Schism or Realignment? Emerging Identities in American Jewish Life

Event Details

• 📅 October 28, 2026

• 🕖 7:00–9:00 PM

  • Doors open at 6:30 PM

  • Workshop starts promptly at 7:00 PM

• 📍 Nicholas Martin Hall, Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

• 🎟️ Free, RSVP Required. Donations encouraged

• 🖼️ Full group exhibition on view in person October 27 - November 8, 2026 and online beginning October 27, 2026

Join us for Schism or Realignment? Emerging Identities in American Jewish Life, a community workshop exploring the new lines of difference reshaping American Jewish communities. The session is presented as part of 70 Seeds, a group exhibition imagining vibrant, pluralistic Jewish life in the United States in the year 2070.

American Jewish life is often described as splitting in two along a single axis: left versus right, religious versus secular, or one side of a familiar debate versus the other. But what if we're living through something more multi-dimensional than a clean schism? Class and education, generational change, geography, declining social connection, and evolving gender dynamics are producing new dimensions of disagreement that cut across the political and religious categories many of us grew up with. Labels like "progressive," "conservative," "observant," or "secular" now contain multitudes, and the people who share them often diverge sharply on the questions that matter most to them. The identity-based coalitions and institutions that have long structured American Jewish life are no longer holding, and new ones are forming along lines that don't yet have names.

In 2025, Democracy 2076 identified 17 emerging axes of political division in the United States that don't map cleanly onto left and right binaries. This workshop, designed by the Judeofuturism Project in collaboration with Democracy 2076, borrows several of those axes and adds new ones rooted in Jewish life.

This session asks what we're really disagreeing about, which differences our current categories obscure, and what these new fault lines could mean for Jewish identity, community, and coalition over timelines longer than a single election cycle, calendar year, or generation. Participants should come ready to get on their feet and move around the space.

The Judeofuturism Project is a multidisciplinary initiative supporting Jewish futures rooted in imagination, resilience, and collective thriving. We ask: What becomes possible beyond survival? How can communities think long-term? And what can Jewish wisdom offer a world in transformation? The Judeofuturism Project believes Jewish communities have always been futures-builders. Our mission is to recover, practice, and amplify that capacity, connecting the people, tools and ideas needed to strengthen our infrastructure of imagination for this moment and beyond.

Democracy 2076 provides strategies to inspire renewed faith in pro-democratic, protopian futures that moves people to action in service of a resilient democracy. We bring together a wide variety of organizations to discuss how the US is likely to change over the next 50 years and align on the necessary changes to improve our democracy over the long-term.

By co-creating and executing strategies in close partnership with local, state and national partners, we work to expand the pro-democracy ecosystem and ensure this work is grounded in the needs and experiences of real people. Democracy 2076 thinks on a 50-year time horizon and, in doing so, removes the constraints to feasibility that are invoked with a near-term, crisis response focus.