More about them there US Jews and Yees-raw-ail: "Israel not high on young U.S. Jews' agenda"

["Bryan Atinsky" <bryan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is from today's Ha'aretz:

Israel not high on young U.S. Jews' agenda

By Nathan Guttman, Haaretz Correspondent


WASHINGTON - Young American Jews can no longer be
expected to supply sweeping support for Israel nor
to refrain from expressing criticism of it,
according to a new study on their involvement in
the Jewish community and their concern with Israel
in particular.

The study, conducted by Frank
Luntz, a leading Republican
pollster who visited Israel
recently, indicates that 80
percent of American Jews of
university age have no
connection to the life of the
Jewish community or to Israel.
In fact, their attitude toward
Israel is closer to that of

other Americans their age than to that of their
parents.

They define themselves as "American Jews" with the
emphasis on American, and do not automatically
accept the Jewish community's position of
traditional support for Israel. This does not
mean the Jewish young generation does not support
Israel, but for many the subject is not high
priority.

"It has to do with the fact that many of the
youngsters have not undergone their parents'
experience at the time the state was established
and got to know Israel only as a strong state ...
and [with] the intifada," says Roger Bennett,
vice president of Andrea and Charles Bronfman
Philanthropies, which helped finance the study.

Luntz and his team conclude that the veteran
Jewish organizations are failing to reach the
young target generation and to inspire it to the
kind of involvement that characterized its
parents' generation.

"We're selling to young Americans the Israel we
loved in the Six-Day War, while they grew up with
the background of Rabin's assassination and the
intifada," says Bennett.

`Them' - not `us'
The first worrying sign Luntz and his team came
across in their debates with focus groups of
young American Jews was the way they referred to
Israelis. They referred to them as "they" instead
of "us," which marked the Jewish American
discourse toward Israel in previous decades.

Another group held six consecutive debates without
mentioning Israel once. Only when the mentors
raised the issue, did the Jewish youngsters
remember to discuss Israel and its place in their
lives.

The study finds young Jews are cut off from the
U.S. Jewish and religious establishment.

They are interested in Judaism in the spiritual,
rather than the religious, sense, and see no
particular reason to join Jewish organizations
for the young, which are not considered "cool."
The younger generation is drifting away from
religion, so any attempt to appeal to them in the
name of a religious authority or to use biblical
quotes in advertisements, will simply not work,
says the study.

What American youngsters do care about is peace,
and the peace message is more important to them
than Israel's security.

The study's findings came as no surprise to
Daniella Gerson, the young Jewish editor of New
Voices magazine, which tries to give students a
different picture of Jewish community life and of
Israel. "When I went to Brown University, I found
that most of my Jewish peers did not take part in
the campus Jewish activity. They were cut off
from it," she says. She calls this severance
"Israel fatigue." Gerson says: "Many students
have difficulty understanding what is happening
in Israel. There are lecturers who tell them to
support Israel, but they want to understand why
and to ask questions," she said.

The Luntz study reaches this conclusion and offers
advice to Jewish organizations on how to appeal
to the young people and try to arouse their
interest in Israel and in Jewish life. Luntz and
his people suggest the organizations stop
preaching to the youth and start talking about
Israel.

He proposes dropping the huge, full-page ads in
The New York Times calling "We stand beside
Israel now and for ever." Such slogans, for which
the Jewish organizations pay a tidy sum, may be
good for the converted parents' generation, but
the young generation will ask, at best, why are
we "standing beside Israel." At worst will feel
alienated by the imperative form of the ad
headline and cut off from the whole thing.

The study suggests replacing any sermonizing with
debate and argument. Data indicates that young
Jews are interested in exploring their
affiliation to Israel and Judaism, and they can
be persuaded to become involved and to support
the community and Israel if they are the ones to
decide on their approach and position.

The study presented young Jewish focus groups in
New York and Los Angeles with some 120 ads, some
real and some prepared for the debate, in which
the Jewish organizations try to market Israel to
the American public.

Luntz presents a list he dubbed "the Ten
Commandments" which Jewish Organizations can use
to try to connect to the younger generation. In
addition to suggestions about improving ads
graphically, he suggests appealing to the young
people on the cultural level, by bringing shows,
comedies and singers who will speak to the
students and stress all the time the connection
between their being American to their being
Jews.

Perhaps the people who conducted the study would
have welcomed the way in which Hillel, a
campus-based Jewish network, acted in the
University of San Diego. In an attempt to bring
Israel closer to issues that interest the
students, Hillel activists distributed on campus
condoms with the slogan "Israel - It's still safe
to come."