Abstract
New analyses by the authors of the Pew Research Center’s, Portrait of Jewish Americans, critically reexamine the prevalent narrative drawn from the report of decline and assimilation in the American Jewish community. Comparisons of the Pew findings to NJPS 1990 and 2000-2001 demonstrate a substantial increase in the US Jewish population and stable levels of belonging to the Jewish people, observance of Jewish ritual, and connection to Israel. The overall population increase is driven primarily by higher-than-expected retention of young adult children of intermarriage, most of whom were raised without Jewish religious identity and disproportionately identify as Jews of no religion. Nonetheless, the engagement of the next generation of adult children of intermarriage is lower than that of other American Jews. Intermarriage, thus, presents both a challenge and an opportunity.
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Notes
- 1.
Pew counted only children being raised partly or fully Jewish (according to their parents). About 300,000 children in households with a Jewish parent were not included in the estimate of the Jewish population.
- 2.
NJPS 2000–2001 did not ask all JNRs questions about Jewish engagement; thus, Fig. 12.1 only shows comparisons between NJPS 1990 and Pew 2013.
- 3.
Population estimates are shown for illustrative and comparative purposes. Pew (2013b) cautions that accurate estimates cannot be derived directly from the dataset.
- 4.
The question about Israel attachment in NJPS 1990 utilized different response categories and therefore cannot be compared directly with 2000 and 2013.
- 5.
Millennials are those born 1981–1995; Generation X, 1965–1980; Boomers, 1946–1964; Silent, 1928–1945.
- 6.
The analysis is limited to bar mitzvah (for boys) because of increasing overall prevalence of bat mitzvah (for girls).
- 7.
There is no increase from older to younger generation in the tendency of Jews raised by either two Jewish parents, or one Jewish parent alone, to be JNRs. The increase in the JNR population derives from the changing composition of the Jewish population to include more Jews with one Jewish parent.
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Saxe, L., Sasson, T., Aronson, J.K. (2015). Pew’s Portrait of American Jewry: A Reassessment of the Assimilation Narrative. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2014. American Jewish Year Book, vol 114. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09623-0_12
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