{"id":131,"date":"2014-12-19T12:31:10","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T17:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/?p=131"},"modified":"2015-08-06T15:12:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T19:12:19","slug":"pew-on-jew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/2014\/12\/19\/pew-on-jew\/","title":{"rendered":"Pew on Jew"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0– December 19, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

There was a young lady of title
\nWho insisted on wearing a sheitel<\/i>.[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>
\n<\/sup>She didn\u2019t care much
\nFor kashrus<\/i>[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> and such,
\nBut the sheitel<\/i>, said she
\n\u2014now that\u2019s vital!<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican Jews are losing faith\u2014in religion, that is. More than one in five Jews, 22 percent, now say they have no religion. And as U.S. Jews overall pull away from formal expressions of Judaism, they are upending traditional notions of Jewish identity and what it means to be a Jew today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus the New York Jewish Week<\/i>, in the lede to its September 30 story last year on \u201cA Portrait of Jewish Americans,\u201d the Pew Research Center\u2019s survey of Jews in America.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/i>, in Laurie Goodstein\u2019s October 1 story, took a crucially different tack: \u201cThe first major survey in more than ten years finds a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish\u2014resulting is rapid assimilation that is sweeping through every branch of Judaism except the Orthodox.\u201d Emphasizing intermarriage and assimilation, the Times<\/i> threw down the gauntlet.<\/p>\n

What was the Pew story? Was it about kashrus and such\u2014a decline in observance\u2014or about actual loss of identity?<\/p>\n

Salient findings included:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One in five Jews (22 percent, approximately the same as the percentage of \u201cNones\u201d in the general public) describe themselves as having no religion.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Less than two percent of Americans identify their religion as \u201cJewish\u201d as religion, a decline of half since the late 1950s.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Secularism appears to be regnant, as 62 percent say that being Jewish is a matter of ancestry and culture, while 15 percent say that it is a matter of religion.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jews of no religion (\u201csecular\u201d Jews) are much less connected to Jewish organizations and are much less likely to raise their children Jewish, whereas 90 percent of Jews by religion raise their children Jewish.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Intermarriage\u2014long the Jewish bugaboo and worse\u2014is more common amongst secular Jews than amongst Jews by religion: Seventy percent of married Jews of no religion have a spouse who is not Jewish, compared with 36 percent among Jews by religion; and intermarriage appears to have risen substantially over the last half-century.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Altogether, Pew found there to be 6.3 million Jews in America; that was 15 percent higher than the 5.5 million of the highly respected 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) but well below overall U.S. population growth of 25 percent.<\/p>\n

What Pew discerned was a dramatic generational shift away from Jewish identity rooted in religion and traditional institutions, to one that\u2019s more secular, fluid, and, more broadly, American\u2014implying a decline in Jewish identification itself<\/i>. And compared to the Forward<\/i>\u2019s understated approach, the rest of the Jewish press was gloom and doom.<\/p>\n

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the century-old news service for Jewish communities worldwide, led the way. \u201cPeople want to have the news when the sky is falling,\u201d said JTA publisher Ami J. Eden. \u201cWe decided to go with the \u2018Nones\u2019\u2014people who say that they have no religion\u2014in the lede because that seemed like the most compelling, and most dramatic, in the study,\u201d said New York Jewish Week<\/i> managing editor Robert Goldblum.<\/p>\n

Blaming the intermarriage numbers on \u201cassimilationist liberals,\u201d the right-wing Jewish Press<\/i> declared on October 10, \u201cThey are intermarrying their way into post-Jewish oblivion. And they\u2019re doing so as a direct result of having emptied their version of Judaism of all meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Israel, the center-progressive newspaper Haaretz<\/i>, always ready to bemoan the state of American Jewry, issued two Pew-based jeremiads back to back: \u201cReengaging American Jews Before They Drift Away\u201d (October 8) and \u201cWho is an Assimilated Jew?\u201d (October 9).<\/p>\n

