A newly released public opinion survey commissioned by progressive pro-Israel U.S. think tank J Street has uncovered striking, underrepresented perspectives among American Jewish voters, revealing a stark disconnect between mainstream political narratives around antisemitism and the community’s on-the-ground views. Conducted by leading research firm GBAO Strategies between October 28 and November 3, the poll captured responses from a representative sample of Jewish American voters, yielding data that challenges long-held conventional wisdom about the community’s political priorities.
The most headline-grabbing finding shows that a staggering 80% of surveyed Jewish voters believe the Israeli government’s ongoing operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are directly driving a surge in antisemitic sentiment across the United States. An additional 66% of respondents stated that high-profile campaign spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) targeting political candidates who criticize Israeli policies is actively exacerbating domestic antisemitism. Further, 60% of participating Jewish voters argued that mainstream Jewish advocacy groups that reflexively frame all sharp criticism of Israeli state actions as antisemitic are cynically exploiting legitimate public concerns about antisemitism to shield unpopular Israeli government policies from scrutiny.
Jim Gerstein, founding partner at GBAO Strategies, emphasized that the poll results dismantle oversimplified media and political portrayals of the American Jewish community’s stance on Israel and antisemitism. “For years, conventional narratives about how Jewish communities process concerns over antisemitism and what it means to support Israel in U.S. political spaces have been wildly off base,” Gerstein explained. “What we see here is deeply nuanced, layered thinking that is almost entirely erased from most mainstream coverage of Jewish American views.”
The survey’s findings also align with notable outcomes from the most recent U.S. midterm elections, where Middle East policy, including U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, emerged as a central wedge issue in competitive races nationwide. In Michigan, progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed secured a historic landslide victory over AIPAC-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, with separate post-election polling from Mercury Public Affairs showing El-Sayed earned 60% of votes cast by Jewish residents during early voting. El-Sayed ran explicitly on a platform of restructuring U.S. foreign aid to Israel and other Middle Eastern states, and publicly condemned Israeli actions in Gaza as genocidal. The same Mercury Public Affairs survey found that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly been targeted by right-wing critics with false accusations of antisemitism, holds a 49% favorability rating among Jewish American voters — more than double the 20% favorability score assigned to outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Across the full J Street-commissioned poll dataset, 72% of Jewish American voters reported casting their ballots for Democratic candidates in the midterms, while 76% stated they support implementing formal U.S. sanctions against violent extremist settler groups operating in the West Bank. J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami noted that the data thoroughly debunks pervasive, harmful stereotypes about American Jewish political priorities that dominated discourse throughout the 2024 election cycle. “For months, politicians and media pundits treated Jewish Americans as a monolithic political football, claiming our community uniformly demands unconditional, unwavering support for every policy of the current Israeli government,” Ben-Ami said. “These results tell a completely different, far more accurate story. Jewish voters overwhelmingly rejected the Trump-aligned Republican agenda, voted for Democratic candidates by a wide margin, and firmly believe the Israeli government must be held accountable for its actions. They want U.S. leadership that works toward lasting, equitable peace and security for both Israeli and Palestinian people, and they are resoundingly rejecting the false framing that supporting Israel means giving its government a blank check with no oversight.”