By the numbers: some thoughts about the Pew study of American Jewry

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Dougals Aronin, Esq.
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By the numbers: some thoughts about the Pew study of American Jewry

It's a fairly well-known story, but it's worth repeating.  Back in May of 1964, Look magazine published a cover story entitled "The Vanishing American Jew", in which it famously predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, the American Jewish community would disappear.  We all know how that one worked out.  When the century's end arrived, the American Jewish community was still alive and kicking; it was Look magazine that had disappeared.
 
Look was neither the first nor the last to predict the end of the Jewish people.  Countless times throughout history our demise has been foretold -- in some cases eagerly, in others regretfully.  But each time, to borrow Mark Twain's familiar phrase, reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.  

In a sense, though, the prophets of doom haven't been all wrong.  By the ordinary logic of history, Jews should have disappeared centuries ago.  Our stubborn insistence on surviving has puzzled many, among them the prominent British historian Arnold Toynbee, who referred to us as a living fossil.  We have been defying predictions of our demise for centuries.  We are now what we have always been, what Balaam, one of our earliest enemies, called "a people that dwells apart."  (Num.  23:9)   Our long experience in defying the prophets of doom enables us to overcome despair, even in the face of mounting statistical evidence of impending demographic disaster.

At this point in history, however, despair seems a lesser risk than complacency.  The Jewish future in North America is endangered by a potentially lethal mixture of assimilation, intermarriage and low fertility.  The math is not terribly complex.  If present demographic trends continue unabated, North American Jewry will shrink catastrophically over the course of the coming decades.  The Orthodox community will survive, maybe even thrive, but the rest of American Jewry may find itself in free fall.

That frightening scenario would seem to be the most straightforward reading of the results of the Pew Research Center's recent demographic survey of the American Jewish community.  Pew has long been the gold standard when it comes to the sociology of American religion, so it is hardly surprising that the results of its survey are receiving considerable attention.  Pew's survey is the first attempt at a comprehensive national survey of American Jewry since the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-01, and its status as the work of competent outsiders with no ideological ax to grind will no doubt be seen as further evidence of its reliability.

Pew's full report of the survey results, available on line (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/), is lengthy and complex, and a comprehensive analysis of those results is well beyond what could be contained in a post of reasonable -- or even slightly unreasonable -- length.  There are, however, some issues raised by the Pew report and some of its critics that are worth some attention.   The threshold issue is the accuracy of the survey data itself.  Pew is a well-respected professional outfit, and I have no reason to doubt the competence or integrity of its researchers. But mass surveys of this kind should always be viewed with some skepticism. How representative the respondents are of the entire sample is difficult to know, particularly where, as here, responding to the survey required a significant time commitment, as opposed to, say, a thirty second poll expressing a preference in a pending election campaign.  I'm no statistician, but I know that, all other things being equal, the smaller the sample, the higher the likelihood of inaccuracy. In this survey,the sample size as a whole was large enough to give some comfort as to its accuracy, but some of the correlations may have been too small to be reliable.

There is also the question of how accurately respondents answer the questions posed. It's well established, for example, that surveys asking about the frequency of attendance at religious services generally result in an over report of attendance.  Survey professionals adjust for such biases, of course, but these adjustments themselves are based on assumptions that may not be the same from one population to another.   

For the most part, these caveats are theoretical, but there is one factor in the survey that raises more concrete concerns. The report stated that 5% of the Jews surveyed were born in the former Soviet Union, while an additional 5% had at least one parent born there, somewhat higher than I would have expected.  (I live in Forest Hills, where the number from the FSU is much higher, but obviously that's atypical.)  The  survey interviews were conducted in either English or Russian, which may have encouraged native Russian speakers to respond. There are, however, American Jews who are native speakers of other languages (Hebrew, Yiddish and Farsi come to mind) and who may have been discouraged from participating for reasons of language.  This is particularly true of Yiddish, whose native speakers today are mostly chasidim, who are probably under counted in any event.  

Whenever a new study of American Jewry, or some geographical subset thereof,  comes out, its findings on intermarriage usually receive the most attention.  In the case of the Pew survey, however, though the intermarriage figures have generated significant interest, they seem to have been upstaged by another finding: 22% of those Americans who identify as Jews claim to have no religion. Headlines in both the Jewish Week ("Fast-Growing Jewish 'Nones' Seen Reshaping Community")   and the Forward ("New Study Finds Jews Fleeing Faith Traditions"), the headlines focused on that finding.  The number of identified Jews of no religion, moreover, is significantly larger in younger age cohorts than in older ones.  Only 7% of those born in or before 1927 identified themselves in this manner, compared with 19% of baby boomers (those born from 1946 through 1964)  and 32% of those born after 1980.  The Pew study points out that these figures are consistent with the figures for Americans as a whole; 20% of American adults -- and 32% of those born after 1980 -- assert that they have no religion.   

