identity,” Tamkin said. “You’re talking about the thing that’s most personal to you: who you are and who you might be.”
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