On November 16, JTA ran \u201cJewish Funders Ponder Lessons from Study,\u201d which questioned the substantial sums going into Jewish identity building in the face of data that \u201cthe number of U.S. Jews engaging with Jewish life is plummeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed the gloom and doom within the Jewish community was widespread, and in synagogues and community centers across the country talks and conferences were held to discuss the Meaning of Pew.<\/p>\n

But for professional insiders, the findings on Jewish identity did not come as a surprise. As Forward<\/i> publisher Samuel Norich cannily observed, \u201cPew was not only predictable, it was predicted.\u201d As far as the professionals were concerned, the real news had to do with the religious movements.<\/p>\n

According to Pew, the largest movement continues to be Reform Judaism, with which 35 percent of American Jews identify. After that it\u2019s 18 percent Conservative, 10 percent Orthodox, and 6 percent such smaller groups as Reconstructionism and Jewish Renewal. Relatively high fertility rates persist among the Orthodox, who also have a substantially lower dropout rate than the other movements, especially in the 18-to-29-year-old cohort (17 percent).<\/p>\n

The Pew data on the movements are highly suggestive of major changes within the movements.<\/p>\n

The Conservative movement, once regnant in American Judaism, is plagued with problems that may be insoluble. Forty-three percent of the Jewish population in 1990, it has declined more than one percentage point per year since then.<\/p>\n

In some measure the movement\u2019s demographic decline has been replaced by pockets of energy\u2014independent synagogues and \u201ccongregations of renewal,\u201d many of which come out of a Conservative base, which is the leader of a \u201cpost-denominational\u201d trend. The problem is that the number of these energetic institutions is far outnumbered by those in decline.<\/p>\n

None of this would be terrible were it not for the age-old dilemma of the disparity between Conservative rabbis, who are religiously observant, and the people in the pews, who generally are not. This gap points up the movement\u2019s ambiguous relationship to normative Jewish normative practice.<\/p>\n

Moreover, its central lay and rabbinic organizations\u2014the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly\u2014have always been weak, and the Jewish Theological Seminary has lost its monopoly over the training of Conservative rabbis.<\/p>\n

The Conservative movement has always maintained a clear and strong boundary between Jew and non-Jew. Should it obscure that boundary\u2014for example, by permitting intermarriage\u2014it would erase a distinctiveness critical to the movement\u2019s self-understanding.<\/p>\n

It is not too much to say that the Conservative movement may be breaking apart.<\/p>\n

The issue for the Orthodox does not have to do with numbers, which have remained stable for more than two decades. It concerns, rather, a striking shift from Modern Orthodox to Ultra-Orthodox\u2014or, more accurately, Sectarian Orthodox.<\/p>\n

After World War II, the Modern Orthodox demonstrated to the rest of the Jewish world that Orthodoxy was not an accretion of unthinking, obscurantist practices but a living religious tradition with serious intellectual underpinnings. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, they began looking over their right shoulders at the more sectarian world of Agudath Israel and the Brooklyn Yeshivas. They also began shifting right on a range of public policy issues, including church-state, civil rights, Israel, and reproductive choice.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Sectarian Orthodox (Haredim<\/i>, in Hebrew) have become, if anything, more sectarian\u2014paying increasing attention to the minute details of practice and limiting their engagement with secular studies. In a radical departure from 50 years ago, few members of sectarian communities today study in mainstream colleges.<\/p>\n

These changes in both the Conservative and Orthodox communities indicate a shrinking \u201cmiddle\u201d in American Judaism. Indeed, in \u201cThe Shrinking Jewish Middle\u2014And What to Do About It,\u201d an unpublished paper written in January, sociologist Steven M. Cohen, among the canniest observers of American Jewish life, treated this as the most important of the Pew survey\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n

Almost as interesting as the findings was the fact that the survey was the first not to be conducted by a Jewish organization.<\/p>\n

When Jewish organizations first began counting American Jews in the 1950s, they gauged identification largely according to degree of ritual observance. If you said you kept kosher and kindled Shabbat candles on Friday evenings, you scored high on Jewish identity.<\/p>\n

This ritual package correlated to the religious movements. Those who scored highest almost always identified as Orthodox; those who scored low tended to identify with Reform\u2014the movement that, as central to its ideology, jettisoned much traditional observance.<\/p>\n

