The latest Pew survey shows double-digit growth in the American Jewish population and finds intermarriage is having a net positive effect
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By Leonard Saxe
More intermarried couples are raising Jewish children Illustrative: Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt with their children Talia and Noah Kim-Leavitt (Courtesy of Kim-Leavitt family/JTA)<
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The Pew Research Center today released a report of their survey, Jewish Americans in 2020. The new study of the size and character of US Jewry coincidentally appears just as Jews around the world prepare to celebrate Shabbat Bamidbar when we read the Book of Numbers’ description of the census of the Israelites in the desert. A scientific survey is not a census but does serve a similar function of providing a portrait of a community and highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.
Pew’s snapshot of the US Jewish community indicates that it is growing in size and diversity, with its members finding different paths to express their cultural, ethnic, and religious identities. Much of the discussion of the study will likely focus on how contemporary Jews differ from one another, but that framing misses a central finding. Contrary to the popular narrative of the “vanishing American Jew,” the US Jewish population is actually expanding. US Jews exhibit a wide range of attitudes and practices, but they have not shed their Jewish identities.
Pew estimates that there are currently 7.5 million American Jews, made up of 5.8 million adults and 1.7 million children, representing 2.4% of the overall US population (roughly the same proportion since 1990). This estimate represents a double-digit increase since 2013, when Pew estimated the total Jewish population at 6.7 million, and a nearly 40% increase in the population estimated in 1990 by National Jewish Population Survey.
The estimate reported by Pew is corroborated by my own work with colleagues at Brandeis University’s American Jewish Population Project. Using data synthesis techniques, which enable us to analyze individual data from hundreds of high-quality surveys and nearly 1.5 million respondents, we estimate the 2020 US Jewish population at 7.6 million. Our higher estimate is, in part, the result of our using more recent census data.
The total population measure is based on two threshold issues concerning respondents’ religious backgrounds and current religious identification. Pew, like most who study American Jewry, identified Jews by asking two kinds of questions: “What, if any, is your religion?” and, for those who are agnostic, atheist, or do not identify with a religion, “Do you consider yourself Jewish in some other way?” All respondents were asked about their upbringing and their parents’ backgrounds. To be included in the Jewish population, they had to have a Jewish parent or had converted.
Based on those responses, Pew classified one group “Jews by religion” (JBRs) and the other “Jews not by religion” (JNRs). Nearly 75% of the adult Jewish population was identified as JBRs and the remainder JNRs. The share of the JNR population appears to be increasing, particularly among young Jews, although other research suggests that the proportion of the US population who are JBRs has remained stable (1.9%).
Raising Jewish children
Pew’s estimate of the number of children is based on the report of an adult respondent. Children are counted as Jewish if they are part of the household of a Jewish parent and are being raised in some way Jewish. Of an estimated 2.4 million children living in Jewish households, 1.6 million were counted as Jewish. Most (75%) of these children are being raised exclusively Jewish by religion, and the remainder are being raised as Jewish in some other way.
The sociological approach used by Pew to identify who is Jewish is imperfect, but importantly yields a conservative estimate of the total Jewish population. The approach excludes nearly three million individuals of Jewish background who do not consider themselves Jewish. Some of whom identify with another religion and others who have no religion.
Along with natural population growth, immigration, and wider access to Jewish education, intermarriage is having a net positive effect. Compared to earlier generations, more Jews appear to be retaining their Jewish identity when they marry a non-Jew, and an increasing number of intermarried couples are raising Jewish children. All of these factors contribute to the expanding Jewish population.
Undoubtedly, some will question Pew’s decisions about who should be counted as a Jew. Long before scientific survey research evolved, Jewish sages wrestled with the question of how to count Jews and assess our strength in numbers. Thus, this Shabbat, the Torah reading about the Biblical census will be accompanied by a Haftarah reading from the book of Hosea that teaches us that the “people of Israel shall be like the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted.”
Jewish tradition reconciles the difficulty of counting with the necessity of assessing the strength of the community by allowing indirect counts. Surveys provide communal organizations with a sense of the magnitude of their responsibility to the community and a yardstick with which to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. The survey provides an objective way to assess the size of the community,
Pew’s report should calm the fears of those who believed that Judaism in America would all but disappear. The study, buttressed by other data, affirms that Jewish identity remains important to the vast majority of an enlarged US Jewish population. Rather than vanishing, American Jews have constructed a multiplicity of ways to express their Jewishness. The challenge posed by the findings is how to provide a wide range of opportunities for the increasing number of individuals seeking meaningful connections within the Jewish world.
@ Reader:
In this, of course you are correct, but this was not my point. I believe you both mistook my aim and proved it with you comment. My suggestion was not that this affected only the Reform Jews, as I stated it affected world Jewry in general. And also as you noted, our many brothers and sisters were cursed with the many hardships of life in the Soviet Union and having survived these only to be met with additional great difficulties while trying to make aliyah – none of which were of their own making – is reprehensible. But none of this was what my comment referenced. Over the many years since this controversy first was raised, the reform movement, specifically but not exclusively in the US, has moved further and further from their former place of support of Israel. And though as you point out this subject affects all Jews, the Reform movement, I believe, has reacted strongly to the subject. The idea that one would have establish proof of their identity or become a token in some political battle among the rabbinate is, as I suggested, belittling and cruel. Your comment:
is quite revealing to my meaning here. It is, of course, just my opinion, but it is not without some input from many friends and associates who reacted with a great bitterness to the subject. I recall one friend suggesting sarcastically that should his rabbi fail to provide enough support he could always request the testimonies of the group who beat him senseless for expressing his support for Israel on one occasion in the wrong part of his home town. It is felt by some that they were having to overcome a prejudice among their own people to prove they belong. In any case, these are just some of the moments that I recall from former friends and associates who expressed great animosity upon first hearing of this topic which never waned while their dislike for the State grew. Regardless of this, though I 100% agree with your final comment:
@ peloni1986:
This has nothing to do with Reform.
All the Jews, even Reform, are of 2 kinds:
1) the ones who have a Jewish mother;
2) the converts.
The Reform and Conservative converts can be asked to convert again with an Orthodox rabbi – no big deal (if they seriously want to join the Jewish people and to make aliyah), the same for the offspring of the Reform and Conservative women-converts.
The real problem is the insane religious requirements that most of the Diaspora Jews who have Jewish mother cannot fulfill if they want to make aliyah (the Jews from the FSU and the Eastern Block countries have been especially hard hit).
.
The result of this is the slowing down of aliyah and limiting its numbers, strangely enough a paradoxical situation exists where a Jew upon making aliyah may have his Jewish status taken away from him because the Rabbinate just doesn’t trust him.
For the first time in his life he actually must PROVE that he s not a goy.
This is actually against halachah.
THIS is the problem, and it must not be allowed to continue.
@ Reader:
This entire process has been terribly dis-unifying among world Jewry. The measures that have been adopted are subjective, belittling and cruel. I personally believe this may be the root the divide between the Reform Jews of the US and any allegiance to the state of Israel. I do understand the political ramifications that brought it into being, but it is has had some very unfortunate consequences that will be felt for a very long time.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
About “the standards of the Israeli law” – there is NO list of documents which are required for the “proof”.
This means that in the absence of a rabbi’s letter, JAFI can keep requesting document after document without end, and there is nothing you can do to end or limit the interrogation for the “proofs”.
Now in order to make aliyah you don’t merely need to prove “a matrilineal Jewish descent” by documenting birth certificates, or Jewish headstones, or genealogy records.
You need to prove that descent along the RELIGIOUS (Orthodox) Jewish lines, and the rabbi who signs the document that your mother was Jewish must not be on the Rabbinate’s blacklist.
Basically, any oleh who crosses the Rabbinate’s threshold for any reason is considered a non-Jew until he can prove otherwise according to the “strictest standards” whatever they are.
The scariest thing is that the Rabbinate can remove your Jewish status retroactively, and then – guess what?
Then all your Jewish relatives lose their Jewish status also!
Most potential converts flunk the Rabbinate’s conversion test.
It even happens sometimes that a Jew is marked as a non-Jew by the Ministry of the Interior and no amount of proofs and pleading can change that afterwards.
Pure b_____t. Those American Jews who meet the standards of Israeli law for determining “who is a Jew” number maybe three million at most. That standard is either that the individual is born of a Jewish mother or has converted to Judaism. Those who meet the Israeli rabbinate’s standard of “who is a Jew” is more restrstrictive than that. Only person’s who have matrilinial Jewish descent going back several generations, and who were converted by Orthodox rabbis who have been certified by the rabbinate to perform conversions (this does not include even many Orthodox rabbis, and completely excludes, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and “OPen Orthodox” rabbis), are considered to be Jews by Israel’s rabbinical authorities. Individuals who do not meet these criteria cannot obtain divorces in Israel, and encounter difficulties in being married there.
Only about two million American Jews belong to a Jewish congregation of any sect. Even less than that send their children to any kind of Jewish school, even a Jewish Sunday school. The birth rate among American Jews is well under two per family. All of this makes the Pew statistics either false or meaningless.