Jewish life in Australia is diverse and constantly changing. Yet the Jewish story is too often told in caricature, distorted, exaggerated and stripped of nuance. Gen26 is the antidote: it replaces the caricature with a portrait.    

If you read the communal press, follow public debates and spend time in online discussions, you might feel you have a good sense of what Australian Jews think. But public conversations tend to amplify some voices more than others, while many perspectives remain less visible: those still making up their minds, those who keep some distance from communal life, and those whose views are expressed more quietly.   

Throughout time, Jews have turned disagreements into something of an art form, and that range of views is one of our real strengths. Yet effective planning for schools, welfare services, cultural institutions, security and advocacy depends on understanding the full diversity of the community, not just the perspectives that are heard most often.  

Every so often a community must stop and look at the evidence. Gen26 – The Australian Jewish Community Survey is that stocktake: the most significant attempt in a decade to see Australian Jewry as it is, rather than as it is most often portrayed. It is one of the most powerful and most overlooked tools we have for understanding who we are, what we need, what we value and where we are heading. But it works best if you are in it.  

We know what such a portrait can achieve, because its predecessors revealed insights that shaped communal thinking for years. With 8,621 responses, Gen17 was the most significant study of its kind ever conducted in Australia, and one of the largest anywhere in the Jewish world. This revealed contemporary Australian Jewish life was far less homogenous than its public image suggests.  

Gen17 showed a drift away from Orthodox and traditional streams towards the progressive, post-denominational and secular. It found that fewer than half of Australian Jews regarded believing in God as important to their Jewish identity. It also found that the markers uniting us most were not matters of faith or practice but of ethics, memory and social justice: upholding moral behaviour, remembering the Holocaust, combatting antisemitism. It also highlighted an often-unseen reality: one in 20 Jewish people reported having to forgo meals or prescription medication because they could not afford them.