State of the Arts Survey: What U.S. Audiences Say About Jewish and Israeli Inclusion in the Arts

To accompany the State of the Arts project, ADL’s Ratings and Assessments Institute (RAI) conducted a survey of U.S. adults to better understand public attitudes toward Jewish and Israeli inclusion in the arts. The survey was fielded online through Prolific in July 2026, with the analytical sample including 951 U.S. adults.

Survey respondents were largely open to Jewish and Israeli inclusion in the arts: Among respondents, 88% said they somewhat or strongly agreed that they would visit an art gallery exhibiting work by Jewish artists, while 87% said they would attend a performance featuring Jewish performers. Similarly, 84% said they would buy a book that interested them even if they knew it included Jewish topics or characters.

Support remained substantial when respondents were asked about Israeli-identified work. Approximately three-quarters said they somewhat or strongly agreed that they would visit a gallery exhibiting work by Israeli artists (77%), attend a performance featuring Israeli performers (75%), or buy a book that interested them if it included Israeli topics or characters (73%).

These results provide preliminary and suggestive evidence that there may be a meaningful gap between perceived market risk and stated audience preferences. Across ADL’s research in the literary, museum, and entertainment sectors, interviews have highlighted heightened caution around featuring Jewish and Israeli themes, artists, creators, and performers, often driven by concerns about controversy, audience response, or commercial risk. The survey findings complicate those assumptions: many respondents expressed willingness to engage with Jewish and Israeli artists, performers, and stories across galleries, performances, and books.

Respondents also broadly recognized exclusion from cultural spaces as harmful. 85% somewhat or strongly agreed that excluding Jews or their work from cultural spaces because they are Jewish contributes to anti-Jewish hate, and 72% said the same about excluding Israelis or their work.

However, while the majority of respondents seemed to find Jewish and Israeli exclusion from the arts problematic in principle, a concerning number still somewhat or strongly agreed that it is “understandable” that some people would avoid going to art galleries that show work by Jewish (32%) or Israeli (46%) artists. In other words, respondents who viewed Jewish or Israeli exclusion from the arts as problematic sometimes nevertheless thought it was “understandable” for people to avoid viewing Jewish or Israeli art in practice. These findings suggest that even when people view exclusion as wrong in principle, they may still excuse or rationalize it in practice.

Overall, our survey respondents expressed substantial willingness to engage with Jewish and Israeli art, performance and literature, while also recognizing the broader harms associated with excluding Jews and Israelis from cultural life.

Our analytical survey sample included 951 U.S. adults surveyed on the online survey research platform Prolific. We were able to receive a total of 1,000 responses. However, based on Qualtrics’ thresholds, we identified 49 responses as potential bots and therefore excluded them from the analytical sample, reducing our analytical survey sample size to 951 U.S. adults. While bot detection on Qualtrics is a narrow and imperfect measure of data quality, given the low percentage of responses that seemed to be potential bots, and to preserve the integrity of the analytical data, we elected to exclude suspected bots from our analyses. Because this is a non-probability sample, we do not interpret the results as nationally representative. Instead, we interpret the data as offering preliminary and suggestive evidence of attitudinal patterns. Although we selected the option on Prolific for a representative sample which uses quota-based sampling to approximately match the sample to U.S. census benchmarks on certain demographic characteristics, we do not treat the results as nationally representative because this is a non-probability sample.

In the analytical sample, 47.6% of respondents identified as a man, 51.3% as a woman, and 1.1% in some other way in terms of gender. Regarding education, 40.1% of respondents said they had a bachelor’s degree, 15.5% had a graduate degree, 29.6% had completed some college or an associate’s degree, and the remaining respondents had completed high school, GED or less than a high school degree. In the analytical sample, 2.3% of respondents identified as Jewish in terms of religion. Additionally, 6.7% of respondents said they identified as Jewish aside from religion, such as culturally, ethnically or because of their family’s background (this number is not mutually exclusive with the religious identity percentage). The sample thus overwhelmingly represents responses from non-Jewish individuals, but there are still some Jewish respondents in the sample.