The re-awakening of antisemitism has had a significant impact on the world of Jewish dating.
Whether singles are religiously observant or less affiliated, Derek Saker, co-founder and CEO of JWed.com says the change in both dating demographics and dynamics has been seismic.
According to Saker, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of less-affiliated Jewish singles, who before had placed little focus on dating someone Jewish, being motivated to meet and marry someone of their shared faith.
Bluntly speaking, Jews of this generation feel under attack like never before. And many less-affiliated single Jews seek to confront this new and hostile world with a spouse of shared and evolving Jewish identity.
Saker stresses this is not about a return to the bagel and lox mindset. Rather, this is about two singles who are attracted to each other emotionally and physically, to each other’s personality, interests and life goals, and feel a common bond of Jewish values and destiny.
While for religiously observant Jews, dating and marrying someone Jewish was always a given, there have likewise been monumental changes.
Jews are again on the move geographically – nationally, communally and individually.
Locations they once called home, where comfort, safety and opportunity were a given, have become places of unpredictability and uncertainty at best. This upheaval, with many moving to Israel for example, has changed the people’s fixed-abode mind-set.
Today, for a single Jew currently in London, and another in Los Angeles, geographical distance is secondary, as the Jewish world has become physically and emotionally closer.
Saker says more than 70 per cent of JWed’s 4,100 marriages are between couples out of city/state and country. The focus now more than ever is (as Saker says “rightly so”) to find not just the best local option, but one’s Jewish soulmate – however near, or far away they may currently live.
Saker says since October 7 there has also been a spiralling online in the number of singles between the ages of 50 and 80 actively seeking their Jewish soulmate.
Whether widowed, divorced or never married, loneliness, especially in a more antisemitic and isolated world, is no longer an option, says Saker, and a new life of simchah can begin at any age.
Within a safe and secure online dating environment, JWed enables Jewish men and women of all Jewish backgrounds, ages and locations, to find their Jewish soulmate.
With 4,100 couples already married, there has never been a better time to find your bashert on JWed.com
