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…
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’…
Jewish America is on the brink of a massive generational shift in identity and practice, according to the first-ever independent study of American Jews, conducted by the Pew Research Center. Young Jews are increasingly likely to say that they have no religion, despite saying they are Jewish. In doing so, they are rewriting the norms…
In 2012, the average New York Jew looks a little less like Jerry Seinfeld and a little more like Tevye the Milkman. New York’s Jews are poorer, less educated and more religious than they were 10 years ago, according to a landmark new study of the city’s Jewish population. They’re also less liberal: More than…
Optimism is a good thing. But there is a difference between optimism and wishful thinking. This fall would have seen the release of a new National Jewish Population Survey, the decennial project that was killed when the Jewish Federations of North America decided it wasn’t worth funding. Instead, based on scattered evidence, the American Jewish…
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