In trying to make sense of this data, it's important to bear in mind the difference between a study, like Pew's, that seeks to depict a snapshot of the population being studied at a particular point in time, and a longitudinal study that follows a random sample of the target population over the course of years.  Pew's division of the respondents into age cohorts creates the impression that the differences are generational; those born during a specified period of history are more likely to share certain attitudes or beliefs than those born in other historical periods.  That may well be true, but at least part of the difference may also reflect changes in some individuals' attitudes as they get older.  It is not uncommon for individuals to make religion a bigger part of their lives as they get older -- a phenomenon that I have sometimes heard labeled as "cramming for the final."   I find the growing number of identified Jews with no religion less surprising than the professed shock with which it has been greeted. The widespread secularism of American Jews should surprise no one. Virtually every study of American Jewry in recent decades has served to confirm what anyone with a practical knowledge of the Jewish community knows instinctively: that Jews are, by almost any conventional measure, among the most secular of Americans.  They are less likely than other Americans to believe in God,less likely to attend worship services at least weekly, and less likely to assert that religion is important or very important in their lives.  In all these respects, the Pew study provides additional support for familiar trends.   

What is intriguing about the 22% of American Jews who profess to  have no religion -- a proportion similar to that of Americans as a whole -- is not their rejection of religion, but the fact that, despite that rejection, so many of them continue to identify themselves as Jews. That 22%, moreover, do not include those who did not identify as Jews but merely claimed to have Jewish ancestry; those were shifted to another branch of the survey.  Of those who identified themselves as Jews but claimed to have no religion, 83% said that they were proud to be Jewish.  (Among Jews by religion, the corresponding figure was 97%.)  This combination raises the obvious question: what is the nature of the Jewish identity in which they take pride?   Are more Jews today prepared to profess a secular Jewish identity than in the past?  Some critics argue that flaws in past surveys make such comparisons unreliable, and Pew itself warns about the hazards of comparing the current surveys results with figures from prior surveys.  Even if there has been a significant increase, moreover, that change may be more a matter of semantics than of substance.  In terms of behavior and attitudes, the bulk of American Jewry has long been resolutely secular.  The willingness of many, particularly in the youngest age cohort, to call their Jewish identity what it has long been may simply reflect American society's greater comfort both with ethnic identity and with spirituality divorced from institutional religion.   

Asked to choose the best of three options to complete the sentence "Being Jewish is mainly a matter of ...", 55% of Jews by religion and 83% of Jews with no religion said "ancestry and culture" while 17% and 6% respectively said religion and 26% and 11% responded both.  In case that's not confusing enough, the survey asked the respondents, with respect to nine specified activities, whether they were an essential part of what being Jewish means to them. Of the nine, "Remembering the Holocaust"  ranked first, being considered essential by 76% of Jews by religion and 60% of Jews of no religion.  Leading an ethical and moral life was a close second, considered essential by 73% and 55% respectively and "Working for justice/equality," was third, so ranked by 60% and 46% respectively .   "Observing Jewish law", by contrast" was next to last, chosen by only 23% of Jews by religion and 7% of Jews with no religion, and barely edging out eating traditional Jewish foods, which was the choice of 16% and 9% respectively.  

The importance that American Jews attach to the Holocaust is hardly shocking.  It is noteworthy, that this response was fairly consistent across all age cohorts.  The Holocaust looms large as an essential component of American Jewish identity, it appears, even among the youngest American Jews.  

When respondents were asked whether any of four specified beliefs or actions were compatible with being Jewish, overwhelming majorities of both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion answered in the affirmative with respect to both working on the Sabbath and being highly critical of Israel.  Two thirds of Jews by religion and three quarters of Jews with no religion agreed that non-belief in God was compatible with Jewishness, yet 65% of Jews by religion and 45% of Jews with no religion asserted that belief that Jesus was the messiah is not compatible with being Jewish.  For a significant majority of Jews, it appears, it is acceptable -- or at least tolerable -- for Jews to violate Shabbat, harshly criticize Israel and reject any belief in God, as long as they don't believe that Jesus was the messiah.  

The survey inquired about the respondents' attendance at religious services and their observance of five religious rituals: attending a Seder, fasting on Yom Kippur, lighting Shabbat candles, keeping a kosher home and not handling money on Shabbat.  Seventy-eight percent of Jews by religion responded that they had participated in a Seder last year, and 62% said that they fasted on Yom Kippur.  The other three rituals were observed by fewer than 30% of the respondents, as was attendance at religious services at least monthly.  (I find it surprising that the specified rituals did not include lighting Chanukah candles, which, past surveys have found, generally ranked second only to Seder attendance in the frequency of its practice.)  None of the responses to these questions was at all surprising.  They represent a slight erosion in observance over time, but not a dramatic change.

Though the intermarriage-related results of the Pew survey have, as stated above, been upstaged to some extent, they have still received much attention, as they should.  In the long run, intermarriage is probably the greatest threat to a viable American Jewish future.  Those who insist that American Jewish leaders pay too much attention to intermarriage can often be heard to say that that intermarriage is merely a symptom of a larger malady, which is the alienation of so many Jews from Jewish life.  That proposition may be true, but it's also beside the point; as any doctor can attest, you can die of a symptom.  

