A view of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Harvard Institute of Politics released its 52nd Youth Poll. Most of the headlines focused on the despair – only 13 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say the country is headed in the right direction, just 15 percent trust the federal government – the lowest figure in more than a quarter century – and half now say people like them have no real say in what the government does.

But buried in the ninth of the poll’s ten highlighted findings is a result that should command sustained Jewish communal attention. When young Americans were asked whether the United States’ relationships with various countries are mostly a benefit or mostly a burden, they sorted the world with striking clarity.

Canada was a benefit by 53 to 9 percent. The European Union was a benefit by 45 to 14. Mexico was a benefit by 40 to 20. Ukraine – 21 percent benefit, 31 percent burden. And Israel: 16 percent benefit, 46 percent burden. A net rating of negative 30 points, the worst of any country tested. The overall benefit-burden gap between Canada and Israel in the eyes of young America is 74 points.

In the political imagination of the rising generation, Israel has become the most burdensome American ally.

It is tempting to read this number through familiar lenses: campus encampments, social media saturation, the war in Gaza, the well-organized anti-Israel left. All of these matter. But the Harvard Poll is telling us something more structural.

Consider the company Israel keeps in young Americans’ minds. The two countries coded as burdens –  Israel and Ukraine – are precisely the two associated with active military conflict. The countries coded as benefits are trading partners and neighbors. The Institute of Politics noted the pattern: “relationships tied to military conflict are far more likely to be seen as [costly] burdens.” Despite the important economic and diplomatic ties the US has with Israel and Ukraine, young Americans are not generally conducting a careful audit of bilateral relationships, weighing intelligence sharing against UN votes, or thinking through the strategic logic of forward presence in the Middle East. They are sorting the world into things that feel costly and those that feel helpful and Israel, through no fault of its own, has been filed under cost.

This global relational sorting is happening inside a larger collapse. Just 26 percent of young Americans say they feel hopeful about the country’s future, down from 55 percent in 2021; among young Democrats, hope has fallen from 78 percent to 12 percent in five years. Half say they have no voice. Seventy-two percent worry the Iran conflict will escalate; 71 percent worry it will raise the cost of living. This is a generation that experiences daily life as a kind of siege: squeezed by housing and inflation, convinced the system does not work for them, certain that war abroad will arrive in the form of higher rent at home.

When a generation feels that way, foreign alliances do not get adjudicated on the merits. They get triaged. Israel, for better or worse the alliance most visibly entangled with the war young Americans most fear will spread, is the one that gets cut.

This is where the Jewish communal conversation needs to sharpen. The instinct, when poll numbers like these appear, is to treat the result as a messaging failure: to call for sharper campaigns, better content, more young influencers in the right rooms. Some of that is needed. But messaging is downstream of something deeper. Convictions about complicated allies are not formed in real time on a phone screen. They are formed slowly, over years, by the institutions that shape how a young person sees the world. When those institutions are strong, even unflattering news about an ally gets metabolized inside a larger framework of context, history, and relationship. When those institutions thin, no amount of messaging can compensate. The Harvard Poll is not telling us the case for Israel has been argued badly. It is telling us it has not been transmitted. That is a different problem. It requires a different response.

For most of the post-1948 era, the case for the US-Israel relationship was not made in real time on a screen. It was carried – quietly, durably, often unconsciously – by institutions: by synagogues that taught the Hebrew calendar alongside American civics, by Hillels that took the kinship between the world’s oldest democracy and its newest seriously, by federations that organized the Jewish year around Yom Ha’atzmaut as well as Yom Kippur, by public schools that taught the Holocaust as a moral fulcrum of the twentieth century, and by Shabbat tables where parents and grandparents spoke of Israel not as a cause but as a place, a relative, a part of the family.

Each of those institutions has thinned. Pew’s 2020 study of Jewish Americans found that 40 percent of Jewish adults under 30 now identify as “Jews of no religion” – the highest share of any age cohort. Hillel still operates on hundreds of campuses, but the environment around it has changed: FIRE survey data show that the share of Jewish students at Ivy League institutions self-censoring multiple times a week jumped from roughly 10 to 13 percent in 2021–23 to 35 percent in 2024. Civic education has been hollowed out across the political spectrum: the 2022 NAEP civics assessment registered the first decline in the test’s history, with nearly a third of eighth graders performing below NAEP Basic – meaning they likely cannot describe how American government works. The Holocaust is taught less and to less effect: a Claims Conference survey found that more than half of American Millennials and Gen Z could not identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 63 percent did not know that six million Jews were murdered. And the Shabbat table, that small but irreplaceable engine of intergenerational Jewish meaning, sets less often than it used to.

