The data also offered unique bright spots, such as high levels of what Rosenzweig classified as Jewish “participation.”

Three-quarters of Jewish children in the area’s interfaith households are being raised Jewish, for example, and nearly one in four of all Jewish children in Milwaukee are enrolled in a Jewish day school or yeshiva, higher than the national average.

But it is the Zionism question that has seized public interest, in part because it was asked at all.

For decades, according to Matthew Boxer, a researcher at Brandeis’s Cohen Center for Jewish Studies who led the Milwaukee study and has worked on many others, local federations conducting population studies would ask about topics such as emotional attachment to Israel, but largely refrained from directly asking their communities whether they identified as Zionists.

That changed with the 2020 Chicago federation survey, also led by Boxer’s team, which found that 40% of the region’s Jewish adults self-identified as Zionist while 80% agreed with the statement “It’s important for Israel to be a Jewish state.”

Since then, Boxer said, around a dozen federations have opted to ask some version of the Zionism question on their surveys. Recently released findings from the federations in Boston and St. Louis found similar results to Chicago’s and Milwaukee’s; new survey results in Austin, Texas, and Orange County, California, are expected later this year. (Some have decided against including the question, too.)

The findings have functioned as something of a Rorschach test for American Jews. Those who are deeply critical of Israel say the fact that a minority of American Jews identify as Zionists prove that American Jewish groups should roll back their support for and engagement with Israel. Those who want to preserve the historic relationship urge looking beyond the label and focusing on the fact that a significant majority of Jews are aligned in their support for traditional tenets of Zionism.

In an essay for JTA published after the national federations group released its survey, Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact officer, concluded that most Jews still believe in the “historic definition” of Zionism, while conceding that the term has gone through “definition creep.” She urged federations to “open pathways for learning and belonging,” and avoid “responding with anger when the moment calls for steady leadership.”

For Rosenzweig, who came to Milwaukee in 2019 after years working with Jewish young professionals at Detroit’s federation, polling her community about Zionism was a no-brainer even when they were first conceiving the survey before Oct. 7. “We have to ask the question,” she said.

“The demographic study is not meant to answer what we want to hear,” she said. “We need to know where they stand, where do people agree and disagree?”

While the survey found a split on Zionist identification, it found broad consensus on other issues, sometimes ones that are in tension with each other. For example, 84% of Milwaukee Jews somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement, “I consider it important for Israel to be a Jewish state.” At the same time, 88% agreed that “Israel should be a democratic state for all of its citizens, regardless of religious identity.”

Rosenzweig said she believes the two ideas could coexist. “Our community can support Israel and support Israel’s right to exist and be a Jewish state, and they’re concerned for the human dignity of Palestinians. It’s not binary,” she said. “And I think that’s really an important message about who American Jews are.”

Rabbi Noah Chertkoff, who leads the Reform Congregation Shalom in the suburb of Fox Point, said he wasn’t surprised by the survey results on Zionism but cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from them.

“I proudly identify as a Zionist, but I also recognize that the word itself has been badly distorted and, at times, deliberately defamed by people more interested in vilifying Jews than engaging seriously with Jewish history, Jewish belief and the Jewish people’s own understanding of our story,” he wrote in an email to JTA.

Chertkoff added that his own congregants have expressed both “real anguish” over Oct. 7, as well as concerns for democracy in Israel and “the suffering of civilians on all sides of the conflict.” He added that the survey should be read as a “mandate”: “If we want the next generation to inherit a durable connection to Israel and Zionism, we cannot rely only on inherited labels.”

Rabbi Lex Rofeberg, a Milwaukee native who runs the alternative Jewish engagement network Judaism Unbound from his current home in Rhode Island, said he believed the survey is surfacing more than mere confusion over the word Zionism.

“As a person who would self-identify as ‘not a Zionist,’ I hope that Jewish organizations in Milwaukee, and beyond, would respond to this finding not by trying to shift my beliefs, or by insisting that I don’t really know what I’m opposing,” he wrote in an email. “I’d hope instead they’d recognize the reality that ‘I’m not a Zionist’ is a sincere, deeply-held belief for a lot of Jews all around the world, and that includes just over 40% of Jews in the greater Milwaukee area.”

Jewish institutions, he suggested, “should respond to lower support for Zionism not with ‘how do we re-brand Zionism’ but rather ‘how can we create meaningful Jewish experiences for folks who are actively not Zionists?’”

Jewish Milwaukee, which Rofeberg calls “awesome” and credits with having “shaped me as a person and a Jew,” could achieve this, he insists.

What the federation does with this new information is still to be determined. Rosenzweig is currently drafting “a very extensive strategic plan,” she told JTA, but said it was too early for specifics. She does hope to focus on points of commonality, rather than trying to convince half of the local Jews they are, or should be, Zionists.

For inspiration, Rosenzweig has been dusting off Milwaukee’s community survey from exactly a century ago. (Meir had already moved to Palestine by way of Denver at the time.) Back then, she said, the community was roughly the same size it is now, and its Jewish funding arms were raising roughly the same amount of money, adjusted for inflation.

“It was talking about the ‘Campaign for Palestine,’ in 1926, because the Jews of Eastern Europe had nowhere to go,” Rosenzweig said. “They were worried about it then. And so today, we’re responding to the moment. And yes, it looks dark. There were dark days, and we survived because we came together. We know how to do this.”