Four weeks left to have your say in Gen26

Gen26, the national survey of Australian Jewish life, will close on November 24, with researchers urging those who have put it off to take part in the next four weeks.

With the survey nine weeks into fieldwork, and JCA research consultant David Graham said thousands had responded so far. “We know we can get large samples, but it’s about representativeness,” Graham said. “We want to make sure we’ve covered a representative sample of the adult community. There are certain groups that are sort of low-hanging fruit, easy to get, keen and ready to answer surveys, and there are other groups that are a lot harder to get.”

Those harder-to-reach groups include adults in their 20s and early 30s — past university, not yet settled with children — who are less likely to be synagogue members or on communal mailing lists. “Motivating them to commit what is for many up to 40 minutes to complete a survey, for people in their 20s that’s a big commitment these days,” he said.

Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking Israeli households are also under-represented relative to their numbers, and researchers are visiting aged care facilities with volunteers and iPads to help residents without internet access complete it.

Graham said the difficulty was not unique to Gen26. “You call them hard-to-reach groups, and they’re not just hard for us. ABS struggles with them for the national census,” he said. Young adults were absent from the lists researchers could access precisely because they were not synagogue members or donors, though they were reachable on social media.

He said a large team across the country had been working to close those gaps. “I’d say things are doing very well at the moment, and we should have a really nice sample for the community to use over the next few years.”

Graham said the pressures of the past three years made this round particularly important. “Obviously, we’re in a very different environment this time round than Gen17, and the heightened levels of antisemitism, people’s experience of antisemitism,” he said. “We’ve included many more questions this time round about experience of antisemitism to try and get as clear and broad a picture as possible of what Jewish people are experiencing.”

Those findings would be used not only to help secure the community but to inform the wider society, he said.

The survey also probes attitudes to Israel in more detail than its predecessors, including what people mean when they identify as Zionist, non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. “For some, the term Zionism is very triggering. One of the aims of this survey is to understand what do people think about this term,” Graham said. “We have in the survey this time round a plethora of questions that help unpack what people actually believe about Israel beyond just the label.”

Gen26 follows Gen17, whose findings shaped communal planning for years. That survey found almost one in three families interested in Jewish education were prevented from accessing it by cost, identified aged care as the community’s highest priority, and found one in 20 Jews had gone without meals or medicine they could not afford. It also found that in 2017, most Australian Jews did not see antisemitism as a major problem.

Graham said the data underpinned the ordinary business of communal life. “We’re still providing education services, healthcare services, security services, religious services, kosher food. It all needs data, and that’s exactly what this is about — the engine, if you like, of the community services.”

Asked whether people had raised concerns about identifying themselves as Jewish in the current climate, Graham said some had sought reassurance but few had refused on those grounds. “It’s entirely anonymous. Although we collect an email address during the process of contact, once the survey is done, even that’s removed,” he said. “The actual data are entirely anonymous. We have absolutely no idea who the individual is. It’s not like the census.”

“On the contrary, I think there’s a lot of motivation for people to report because I think they feel it’s their opportunity to explain to the world what’s going on Jewishly in Australia at the moment for them.”

Graham said Gen26 was one of the few projects the Australian Jewish community undertook as a whole. “Sydney will do its thing, Melbourne will do its thing, Perth will do its thing. There are very, very few examples where we all come together for one cause,” he said. “The numbers that we get in these surveys always surprises any polling company you talk to.”

Results are likely to be cross-analysed with this year’s census data, which is not expected until the middle of next year.

Gen26 is run jointly by the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and JCA NSW, and is open to anyone aged 18 or over who considers themselves Jewish and lives in Australia. Completing the survey takes around 30 to 40 minutes.

“These things only come around every nine or 10 years, given the complexity and expense of such a project,” Graham said. “Now’s the chance.”

Further information: gen26.com.au