What was once carried by institutions is now carried by algorithms. And algorithms do not make the case for difficult allies. They show the dead child, not the missile shelter; the bulldozer, not the kibbutz cemetery from October 7; the protest, not the hostage poster torn down. This is not a conspiracy; it is the structure of the medium. Take the institutions away, and the case for Israel does not get made worse. It does not get made.

The convergence is hard to miss. Pew Research found in 2024 that only 16 percent of Americans under 30 favored US military aid to Israel – the same 16 percent who, two years later, told Harvard the relationship is a benefit. Two different instruments, the same floor. That is the sound of a generation that has not been given the materials to think about Israel as anything other than a cost.

What they have not been given is a serious account of what Israel contributes: intelligence cooperation that protects American lives, technological and medical innovation that benefits the world, a democratic ally in a violent region, and the living center of Jewish peoplehood after two thousand years of exile and persecution. None of this erases the anguish of war or the difficulty of Israeli politics. It changes the frame. Israel is not a line item in an American foreign-policy budget. It is an ally, a refuge, a civilizational achievement, and for Jews, a member of the family. A generation that never learns that larger story will see only the invoice. And no family teaches its children to see one of its own as a burden.

What is to be done? The temptation is to double down on the digital battlefield: more content, faster, with better graphics, more young influencers in the right rooms. This is the easiest investment to make, the easiest to measure, and the least likely to matter. It treats Israel as a brand to be marketed rather than a relationship to be transmitted, and it asks an algorithm to do work that algorithms cannot do. The Jewish community spends an enormous share of its institutional bandwidth on this kind of effort. The Harvard Poll is the bill coming due.

The harder, slower investment is in the institutions of formation themselves, and it has two tracks. The first is internal. American Jews can rebuild what only American Jews can rebuild: day schools that take Hebrew, Israel, and civic seriousness as inseparable, and that are funded as the backbone of Jewish continuity rather than as boutique options for the affluent; supplementary schools that have been allowed to atrophy into bar mitzvah factories; Hillels and Chabads strengthened not as crisis-response units but as durable communities where Jewish life is the default rather than the resistance, as is now the case at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and a small but growing list of southern campuses; and Shabbat tables treated not as a nostalgic flourish but as the most important weekly act of cultural transmission American Jews have, supported by federations and synagogues that take the Jewish home seriously as a site of formation.

The second track is broader, and it is where Jewish philanthropy may have its highest leverage. As I argued in these pages last week, the deepest answer to campus antisemitism is rebuilding the core curriculum at major universities – the foundational sequence in texts, history, and ideas that once equipped students to recognize when something they were being told was false. A generation that does not understand the American constitutional order, the Hebrew Bible, the long arc of Western and Jewish thought, or the basic outlines of modern Middle Eastern history will not understand why the world’s only Jewish state matters to it. The Beren Program at Florida, the new schools at North Carolina and Arizona State, the expanded Directed Studies at Yale: these are not Jewish-specific projects, but they do Jewish-specific work, because forming students capable of serious thought about anything also forms them capable of serious thought about us. The two tracks are the same argument. Jewish institutions transmit the particular; civic and humanistic institutions transmit the general; together they form the soil in which a serious view of Israel can grow. Neither track works alone.

Tocqueville saw two centuries ago that the great American achievement was not its formal institutions but the dense web of voluntary associations – religious, civic, educational, familial – that gave those institutions life. The decline of that web is now showing up in places he could not have imagined, including in how a 23-year-old in Brooklyn or Berkeley thinks about a country 6,000 miles away. The 46 percent seeing Israel as a burden is not the cause. It is a symptom of what happens when the connective tissue of a civilization grows thin on both sides of the Jewish-American hyphen.

The case for Israel will not be won on TikTok. It will be won or lost at the Shabbat table, in the day school, at the Hillel, in the seminar room where students still read Genesis and Locke side by side, and in the slow, patient, unglamorous work of forming the next generation. The Harvard Poll has shown us the cost of skipping that work. The question is whether American Jews still have the institutional patience to begin again, before the next generation forgets why it ever mattered.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.