[lbo-talk] Them there American Jews and Yees-raw-ail

[Bryan Atinsky]

This is from today's Ha'aretz.

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

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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."