Abstract
This chapter explores the costs of individuals and families living a Jewish life, and their effects on the American Jewish community. Living a Jewish life is costly. It is not just the extra cost of kosher foods, synagogue membership, or tuition costs for Jewish schooling for one’s children. There is the time cost of Jewish religious involvement and practice. There are also lifestyle choices that put constraints on one’s activities, such as the choice of a spouse or where one chooses to live. Policy recommendations for the Jewish community to mitigate these costs are considered.
This is a revision of the original article published in Contemporary Jewry, 21(1), 2000, pp. 78–90, co-authored with Carmel U. Chiswick.
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Notes
- 1.
For an interesting estimate of the out-of-pocket costs for various categories of Jewish expenditures see (Monson and Feldman 1995).
- 2.
By this measure even children can have a high value of time. For example, time in Hebrew school competes with time for secular school studies as well as the myriad of after-school and weekend activities ranging from ballet lessons to football practice.
- 3.
Suppose, for example, that by ignoring Jewish human capital a person would be willing to consider as a potential spouse any highly educated person (which for the sake of this example would include all Jewish partners). Then the pool of potential partners would be 25 times larger than if it were limited to Jews only. Even if only 40 percent of these non-Jews were available because of the low specificity of their own religious human capital, the pool of potential marriage partners would still be larger by a factor of ten.
- 4.
As but one example of the cost of Shabbat observance, many academic professional associations now schedule their meetings over the weekend to take advantage of reduced airfares if there is a Saturday overnight and the lower hotel room rates on weekends. Or consider the long-time Shabbat-observing employee who Chrysler Corporation wishes to fire after reassigning him to a shift that includes Friday night (Forward 1997).
- 5.
See (Wertheimer 1999a) for an excellent delineation of the Jewish education system in the U.S.
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Chiswick, B.R., Chiswick, C.U. (2020). The Cost of Living Jewishly and Jewish Continuity. In: Chiswick, B. (eds) Jews at Work. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_14
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