Through the 1980s, the question was, in effect, \u201cDo you identify with Judaism religiously?\u201d This was a source of increasing annoyance to the communal leadership, professional and lay\u2014almost all of whom came out of the Reform movement: \u201cYou\u2019re telling us that we have no Jewish identity?!!\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), sponsored by the Council of Jewish Federations[3]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>, responded by offering questions in a number of areas and asking respondents to choose among four modes of Jewish identification: \u201cnational,\u201d ethnic,\u201d religious,\u201d and \u201ccultural.\u201d Seventy percent chose \u201ccultural.\u201d Whatever that meant, it suggested that there were many gateways to being Jewish.<\/p>\n

The value of this more varied picture of Jewish identity was, however, obscured by the survey\u2019s finding that 52 percent of Jews were now marrying outside the faith. Although many analysts in the field concluded that this figure may have been as much as 10 points too high, its effect on the community at large was traumatizing, and led to a fundamental shift of attention to issues of Jewish \u201ccontinuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

A decade later, a new NJPS sought to improve upon the 1990 model. It didn\u2019t succeed. The questionnaire was overloaded, intricate, and far too complex. There were now seven categories[4]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> of Jewish identification, suggesting that the surveyors simply did not want to be put in a position of saying who was and who wasn\u2019t a Jew.<\/p>\n

Politically, Jewish leadership could not countenance a decline in population. In the words of one large-city federation executive, \u201cWe had to get the numbers up to 5.2 million!\u201d<\/p>\n

Internal debates were so contentious that the survey did not appear until 2002. A decade later, no agency in the Jewish community was willing to undertake an omnibus demographic study. It is fair to say that the inability of the American Jewish communal establishment to do so is itself evidence of the weakening of Jewish identification and the consequent weakening of the establishment organizations themselves.<\/p>\n

So how did Pew come to step into the breach?\u00a0 Analysts had long noted that it was time that American Jews looked at their own community in comparison with other groups, but were insecure about doing so.\u00a0 Additionally, an important part of the answer had to do with Jane Eisner, editor of the Forward<\/i>, the independent weekly (with daily on-line coverage) that has come to be considered the American Jewish newspaper of record.<\/p>\n

Eisner, having spent much of her career at the Philadelphia Inquirer <\/i>(including as editor of the editorial page), had good relations with the Pew Charitable Trusts (parent of the Washington-based Pew Research Center) and the Neubauer Family Foundation, both headquartered in Philadelphia. The latter, established by corporate CEO and Jewish philanthropist Joseph Neubauer, provided a significant measure of financial support for the Pew study, and Eisner helped bring the funder and the research organization together.<\/p>\n

\u201cPew provided an independence that [the Jewish community] had not heretofore had,\u201d Eisner said in an interview. \u201cIt mattered not to Pew whether the intermarriage rate was 50 percent or 20 percent. That\u2019s why it was important for an \u2018outsider\u2019 to do the study.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alan Cooperman, deputy director of Pew\u2019s Religion and Public Life Project, emphasized that it was \u201cnot an odd thing that Pew would count Jews. It\u2019s our standard survey. We \u2018capture\u2019 Protestants, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics, other Christian groups\u2014why not Jews?\u201d<\/p>\n

The twin goals of the survey were, he said, to answer the question, \u201cWhat does it mean to be Jewish in the U.S.A.?\u201d and to offer comparability\u2014that is, a comparison between Jews and other religious groups in America. But in contrast to the earlier surveys conducted by Jewish groups, the purpose was not to provide a communal-needs assessment. \u201cWe were not primarily interested in the needs of the community and on the uses of Jewish institutions,\u201d Cooperman said.<\/p>\n

