(JTA) — If you’re pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Jewish identity building, what do you do when a survey comes along showing that the number of U.S. Jews engaging with Jewish life and religion is plummeting? That’s the question facing major funders of American Jewish life following the release last week of the…
Until recently, I was a poster-child for the kind of attrition from Jewish life that the recent Pew Study, subject of so much angst in the media, describes. I eschewed nearly all organized Jewish activities in the decade after my first Hillel dinner at college, which I fled screaming. Okay, I wasn’t quite screaming, but…
The past few decades have witnessed the “polarization” of American Christianity. Evangelicals have grown, but so have the religiously unaffiliated. Meanwhile, mainstream Protestant Church members have declined sharply, along with non-Hispanic Catholics. We now find parallel trends among American Jews. From a demographic perspective, the Orthodox are incredibly healthy. Their birthrates are far more than…
The results of the Pew survey are not at all surprising, and the basic findings align near-perfectly with estimates that my colleagues and I at the Steinhardt Social Research Institute have reported. Pew’s estimate that there are 6.7 million American Jews — including more than 4 million adults who consider Judaism their religion — confirms…
Are you Jewish or Christian? Increasingly, Americans seem to be checking both boxes, according to the 2013 Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews. It’s not just that a lot of Jews have Christmas trees, though 32% say they do; it’s that 34% of Jews said that they think being Jewish is compatible with believing…
If the United States had 6.7 million holders of a doctorate, and 1 million of these hold a doctorate partly, how many Ph.D.s are there in America? Or, to use another analogy, what’s the meaning of a partly democratic government, or of being partly pregnant? Few among the leading intellectuals in this country will object…
The findings of the Pew study point to an increasingly diverse Jewish population — one that defies generalizations. This diversity stems from several sources, especially the recent history of intermarriage and the increasing prominence and shift to the right of Orthodox Jews. Before I discuss the impact of these trends, I want to allay readers’…
The new PEW survey on Jewish life paints a bleak picture of our future. Among the findings were the fact that 58% of Jews now marry non-Jews, two-thirds don’t belong to a synagogue and 32% of Jews born after 1980 say they have “no religion.” In response, Slate’s Jessica Grose wrote about her mixed feelings…
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