Understanding Israel’s Place in 21st Century American Jewish Life

The inaugural Special Topics Research Initiative will address one of the defining questions facing contemporary Jewish life: how do American Jews understand their relationship to Israel in the 21st century? It will examine how that relationship has been understood historically, how it has changed, why inherited frameworks no longer fully capture the present moment, and what shared vocabulary can help Jewish institutions and broader audiences understand it more clearly.

Scope of the Research Initiative

What it’s not

U.S.–Israel relations, foreign policy, Israeli policy, or institutional advocacy.

The Research Initiative’s purpose is to bring together an intellectually and politically varied set of thinkers — respected both individually and because of the range of perspectives they bring to the group — in order to better understand one of the key aspects of contemporary American Jewish life.

Why This Matters

For decades, the relationship between American Jews and Israel was guided by the 1950 Ben-Gurion–Blaustein agreement, which established a framework of mutual respect and non-interference between Israel and the American Jewish community. Today, that framework no longer fully captures the realities of American Jewish life and its connections to Israel.

With nearly 90% of world Jewry now concentrated in the United States and Israel, the relationship has been transformed by political polarization, evolving philanthropic priorities, and dense transnational connections. In the absence of a shared framework, organizations, leaders, and everyday individuals are increasingly forced to navigate these tensions through improvised assumptions rather than shared understanding.

The result is not simply disagreement about Israel, but uncertainty over the basic terms through which American Jews and Jewish institutions understand their relationship to Israel.

Rather than attempting to impose a new consensus, the Research Initiative seeks to build the intellectual foundation and shared vocabulary necessary for informed conversation across disagreement.

Convened in a neutral academic setting at Tulane University, the initiative brings together leading scholars, public intellectuals, and communal leaders to study the changing relationship between American Jews and Israel and develop rigorous, research-based tools for public understanding.

Why Here, Why Now

At a moment when conversations about Israel and Jewish public life are increasingly polarized, the Stuart & Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience offers something increasingly rare: a rigorous academic setting grounded in inquiry rather than advocacy. That setting is essential: the research initiative depends on an environment where contested questions about American Jews and Israel can be studied carefully, across disagreement, without becoming advocacy or institutional position-taking.

This is what academia can do in ways that think tanks, federations, and advocacy organizations cannot: create the conditions for disciplined, evidence-based inquiry capable of producing frameworks durable enough to outlast the current moment. The Research Initiative reflects the Center’s broader mission of bringing together scholars, practitioners, and public voices across disciplines and disagreements to produce research that shapes both intellectual and public discourse.

What Makes This Research Initiative Different

Research Initiative Co-Chairs

Research Initiative Members

Dr. Ilana Horwitz
Fields-Rayant Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life, Tulane University

The Research Initiative will produce:

Ultimately, the initiative aims to provide a trusted and durable intellectual foundation for navigating one of the most consequential and contested dimensions of modern Jewish life.