Coverage of the survey in the Forward<\/i> was unusually comprehensive, almost daily at the beginning, reflecting the paper\u2019s virtually proprietary interest. \u201cThe Forward<\/i> loved the story,\u201d noted JTA\u2019s Ami Eden. \u201cThey covered it with reverence, they covered it like the Super Bowl!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Forward<\/i> ran no fewer than a dozen news stories, editorials, op-eds, and features on Pew, emphasizing the implications of Pew for the religious movements (\u201cConservatives shrug off Evidence of Dramatic Decline,\u201d October 1; \u201cCan Orthodox Buck Movement Toward More Liberal Branches of Judaism?\u201d October 2); and on the intermarriage question (\u201cJewish Woman is the New face of Intermarriage, Pew Study Data Reveal,\u201d February 13.) Altogether, the Forward<\/i> treated its Pew series as a large-scale story unfolding, with big conclusions.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the sharpest critique of the Pew study came from policy guru J.J. Goldberg in the pages of the Forward<\/i> itself. In \u201cPew Survey About Jewish America Got It Wrong\u201d (October 18), Goldberg said the story should have said, \u201cDespite decades of warnings that American Jewry is dissolving in the face of assimilation and intermarriage, a major new survey by one of America\u2019s most respected social research organizations depicts a Jewish community that is growing more robustly than even the optimists expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg suggested that \u201ca critical misstep\u201d of the 2002 NJPS had been to set aside interviewees with \u201cweak Jewish connections\u201d and not bother asking them detailed questions about Jewish identity. One result was a falsely upbeat picture of Jewish commitment and practice. Another was the disappearance of most Jews who claimed \u201cno religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg compared Pew\u2019s findings with the 2002 NJPS and discovered a huge increase in Jews answering \u201cnone\u201d for religion. Pew\u2019s total in 2013 was 22 percent. The records from 2002 turned up 7 percent. Conclusion: Jews were abandoning religion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat should have rung an alarm. Fifteen percent of a highly visible and vocal religious community, three-quarters of a million people, quietly losing their religious faith inside a decade?\u00a0 How could that happen?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer, said Goldberg, is that it hadn\u2019t: \u201cFor a reality check, go back to an earlier survey, NJPS 1990, which was highly regarded in most respects. Of 5.5 million Jews it found, 20 percent chose \u201cnone\u201d for religion. Given a 3 percent margin of error, that\u2019s the same as 22 percent. There\u2019s been no rise. None.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article, an extreme version of the Forward<\/i>\u2019s general soft-pedaling of the bad news, drew reactions ranging from the lurid and excoriating to the merely defensive. Indeed, it polarized much of the subsequent discussion of the survey.<\/p>\n

Pew\u2019s own response was sharp. In an October 25 op-ed in the Forward<\/i>, Cooperman and religion survey director Greg Smith accused Goldberg of comparing apples and oranges. The category of \u201cBorn Jews With No Religion\u201d in the 1990 NJPS was \u201cconsiderably broader than the Jews of No Religion in Pew,\u201d they wrote. Jews might very well be abandoning their religion.<\/p>\n

The bottom line from Pew, in this author\u2019s view, is that Jewish identification is indeed a troubled arena and that intermarriage rates are higher than many Jewish professionals had come to think. But is the sky falling?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe early coverage was too reflexive,\u201d noted the Jewish Week<\/i>\u2019s Robert Goldblum. \u201cOh God, the community is falling apart!\u201d In his view, \u201cA Portrait of Jewish Americans\u201d is really telling Jewish Americans that a new kind of community has been forged in the United States, one less dependent on traditional boundaries and definitions. \u201cIncluding this idea in the original coverage,\u201d he said, \u201cwould have provided balance and made the coverage less geshrei<\/i>-like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less hysterical, that is.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

1<\/sup>Yiddish word for the wig worn by sectarian Orthodox married Jewish women, who observe the stricture against display of loose hair.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup>Jewish dietary law.<\/p>\n

3<\/sup>The organization that coordinated fund-raising, allocations, and social planning on behalf of social-service agencies in Jewish communities across America. It has since been renamed the Jewish Federations of North America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Pew discerned was a dramatic generational shift away from Jewish identity rooted in religion and traditional institutions, to one that\u2019s more secular, fluid, and, more broadly, American\u2014implying a decline in Jewish identification itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,20,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1087"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/religioninthenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}