‘I feel I could be single forever’ – what dating is really like for Jews in 2025

Jewish people currently seeking a relationship, on sites such as Hinge or Bumble, report that dating apps today are full of the statement “no Zionists” or pictures of watermelons. They feel ostracised from the start.

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As she pored over profiles recently, Alice saw the comment, “Let’s make sure we're on the same page about Palestine.” “Which always means, you know, no Jews,” she sighs. “They say ‘no Tories, no Nazis, no Zionists’. It’s taken me off the sites – I'm not on them any more. I feel I could be single forever.”

She adds that, as a Zionist, to be put in the same bracket as “no Nazis” is the most hurtful thing of all. “We all know it means no Jews. What it comes down to is to feel like you shouldn't be there, and that you don't deserve love. It is very resonant, with all the antisemitism: we don't deserve to be heard, we don't deserve to be thought of, we don't deserve to live. And the final thing: you don't deserve anyone to love you. It's very hard.”

Feeling like she should look towards the Jewish community for a safer dating space, she went on JDate “as a test” and found no gay women on there. “That was really depressing. The Jewish gay community is very small, and most of them are coupled up. So it was like, ‘OK, that's that then.’”

And it’s not just a problem for gay Jews; straight people are equally driven out of the main dating sites by such political statements. Even before October 7, Adam Silas, a London-based tattoo artist, has had women in person and on apps ask him where he is from, only for them to abort the conversation when it is revealed that he has British- Israeli dual nationality.

“The question is really: why am I brown, and what kind of brown am I,” says Silas. He likes to “test the waters” by not immediately answering, “Israeli”. “I say, ‘Persian on my dad's side and Indian on my mum's side.’ Then they go, ‘so you speak Arabic?’” When he replies that he speaks Hebrew, they block him. “They say, ‘Oh, great. That's the last thing I need right now.’ Then they just leave.”

A woman approached him at a bar and started chatting, before asking where he is from. It was clear to Silas that she was trying to suss out if he was Jewish. “Within two minutes she realised,” he says. “And she said, ‘Well, have a good night,’ and walked off.”

London-based tattoo artist Adam Silas[Missing Credit]

Another time, which he calls “objectively funny, but also horrible”, was when he was talking to a woman on an app, and they were getting on. “And then she asked me what my favourite conspiracy theory was, which I think is quite a good conversation starter, and she said the Holocaust. For a second, I was like, is this her doing edgy banter because she doesn't know I’m Jewish? As the conversation progressed slightly, I realised she's a Holocaust denier.”

After October 7, he actively dated for a short time. “But mostly I was installing the apps then deleting them again, because I realised that it was just a hellscape for anyone Jewish,” he says. “Almost every single profile was a Palestinian flag or a watermelon emoji and I was like, this is not me saying you can't be pro-Palestinian rights, but can we just have a chat about movies? It made me so anxious. I realised very quickly that apps were not for me anymore.”

Some apps, like Hinge, allow the user to filter under religion, however that depends on whether the other person has listed their religion, and a lot of people omit theirs for fear of antisemitism.

As for whether Silas had considered Jewish sites such JDate or JSwipe, he used the latter for a brief time only. “It was weird, because I saw a load of people I went to high school with and never talked to. Because there are so few Jews in the world, you run out of people very quickly.”

And fortunately, he now has a girlfriend with whom he had already been friends for three years before they realised they were madly in love with each other. “I couldn't be happier in my relationship,” he says.

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While on Hinge, Tammi* trawled through endless profiles of women seeking to date women (or men and women) and found herself skipping over many that featured Free Palestine messages and emojis. Since Hinge indicates various prompts to include in your profile, including how you would end the sentence, “All I ask of you is…”, she ended up putting on her profile, to save time: “All I ask of you is…that you don’t see the Gaza/Israel conflict in binary terms, and that you can recognise it is a complex situation requiring empathy for both Palestinians and Israelis.”

While she is certain this statement put some people off contacting her, she did have a couple of users comment on it positively. One of those was her current partner.
“I know for her it reinforced that this was so someone she wanted to meet,” she says.

Her partner Gabrielle* had one spell on Hinge before October 7 and another one after, when she met Tammi. She recalls how before October 7, she saw many people with “No TERFs or Tories” on their profiles. But after October 7, this changed to, “No TERFs , Tories or Zionists…”

With such a state of affairs, it’s not surprising that so many are turning to matchmakers.

Aimee Belchak – who established The A-gency during the pandemic, setting up London-based Jewish singles aged 22-36 years old on blind dates – says politics is becoming a bigger issue for daters early on. She has experienced clients enjoying their dates until they discovered their politics are not aligned.

