Grant Center launches initiative examining American Jewish relationship with Israel

The Stuart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University has launched a new research initiative examining one of the most consequential questions in contemporary Jewish life: how American Jews understand their relationship to Israel in the 21st century.

Understanding Israel's Place in 21st Century American Jewish Life will bring together an intellectually broad and politically varied group of leading scholars, public intellectuals and communal leaders to study how that relationship has been understood historically, how it has changed and why inherited frameworks no longer fully capture the present moment.

Rather than developing policy proposals or seeking consensus, the Grant Center-funded initiative aims to build a shared vocabulary that can help Jewish institutions and broader audiences have more informed conversations about these issues amid disagreement. The project is not about U.S.-Israel relations and does not take positions on Israeli policy, U.S. foreign policy or communal advocacy strategies, said Grant Center Executive Director Michael R. Cohen, co-chair of the initiative.

"At a moment when discussions about Israel and Jewish public life are increasingly polarized," Cohen said, "the Grant Center is providing a unique methodology that will enable people with very different perspectives to examine difficult questions seriously, without advocacy and without a predetermined outcome, creating a stronger foundation and a common framework for understanding one another."

The initiative is co-chaired by Jonathan D. Sarna, university professor emeritus at Brandeis University.

"So much has changed since 1950, when David Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein forged an agreement concerning the relationship between American Jews and the new State of Israel," Sarna said. "The Grant Center's timely initiative provides a welcome opportunity to revisit this crucial subject in the wake of recent developments. I anticipate an illuminating discussion and report."

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 noninterference 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.

Nearly 90% of world Jewry is now concentrated in the United States and Israel, while political polarization, evolving philanthropic priorities and dense transnational connections have transformed the relationship. In the absence of an overarching framework, organizations, leaders and individuals increasingly navigate these tensions through differing 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.

The research initiative will examine that uncertainty through historical documents, scholarly inquiry and carefully moderated discussion. Participants were selected for their intellectual rigor and credibility rather than ideological alignment. The group includes scholars, public leaders and former officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The approach is intentionally different from an advocacy project or public debate. Rather than attempting to establish a new consensus, participants will study the changing relationship between American Jews and Israel and work toward research-based frameworks and interpretive tools that can help Jewish institutions and broader audiences understand it more clearly.

The initiative's members include:

David Barak-Gorodetsky, director, Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies, University of Haifa;

Mijal Bitton, dean, Maimonides Jewish Leadership Institute at the Maimonides Fund; sociologist, scholar of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, and spiritual leader;

Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College;

Brian Horowitz, Sizeler Family Chair of Jewish Studies, Tulane University;

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

Jack Lew, former U.S. Treasury secretary; former U.S. ambassador to Israel; professor of international and public affairs, Columbia University;

Ted Sasson, Curt and Else Silberman Professor of Jewish Studies, Middlebury College; Ruderman Family Foundation Scholar, Tel Aviv University;

Tevi Troy, senior fellow, Ronald Reagan Institute; former White House liaison to the Jewish community;

Jason A. Silverman, postdoctoral fellow, Stuart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience.

The initiative will produce a landmark report on the intellectual foundations of the relationship between American Jews and Israel, along with research-based interpretive tools and translational materials for Jewish communal institutions. The center plans to produce content and host public events to make the scholarship accessible to broader audiences.

The project is the Grant Center's first Special Topics Research Initiative, a new program designed to bring rigorous, nonadvocacy scholarship to timely questions in American Jewish life and translate that research for public understanding.