Abstract
Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively.
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available at the Berman Jewish Data Bank (https://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/1108 public domain
available at the Berman Jewish Data Bank (https://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/1108 public domain
available at the Berman Jewish Data Bank (https://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/1108 public domain
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Notes
The full definition of social knowledge can be found on the page cited.
To be sure, scholars are critical about all these premises. To use historian Theodore Porter’s oft-cited title, scholarship on quantification does not reinforce a “trust in numbers”, but rather unpacks its sources and manifestations to expose its bargained realities. In addition, the “trust in numbers” paradigm has been expanded, nuanced or problematized in several productive directions. See, for example, Best, 2012; Goodman, 2020; Kravel-Tovi, 2018; Muehlmann, 2012; O’Neil, 2016; Paley, 2001; Samuel, 2014; Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi, 2010.
The methodological and normative assumptions that go into the commensurability of American Jews with other seemingly comparable groups deserve its own attention, and exceed the limits of this article. But it is worth gesturing towards two aspects that problematize commensurability in this context and warrants attention. First, the contested question of Who is a Jew?: namely, the substantial gaps among definitions employed in various population surveys, by various religious Jewish denominations, by the Israeli State’s Orthodox Rabbinate and population registration. The second is the inherently vague classification of Jews, as either an ethnic, religious, racial, genetic, or cultural group, or as a combination of some or all of the above. Jews defy such a clear categorization, which renders any attempt to position them alongside other religious groups or ethnic minorities, in the USA and elsewhere, as impartially justified at best.
All these statistical projects have helped consolidate two formative scalar domains: the national and the local, a delineation which resonates with the American-Jewish communal administrative order. An assessment of these scalar domains lies beyond the purview of this article, but several comments are nevertheless warranted. First, the marker of “national” encompasses not only the aggregated local Jewish communities; in the context of socio-demographic studies on American Jewry, the division creates scalar hierarchies, often associating national studies with more robust social-scientific rigour (see Kravel-Tovi, 2016: 146–147). Secondly, the category of smallness, which engages me here at the national level, also serves as an important feature in the historical development and social scientific study of local Jewish life. See, for example, work on “small-town Jews” and “small Jewish communities” (Morawska, 1996; Sheskin, 2000). Lastly, quite a few of the Jewish professionals and social scientists interviewed in the course of my study asserted, in one way or another, that “real Jewish life” takes place in the local sphere – an assertion that emphasizes the constructed nature of “American Jewry” as a trans-local polity hovering above locality (see Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Kravel-Tovi 2018).
The reversed and less common term, “Jewish Americans”, is not coincidental; it reflects Pews’ social scientific gaze on the landscape of American religious groups. That they measure and project the demographic growth of other minority groups also attests to this vantage point.
Contemporary estimates of absolute numbers point at about 7.5 million. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/11/10-key-findings-about-jewish-americans/; http://jppi.org.il/en/article/despite-the-gloomy-headlines-american-jewry-has-grown-in-size/#.YbRJcdBBw2w
The communal debate about the tensions and links between the “quantity” and “quality” of the population implicates the question whether a smaller but “Jewishly strongly identified” community is more stable than a bigger one with people expressing diminished Jewish commitment. See: Kravel-Tovi, 2018.
In a personal correspondence with Golin, whom I also interviewed, he developed his argument, emphasizing the fact that the proportion of Jews in Brooklyn is markedly higher than the national percentage. This comment implies that the phenomenological sense of Jewish scale varies widely, depending on one’s location. How many Jews one has in one’s class, how many Jews one meets in daily encounters, how (and how many) Jewish-related stores and communal organizations configure in the public space of the neighbourhood, town or city: all are components of this subjective lived experience of scale. Relatedly, see how American-Jewish anthropologist Sherry Ortner describes 1950s Weequahic, NJ, her hometown, in her New Jersey Dreaming (Ortner, 2003) as a Jewish world unto itself (Ortner, 2003: 57–58).
Della Pergola defines “core Jews” as those who, when asked, say they are Jews, including “Jews by religion”, individuals who converted to Judaism, and individuals born Jewish who do not associate Jewishness with religion.
This sermon was made available to me by Rabbi Hirsch in a personal communication.
Acronym JFNA—the umbrella organization in charge of the 2000–1 NJPS, at the time operating under a different name.
Typically, it is the Palestinian population (and not diasporic Jewish communities) that draws comparative exercises of scale with the Jewish population in Israel. After all, Israel’s attempts to secure a significant Jewish majority are inseparable from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A study by the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University supports Sheskin’s position. According to the latest study of the project, the American-Jewish population is in fact expanding, reaching, as of 2020, 7.6 million. See: https://ajpp.brandeis.edu/
In relative terms, the current estimate of 1.8–2% is a lower percentage of Jews compared to the percentage of Jews in the population of the United States in the 1940s, when it was about 3.7% (Sarna, 2004: 375).
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Kravel-Tovi, M. Ambivalences of smallness: population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry. Theor Soc 52, 293–331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09473-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09473-5