Vol.:(0123456789) Contemporary Jewry (2025) 45:45 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-025-09669-8 Shared Roots, Divergent Paths: A Comparative Survey of Jewish Religious Beliefs in Israel and the USA Motti Inbari 1  · Kirill Bumin 2 Received: 13 September 2024 / Accepted: 28 July 2025 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025 Abstract In this study, we compare Israeli and American Jewish religious beliefs utilizing identical surveys that were conducted among representative samples of both Ameri- can and Israeli Jews in April and May 2023. We examine how the two groups relate to the core Jewish beliefs in God, the ideas of the Election of Israel, the afterlife, and the advent of the Messiah. The results show that American Judaism is mostly nonexclusive; more than 70% of the sample identified themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or as adherents of Judaism, but perceive Judaism as “not the only true religion.” In Israel, on the contrary, the majority confirmed their particularistic views of Judaism as their national religion, with roughly half of the respondents say- ing that Judaism is the ultimate, true religion. In addition, in almost all of the ques- tions that we asked, there was approximately a 10–15% difference between the two samples; Israelis generally exhibited warmer views toward traditional Jewish beliefs. There are also many similarities between the two groups. Both groups believe in a higher power in similarly high numbers, at around 90%. A majority of both samples agree with the idea that Jews are the Chosen People and that Israel is the Promised Land. Both groups exhibit a surprising age difference in beliefs in the afterlife, with the youngest members affirming them in higher numbers than the older generations. Keywords Israeli Jews · American Jews · Beliefs · Survey data · Chosen people · Promised land · Afterlife · Heaven and hell · Messiah · Jewish eschatology * Kirill Bumin kmbumin@gmail.com Motti Inbari inbari@uncp.edu 1 Department of Philosophy and Religion, The University of North Carolina Pembroke, Pembroke, NC 28372, USA 2 Metropolitan College, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA