Abstract
This paper examines the independent and interactive effects of financial capacity and Jewish connections on reported constraints in purchasing two intensive forms of Jewish education, day school and overnight summer camp. The analysis is structured around three hypotheses: (1) financial capacity is inversely related to constraints on Jewish education; (2) Jewish connections increase or decrease the level at which financial capacity determines financial constraints on Jewish education; (3) the strength of the inverse relationship between financial capacity and financial constraints on Jewish education varies by the strength of Jewish connections. We merge data from 13 local Jewish community studies to test the hypotheses with bivariate crosstabulations and multivariate logistic regression models. We assess the empirical evidence as showing moderately strong, though admittedly variable, support for our three hypotheses. The most robust support for the hypotheses comes in the case of financial constraints on Jewish day school education, with less consistent support when modeling constraints on Jewish summer camp. A final section highlights and integrates the main findings and concludes with several strategic and normative considerations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
These are well-known, empirical generalizations supported by extensive survey data (see, for example, Kotler-Berkowitz 2005; Pew Research Center 2013). They are not meant to suggest that those with other characteristics do not provide Jewish education for their children, only that they are less likely to do so.
We thank Rachel Friedberg for discussing this concept with us.
We accessed the studies from the Berman Jewish DataBank. Methodological information about each study is available from their study pages and materials at the Berman Jewish DataBank, accessible most directly at: http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/us-local-communities.cfm. We thank the commissioning organizations and principal investigators of each study for archiving their studies at the DataBank and making them available for secondary analysis. See the Acknowledgements section at the end of this article for details.
When we merged the files, we brought in the household weight from each individual study. When applied, the household weight projects the total number of estimated Jewish households in each community, where Jewish households are defined as having at least one Jewish adult. This gave us a total of 1,355,060 households. However, statistical analysis cannot be conducted with this many cases. Instead, we created an analytic weight by dividing the household weight by its mean. Doing this brings the weighted household total back to the unweighted total, 18,716. It keeps all of the communities in their proper proportion relative to each other, and it maintains all of the other weighting adjustments (e.g., for unequal probability of being in a study sample). Calculating an analytic weight from a household projection weight (or a person projection weight) is standard procedure in statistical analysis.
We did not adjust income for inflation over the 12-year period covered in the studies. However, we do not believe this is a significant problem, because we are sorting people into broad categories of relative income, not tracing specific income levels over time.
Previous research on Jewish poverty has shown that a disproportionate share of those who refuse to provide household income information have educational levels that suggest higher rather than lower incomes. See Kotler-Berkowitz (2009).
Excluding missing data, the distribution suggests a median income near the top of the middle-income category.
“Just Jewish” is a response option typically provided on survey questions about Jewish denominational identity or affiliation. How and when respondents are presented with the “Just Jewish” option depends on a survey’s specific question wording and skip patterns. In most cases, though, respondents who select “Just Jewish” answered a prior question identifying their religion as Judaism/Jewish and then chose “Just Jewish” in a follow-up question about denominational identity that also offered Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and other response options.
In some surveys, if respondents previously answered that they have no religion, they were not asked the denominational identification question.
See Wertheimer (2007, 279) for a brief discussion of this issue.
For each dependent variable, we specified separate models for each measure of Jewish connections, because the measures are highly correlated with each other, as are selective interaction terms including them. Nonetheless, we tested a full model in which we first constructed an ordered index of Jewish connections by including synagogue membership, donation to a Jewish cause, and Jewish educational background, and then entered it as a categorical variable simultaneously with Jewish denomination, marital status, interaction terms, and the control variables. In general, the findings are consistent with but in some ways weaker than the separate models—not surprising, given the intercorrelations among measures of Jewish connections. For constraints on purchasing a day school education, dummy coefficients for denomination and marital status were smaller, some of the interaction terms were no longer significant, and only the lowest of three categories on the Jewish connections index and its interaction term were significant. For constraints on purchasing overnight summer camp, dummy coefficients for denomination (except “other” Jewish) and marital status and their interaction terms remained insignificant, while the two lowest categories of the Jewish connections index and their interaction terms were significant. Importantly, neither of the full models yields findings that contradict the separate models. The full regression models are available from the authors on request.
For some empirical evidence on American Jews’ views on social and economic inequality, see Jones and Cox (2012).
References
Bubis, Gerald B., and Stephen Bayme. 2008. The costs of Jewish living: Revisiting Jewish involvements and barriers. New York: American Jewish Committee. Accessed at http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=322.
Chiswick, Carmel. 2014. Judaism in transition: How economic choices shape religious tradition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cohen, Steven M., and Shaul Kelner. 2007. Why Jewish parents send their children to day schools. In Family matters: Jewish education in an age of choice, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 80–100. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Cohen, Steven M., and Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz. 2004. The impact of childhood Jewish education on adults’ Jewish identity: Schooling, Israel travel, camping and youth groups. Report 3 in the United Jewish Communities Report Series on the National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. New York: United Jewish Communities.
Cohen, Steven M., Ron Miller, Ira M. Sheskin, and Berna Torr. 2011. Camp works: The long-term impact of Jewish overnight camp. New York: Foundation for Jewish Camp.
Desilver, Drew. 2014. “Five facts abouteconomic inequality.” Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center. Accessed at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/07/5-facts-about-economic-inequality/.
Jones, Robert P., and Daniel Cox. 2012. Chosen for what? Jewish values in 2012: Findings from the 2012 Jewish values survey. Washington, D.C.: Public Religion Research Institute. Accessed at: http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=2821.
Kotler-Berkowitz, Laurence. 2004. Economic vulnerability in the American Jewish population. Report 5 in the United Jewish Communities Report Series on the National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. New York: United Jewish Communities.
Kotler-Berkowitz, Laurence. 2005. The Jewish education of Jewish children. Report 11 in the United Jewish Communities Report Series on the National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. New York: United Jewish Communities.
Kotler-Berkowitz, Laurence. 2009. Poor Jews: An analysis of low income in the American Jewish population. Contemporary Jewry 29(3): 241–277.
National Bureau of Economic Research. 2012. “US business cycle expansions and contractions.” Accessed at: http://www.nber.org/cycles/US_Business_Cycle_Expansions_and_Contractions_20120423.pdf.
Pew Research Center. 2013. A portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center survey of US Jews. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center.
Prager, Yossi. 2005. “The tuition squeeze: Paying the price of Jewish education.” Jewish Action (Fall). Accessed at:http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=13395.
Samuelson, Paul A., and William D. Nordhaus. 1989. Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2012. “BLS spotlight on statistics: The recession of 2007–2009.” Accessed at http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2012/recession/pdf/recession_bls_spotlight.pdf.
Wertheimer, Jack. 2001. Talking dollars and sense about Jewish education. New York: AVI CHAI Foundation. Accessed at http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=2931.
Wertheimer, Jack. 2007. Family matters: Jewish Education in an age of choice. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Acknowledgments
An initial version of this paper was presented at a session of the joint conference of the Network for Research in Jewish Education and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY, June 10, 2015. Harriet Hartman, Deborah Skolnick Einhorn, Yossi Prager and Jack Wertheimer served as respondents at the session, and we thank them for their careful reading of the paper and insightful comments, which sharpened our analysis. We are grateful to Rachel Friedberg for helping us think through the concept of income elasticity of demand and how it applies to our analysis, and to Ron Miller for his review of an earlier version of the paper and his valuable suggestions for improving it. We want to thank the various commissioning organizations and principal investigators of the local community studies we utilized for archiving them at the Berman Jewish DataBank and thereby making them easily available to researchers for secondary analysis. The commissioning organizations (in alphabetical order) are: Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado; Columbus Jewish Foundation; Harvey and Terry Hieken; Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation; Jewish Federation of Cincinnati; Jewish Federation of Columbus; Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta; Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia; Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix; Jewish Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties; Jewish Federation of St. Louis; Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati; Jewish Healthcare Foundation (Cincinnati); Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago; Lubin-Green Foundation; Manuel D. & Rhoda Mayerson Foundation; Morton J. and Morton D. May Fund of the Greater St. Louis Jewish Foundation; Rose Community Foundation; Sturm Family Foundation; The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore; UJA-Federation of New York; United Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh; United Jewish Federation of San Diego County; Weaver Family Foundation; and Wexner Foundation. The principal investigators (in alphabetical order) are: Steven M. Cohen, David Dutwin, Peter Miller, Ron Miller, Bruce Phillips, Etienne Phipps, Susan Sherr and Jacob B. Ukeles. We are very pleased to have research colleagues who value sharing the data they produce for our joint efforts to better understand American Jewry. We alone retain responsibility for the analysis and interpretations offered here.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix: Subjective Financial Status as a Measure of Financial Capacity
Appendix: Subjective Financial Status as a Measure of Financial Capacity
During our research, we tested a second measure of financial capacity, namely respondents’ subjective financial status. In the interest of space, we are summarizing the measure and findings related to it here rather than presenting them in detail in the main text.
Subjective financial status has three ordered categories—having not enough money, enough money, or extra money—and a fourth category, off the ordinal scale, to capture missing data. The distribution across the ordered categories is fairly even: 29% of respondents see themselves as not having enough money, 33% as having enough money, and 24% as having extra money, with missing data at 15%. Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between household income and subjective financial status (Spearman’s rho = .56, p = .000; missing data categories removed from the correlation statistic).
In bivariate associations, subjective financial status has a strong, inverse association with constraints on purchasing intensive forms of Jewish education (see Table 7). Households where respondents feel they don’t have enough money are almost six times more likely to say that they face financial constraints on purchasing day school and nearly 10 times more likely to report financial constraints on purchasing overnight summer camp than households where respondents report having extra money.
In all multivariate regression models, subjective financial status is inversely related to constraints on purchasing day school education and overnight summer camp. In the interaction models, statistically significant coefficients are always in the hypothesized directions, but, overall, the interaction models are not as robust as when household income is used as the measure of financial capacity, especially for constraints on purchasing Jewish day school education. Detailed regression models are available from the authors on request.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kotler-Berkowitz, L., Adler, C. Financial Constraints on Intensive Jewish Education: The Interactive Effects of Financial Capacity and Jewish Connections. Cont Jewry 36, 125–150 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-016-9159-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-016-9159-4