Two results were extraordinarily concerning.
A huge 36% of the teens felt that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and an astonishing 32% felt sympathy for Hamas.
At first blush, it looks like Jewish teens are continuing the trend of younger people being less sympathetic to Israel. But when you look at the details, the actual takeaway is a bit different.
The majority of those who sympathize with Hamas are 14 or 15 - 60% . By the time they reach 18, the support for Hamas plummets to 9.2%.
In other words, the teens who support Hamas are the ones who know the least. As they go through high school and learn a little more about the world, they completely turn around. You wouldn't trust a 14 or 15 year old's opinion on politics - why would anyone think they know what Hamas is?
A similar but not as dramatic transformation takes place for the "genocide" question: from 49.5% to 25.2% the older they are. To a 14-year old, "genocide" means "acting mean." 18-year olds are more likely to know what the word means and the difference between a war and extermination.
When you look at the strength of their Jewish background (exposure to Jewish education and camps,) you see a similarly dramatic straight line between how little Jewish education they have and how much they agree with Israel haters. Those with little Jewish background were five times more likely to say there was a genocide than those with a strong Jewish background, and ten times more likely to sympathize with Hamas.
Among Jewish teens, it is the ignorant - both Jewishly and generally - who are more likely to sound like BDSers.
The answer, as it has always been, is more and better education. The teens who had visited Israel, the teens with friends and relatives in Israel, the teens who have learned about Israel are the ones who are more pro-Israel.
But it is not only exposure to and education in Zionism. It is also more general exposure to Jewish education and to Jewish rituals.
It is not hard to understand why. Those who believe that they are part of a larger people - who look at their fellow Jews as family - are going to sympathize more with their people.
Ignorant Jewish teens who are thrown into college are generally on their own for the first time, and they gravitate to groups they can identify with. The "Jewish Voice for Peace" type groups give them the pretense of hanging with Jews while they can pretend to be revolutionary and break away from their parents, which is, after all, fun.
Jewish parents who do not immerse their children in Judaism from birth are doing their kids a huge disservice, and they are doing their people a huge disservice. Kids need to feel that they are part of something much bigger than them, part of a people who have contributed more to the world than any other, part of a history that goes back thousands of years, part of a tradition of morality that does not easily change with the times. They cannot get that from being raised as "liberal" or as "conservative" alone - words that have changed their meanings in living memory.
This survey is frightening, to be sure. But it gives us the clearest path forward of any such survey I've ever seen. The Jewish community - and, especially, the American Jewish community - has got to wake up and go back to fundamentals.
