Gots to give credit to Hillel's creative marketing campaign, quoted at the end of the article:
"Hillel activists distributed on campus condoms with the slogan "Israel - It's still safe to come." "
Bryan
--------------------------------------- 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."