Before pairing potential couples for dates, Belchak will ask what their negotiables and non-negotiables are. While people still state physical attributes, Belchak says that politics is increasingly popping up.

Aimee Belchak established The A-gency during the pandemic[Missing Credit]

“Knowing where people stand is important, because it can feel unaligned with how someone might want to live their life. It's just becoming another thing to consider which didn't feel as big a couple of years ago.”

Now 30, and single herself, Belchak acknowledges how hard modern dating can be even without additional considerations. “It's really hard to meet people and to connect. Throw in the religion aspect, and people's own levels of religion, and then throw in what the world is like politically, and the pool gets smaller and smaller and dating becomes much more difficult.”

Belchak understands why it is simpler for Jews, who were once more relaxed about the background of their future partner, to look within their own community for a match. “That's not true for everybody, but many have had a realisation that marrying within the faith and to someone who is pro-Israel is important to them. People are doing a lot of reflection on the people they're willing to meet.”

Lara Besbrode is in her fifth year as the founder and managing director of the thriving agency The Matchmaker UK. While she is Jewish, the agency is not, however they work with many busy Jewish professionals, in the UK and around the world. And she has witnessed a definite shift in Jewish clients’ preferences.

Lara Besbrode, founder and managing director of the thriving agency The Matchmaker UK[Missing Credit]

“Before October 7, it wasn't top priority that they would bring forth their Jewishness and their identity, their love of Israel and their culture. Now, the feedback we're having from Jewish inquiries is they're saying it's very important to them that the person that they're being matched with shares their viewpoint on being Jewish.”

“When a client comes to us and says, ‘I'm Jewish, I can't find anyone Jewish; I'm prepared to consider non-Jewish, but they must be in support of Israel, they must not be antisemitic’ – I never heard that before October 7. It's very much at the forefront because people are experiencing antisemitism in the UK dating world.”

Besbrode, who describes herself as “very pro-Israel and Jewish”, stresses that this is not the case for every Jewish client. However, she has observed a pronounced increase in those struggling to date due to the rise in antisemitism.

“What people are saying is that they are finding it difficult to date outside of matchmaking. Whereas they might normally have met people and said, ‘I'm Jewish’, they are now not prepared to have that on their dating profile.”

While she is seeing people keen to date within the faith, she is also seeing those specifying their wish to avoid anyone not in support of Israel, or with an anti-Israel viewpoint.

“It is very interesting to see a bias towards people identifying whether they will or won't date Jewish. I am hearing more regularly that people will say, I do not want to date a Jewish person, or I don't feel comfortable dating somebody if they support Israel.”

She points out that The Matchmaker UK is a fully inclusive agency. All of its clients signed a code of conduct, which outlines the agency’s inclusivity and that it does not support racism, sexism or ageism, and so on. Besbrode has repeatedly had to refer clients to this document since October 7.

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As a preventative measure, the agency has introduced new political questions in their interviews with new clients, to be sure that they can be suitably matched. During the process, they also ask questions such as “are you open to all types of criteria?”

Besbrode gauges their views on world politics including Israel. “I get into an open discussion with them,” says Besbrode. “I didn't use to ask political questions before October 7.”

Before this, they asked if clients would date somebody of a different ethnicity, religion and culture. “We don't ask these questions now,” says Besbrode. “We have updated our interviews to prevent the opportunity for people to show open antisemitism. And because I am Jewish, and so are some of my team, and a lot of our clients are Jewish, we have added a layer of protection.”

Similarly, the agency still represents many clients whose profiles were written before October, so has gone back and removed mentions of their faith – for their protection.

While matchmaking brings her “joy” every single day, she says it is hard, especially for Jewish people under the age of 40. “Since October 7, the Jewish inquiries have got younger and younger with more parents contacting us for their children in their twenties. Clients will tell me, ‘I really don't want to date somebody not Jewish, because I can't explain who I am and what's going on, and I'm so frightened of them having some sort of antisemitic response or viewpoint on Israel.’

For those such as Silas who are concerned about the small size of the dating pool, Besbrode also collaborates with Jewish matchmakers around the world. They are united in the priority of matching Jews with Jews, so when a Jewish client approaches them and says they are happy to date non-Jews, they work as a team to avoid this.

“It’s almost an unspoken agreement that we try and keep them dating within our religion. We want to support Jewish matchmaking. We want to create Jewish opportunity. Our dating pool globally is small because we're a small population, so our work is harder. It's my priority to make a shidduch and to make a match. It's a blessing.”

*Names have been changed