There’s been an 8 percent increase in Jewish households in Greater Boston since 2015 – but among the more than 333,000 people making up those 138,200 households, nearly one-third don’t identify as Jewish, according to the Greater Boston Jewish Community Study released last week.
Among its findings are that among younger adults, 38 percent identify as somewhat or strongly anti-Zionist, a finding that suggests why a non-Zionist synagogue says it is finding a growing membership in Cambridge since opening last summer.
The study, reflecting research between December 2024 and April 2025 drawn from a sample of nearly 4,800 adults in local Jewish households, was released by Combined Jewish Philanthropies. The organization said the findings highlighted evolving demographics and other changes at “an important post-10/7 inflection point for Jews across the region” – a reference to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel led by Hamas, a Palestinian organization.
“Our findings show that over the last decade Greater Boston’s Jewish community has become more diverse,” said rabbi Marc Baker, chief executive and president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies. The studies have come out once a decade for the past 60 years.
There are 18,800 Jewish households across Cambridge, Somerville, Medford and Winchester, the organization said. A majority (51 percent) of Jewish households in the region now include someone who does not identify as Jewish, and 65 percent of Jewish households with children are interfaith. The study shows that Jews ages 18-29 tend to feel less connected to the Greater Boston Jewish community (40 percent) and their local communities (36 percent) than respondents who are 75 years or older (57 percent and 51 percent, respectively).
Antisemitism and hate crimes
Nearly all Jewish adults express concern about antisemitism globally (94 percent), and among Jews in Greater Boston, nearly one in four (23 percent) report experiencing or seeing antisemitism, most of which manifests as overhearing or seeing antisemitic remarks.
Thirty-six percent of younger Jews report being somewhat or very concerned about antisemitism in Greater Boston, compared with 80 percent among the oldest cohort. Younger Jews, though, say they are more likely than any other age group to change their behavior in response to antisemitism, including avoiding an event, being less likely to identify as Jewish in public or self-censoring what they say online. More than half (55 percent) of those ages 18-29 reported altering at least one of these behaviors, compared with 37 percent of all respondents.
The annual crime report by Cambridge police for 2024, the most recent year available, showed 34 hate crime incidents reported, which is 38 percent below the 55 reported in 2023 and 36 percent above the 10-year average of 25 from 2014-2023. The reporting includes “a series of malicious destruction reports in which anti-Israel stickers were discovered around Harvard Square in mid-October,” police said. The 17 recorded religion-based incidents are more than those related to race and ethnicity (of which there were 14) and sexual orientation or gender identity (six).
Somerville’s Department of Racial & Social Justice got 48 complaints of hate or bias in 2025, 11 of which might be classified as antisemitism, a spokesperson said. Five complaints drew the involvement of police: two cases of graffiti, two of stickering and one egging of a home. (There is no uniform categorization for antisemitism, so the 11 cases were determined based on how the incidents were described, the spokesperson said.) The remaining complaints reported to the department referred to such things as slogans on signs, a T-shirt or a Facebook comment.
“For additional context, RSJ notes there were 15 hate/bias complaints reported in the calendar year 2025 that may be classified as ‘anti-Palestinian,’ ‘anti-Muslim’ and/or ‘Islamophobic,’” the spokesperson said.
Anti-Zionism is new to survey
While eight in 10 people in the Combined Jewish Philanthropies study overall agree Israel should be the nation-state of the Jewish people, 38 percent of younger Jewish adults (ages 18–29) identify as somewhat or strongly anti-Zionist, compared with just 11 percent of adults 45 and up.
Baker expanded on the findings in a Friday call, noting that apples-to-apples comparisons on anti-Zionism survey findings by his organization aren’t possible: The study has “changed significantly” over the past 60 years and “even from the one 10 years ago” – when there was no question about being anti-Zionist, because a decade ago there was no perceived need.
“The very fact that we weren’t talking about these terms 10 years ago indicates that this is a growing phenomenon,” Baker said. “The degree to which especially some among our younger generations are seriously wrestling with Israel is a fact of American Jewish life right now.” A survey question asked about feelings before and since the “watershed” date of Oct. 7, but did not explore whether or how Israel’s actions since that date had changed feelings.
The questioning among younger American Jews makes some sense to Baker: Most have known only the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, he noted, and are further from “periods of Jewish vulnerability” that would underline the importance of a Jewish state.
“Older adults have lived more of Jewish history,” Baker said. “The degree to which people are both closer to and have a knowledge of and understanding of Jewish history and Israeli history tends to correlate to a clear and stronger commitment to the importance of Israel.”
Cambridge’s non-Zionist synagogue
As of August, Cambridge is home to one of the country’s 30 non-Zionist synagogues: V’ahavatah, begun by rabbi Greg Hersh. It serves a growing group of around 280, the rabbi told Massachusetts Peace Action’s Jeannie Connerney.
V’ahavtah was founded “to let Jews know that you can be a good Jew and a non-Zionist, but also to let non-Jews know that we exist, that not every Jew is a blind supporter of Israel,” Hersh told Massachusetts Peace Action. He attended a Reconstructionist rabbinical college in Philadelphia and working for nine years as a rabbi at Temple Emmanuel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Wakefield. (Reconstructionism calls for “radical inclusion” and rejects the idea of a supernatural god and Jews as the “chosen people,” Connerney writes.)
Hersh said he felt good about his work in Wakefield until “everyone seemed to regress” after the October 2023 attack and he “noticed a return to a single, Israeli narrative,” Connerney writes. He turned away from Reconstructionism to follow his own path, founding V’ahavtah with five other people.
“I can never go back to working in the mainstream Jewish world; now no synagogue will hire me,” Hersh told Connerney. “Interest will continue to grow in non-Zionist synagogues. So many people have been turned off to Jewish life over the last two years, and for so many of us, just seeing an Israeli flag is something we don’t want to be a part of. I think there will be more and more of these synagogues that pop up because there’s a real need for it.”
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