Abstract
The tensions facing the members of a small Orthodox sub-group, the Syrian Jewish “community” of Greater New York are described. The variations in their self-styled Sephardi Orthodoxy and the tensions created by financial challenges and college enrollment to the community’s long-term viability are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
See the discussion on rising poverty in the New York Haredi population.
- 2.
Many recent debates between Orthodox pundits have centered on the role of women in religious life.
- 3.
It is important to note that there are Syrian Jews who do not identify as belonging to this community and who are not included in this brief communal portrait. I use the term “community” privileging the social construct of my research participants. The 2011 Jewish Community Study of New York provides important demographic data regarding New York Jews who identify as Syrian. However, since the study did not ask whether these individuals identify as belonging to the Syrian Jewish community it is not possible to determine whether these data reflect the New York Syrian Jewish community. In the same way as there are Syrian Jews who do not identify as belonging to a Syrian Jewish community, there are also individuals who do not have Syrian or Middle Eastern ancestry and who identify as belonging to the community.
- 4.
This figure is hard to determine due to the very informal and loose boundaries of the community. I report this figure as the one that community leaders most often supplied with a rationale for their accounting. Membership is not defined by any official affiliation but by engaging with community institutions, self-identifying as belonging to the community and participating in community life (See Gold 2016, pp. 34–35).
- 5.
The lack of a gendered dimension also obscures many of this special report’s findings as the Orthodox community’s religious practice is highly gendered. Statistics about Orthodox Jews’ synagogue attendance, education and ritual practice cannot be properly understood without analyzing the data along gendered lines.
- 6.
I identify this population as Sephardi based on communal self-identification, as well as rationales based on this community’s historical developments and Halakhic (Hebrew: Jewish law) practices.
- 7.
The category of Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: Eastern Jews) developed in an Israeli context and reflects Israeli political and socioeconomic developments. It is not commonly used to self-identify by Sephardi populations in America. As such, I use it exclusively to describe populations in Israel and Mizrahi expats in America.
- 8.
This relates to the way many Mizrahim in Israel function as Masortim, “traditionalist.” See the works of Nissim Leon, Yaakov Yadgar, and Meir Buzaglo, among other scholars, and their exploration of Israeli Mizrahi religiosity.
- 9.
The influence of Haredi-Sephardi Yeshivot in Israel, such as Porat Yosef, on this Syrian Jewish community has also been deeply significant and merits further study.
- 10.
Both the 1990 and the 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys asked respondents if they were Sephardic. The 1990 NJPS reported that 8.1 % of its respondents self-identify as Sephardi (see Kosmin et al. 1991). In the 2000 NJPS, the number of respondents who identified as Sephardi did not provide a large enough sample to be a coherent analytic category (see Kotler-Berkowitz et al. 2003). A survey sensitive to the specific genealogies of the Sephardi American populations could provide important data to broaden our understanding of American Jewry in its broader diversity.
- 11.
Community leaders posit that over 95 % of children in the community currently attend Jewish day schools.
- 12.
For a broader analysis of the ways in which economic choices shape Jewish behaviors and trends in the US see Chiswick’s (2014) Judaism in Transition: How Economic Choices Shape Religious Tradition.
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Bitton, M. (2017). The Orthodox Paradox: Numbers, Confidence, and Anxiety. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2016. American Jewish Year Book, vol 116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46122-9_4
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