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Notes
I want to thank first, Sergio DellaPergola, who despite his “coolness” to narrative encouraged me to organize this roundtable on the topic and who in his inimitable style has written an essay that makes self-reflection an important part of demographic research. Indeed, I wish to thank each author, who despite his/her heavy research agenda, has taken seriously the importance of narrative. And finally, I would like to thank Samuel Heilman who had the vision to move forth with this volume and who encouraged me to write this introductory essay.
I have paraphrased Michael Burawoy’s (2011) discussion of positivist science and applied it to demography. Burawoy writes in his rejoinder to Piotr Sztomkpka (entitled: The Last Positivist):“that science cannot be abstracted from its context; it is a product of its own history but also of the broader history in which it is lodged, and, for example, that “heuristics” (discovery)…and “justification” cannot be neatly separated (italics mine, p. 398).
When reading this essay, Samuel Heilman added an important insight suggesting that whether we are Israeli or Diaspora Jews also makes a difference. The former, he notes, always see the Diaspora as losing numbers, the latter always find room for optimism.
In a different context, Horowitz (2013) says: “Jewishness in its many modes is no longer limited to traditional Jewish outlets…In addition, Jewish content is increasingly available in places that never provided it before.”
While all the essayists in this volume are positively committed to the tools and methods associated with quantitative analyses, they do not take as “hard” a line toward qualitative approaches and narrative (see especially, Hartman, Phillips, and Keysar) as does DellaPergola but rather focus on its complementarity to population surveys.
She cites yet another noted demographer, Calvin Goldscheider, to make her points about the potential repercussions of “core” and “periphery” classifications, such as a polarization of the community and/or a justification of one set of policy initiatives directed at the core and not the periphery. She extends her own critique when she notes that the NJPS (2000) survey did not ask the same questions of those in the periphery as those in the core, such as whether one had a bar or bat mitzvah or went to Jewish summer camp. Interestingly, these are the very issues critical to Keysar’s longitudinal study in the transmission of values from one generation to the other.
Harriet Hartman and I presented some preliminary thoughts and findings in our “Ways of Knowing in the Study of Jewish Identity” paper delivered at AJS, 2013 (Boston MA). In this paper we used preliminary findings from a new research project we are conducting concerning the following set of questions about social science research. How far (if at all) have we come from our positivist origins in contemporary social science research? Is self-reflexivity practiced among social scientists and if so how do we measure the effect of experiences, professional and personal, and/or social location in our research?
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Kaufman, D.R. Demographic Storytelling: The Importance of Being Narrative. Cont Jewry 34, 61–73 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-014-9122-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-014-9122-1