JTA — In a recent speech on nutrition, the nation’s top health official offered a perhaps surprising explanation for what is ailing Americans.

“We’re engaged right now in spiritual warfare and … the malevolent forces want to drive us apart and end our connection to each other,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on March 5.

It’s not clear if Kennedy was speaking metaphorically, having frequently talked about his own spiritual crises over the years. But he was using language that many thought was targeted at those who believe that modern science is no match for the unseen “malevolent forces” assailing Americans’ physical and mental well-being.

According to recent polling, 54% of Republicans and 37% of Democrats believe in the literal existence of demons. A Marist Poll found that the number of Americans who claimed to have actively been in the presence of a ghost or spirit more than doubled between the 1990s and the 2020s, from roughly 9% to 24%.

TikTok is awash in tarot readers, crystal healers, astrology influencers and wellness gurus promising access to unseen forces. Influencers peddle alternative COVID cures and supernatural explanations for current events. Essayists and social sciences are attributing the popularity of the occult, the supernatural and conspiracy-minded thinking to a rejection of institutional authority. In a period of profound economic and political instability, they suggest, people seek metaphysical answers when the official explanations feel insufficient.

But if this all feels very 2026, a new exhibit at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research suggests we’ve been here before.

“Jews Are Magic,” now open at YIVO’s Manhattan headquarters, explores the Jewish fascination with mysticism, fortune telling, amulets, psychics and occult practices. While the exhibit reaches back to the biblical and Talmudic periods, its main focus is on the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. In the face of increasing urbanization, oppression in Russia and the pull of assimilation, Jews in Eastern Europe and New York’s Lower East Side, no less than their non-Jewish neighbors, found solace in the occult.

“In this time period, when people commonly think that sort of magic is getting left at the wayside and people are becoming more modern, they’re just as engaged with these unseen realities as they were beforehand,” said Samuel Glauber, a specialist on the Jewish occult and adviser to the exhibit.

And it wasn’t just the huddled masses. Writers, intellectuals and scientists were fascinated by the supernatural, adding a sheen of respectability to fortune-telling, seances and what Sigmund Freud called the........

© The Times of Israel