The basic patterns of intermarriage as extrapolated from the Pew report are consistent with prior statistical as well as anecdotal evidence. Of those identified Jews (whether by religion or not) who were married at the time of the survey,  56% were married to Jewish spouses. Of those currently married  respondents who married before 1970, 83% were married to Jews. At the other end of the age/longevity spectrum -- those married in or after 2005 -- only 42% were married to Jews.  Overall, 64% of married Jews by religion have a Jewish spouse, but among Jews of no religion the in-married percentage is 21%.   

In the narrative accompanying the survey results on intermarriage, Pew is cautious in drawing conclusions.  It points out that the survey inquired only about currently intact marriages and thus provides no information about marriages previously terminated, whether by divorce or death of the spouse.  There is research, Pew notes, indicating that in-marriages "tend to be more durable than intermarriages; if this is the case, then the percentage of intermarriages in the 1970s and 1980s may have been higher than it appears from looking only at intact marriages today."  The narrative also notes that "[t]here are too few married Jews of no religion in the current sample to permit separate analysis of intermarriage rates by year of marriage for Jews of no religion alone."  

The survey's findings as to the effect of intermarriage on how Jewishly the children are raised are likewise hardly surprising. Among those Jewish respondents (whether by religion or with no religion) who are the parents of minor children, 59% are raising their children as exclusively Jewish by religion, 14% as partly Jewish by religion and 8% as Jewish with no religion.    The effect of intermarriage on the Jewish identity of the next generation appears to be dramatic.  Among those presently married to a Jewish spouse, 96% are raising their children as exclusively Jewish by religion. Among those presently intermarried, the corresponding number to 20%, while among  those not presently married it is 45%.  If that figure is accurate, then the central argument of the intermarriage apologists -- that intermarriage is not necessarily a net loss Jewishly -- is demonstrably false.  

The Pew report touches on other facets of American Jewish life as well. It examines, among other things, voting patterns, attitudes toward Israel and denominational affiliations.  Its findings in these and other areas illustrate the growing chasm separating Orthodox Jews from those of other denominations. A more detailed discussion of these issues will have to await a later post.  

It is human nature to resist significant changes to our perspective on the world.  Confronted with facts that challenge our fundamental assumptions, our instinctive reaction is to  explain them away.  It could hardly be otherwise; if we had to re-examine first principles every time we were faced with a decision, we could not function.  But some people carry that instinct to extremes, impairing their ability to adapt to new circumstances as they arise. J.J. Goldberg's column in the Forward of October 18, 2013 is a prime example of this phenomenon.    To put that column in perspective, we need to keep in mind that J.J. Goldberg, a regular columnist and former editor-in-chief of the Forward, has been attacking Jewish demographic studies for as long as there have been Jewish demographic studies to attack.  (OK, maybe he's not quite old enough for that, and it only seems that long.)   

Goldberg has raised different issues with respect to different  surveys, but his underlying concern has been essentially the same.  He doesn't like the priorities created by intense concern about assimilation and intermarriage.  When the second National Jewish Population Study, which came out in 1990, found an intermarriage rate of 52%, he attacked, justifiably, the accuracy of that finding but ignored the underlying reality. Even assuming that he and other critics of that NJPS, who were correct in claiming that the 52% figure  was too high, had also been correct in asserting that the correct figure was about 38% (which was actually too low), so what?   A technical adjustment of the intermarriage rate couldn't negate the underlying reality that the actual rate was high  enough to be a threat to the future of American Jewry.  Even if Goldberg's position had been completely correct, intermarriage would still have been potentially life-threatening to the American Jewish body politic; it would merely  add a few years to our anticipated lifespan.  

Why has Goldberg been so desperate to discredit the intermarriage data?  in a column published in the Forward in January of 2011, he was unusually candid:  " Impending disaster brings out the conservative in all of us. The institutions of American Judaism have been on emergency footing for decades, through foul weather and fair, because of mounting alarm about vanishing American Jews."  Later in the column, he summed up his motivation succinctly: "If Jews are in decline, conservatives are ascendant and liberals are on the defensive."

Goldberg's reaction to the Pew survey results has been similarly divorced from the facts.  His column  on the Pew study was entitled "A Reading of Pew that Will Make You Smile." (It did, but not for the reason he had in mind.) He begins by quoting the New York Times summary of Pew's results as showing "a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish."  Perhaps on the premise that the best defense is a good offense, he immediately goes on the attack: "There's one more thing you need to know.  It's not true.  None of it....No, not wrong as in 'I think there's a better way to interpret these numbers.' Wrong as in incorrect. Erroneous.  Whoops."    

Goldberg does not take issue with any of Pew's raw survey data, or, indeed, with any of the compiled results.  When you get down to it, Goldberg bases his entire column on comparisons between the Pew results and those of earlier studies.  He neglects to mention that Pew's report itself cautions against such comparisons because of different methodologies. Even if Goldberg's critique were correct, moreover, it could not justify his peremptory dismissal of the survey results.  Those results are alarming by themselves without reference to how much worse the state of American Jewry is today than it was than ten or twenty years ago.   So where does this leave us?  There is much in the Pew report that should be of interest to anyone who cares about the future of American Jewry; my comments above have barely scratched the surface. 

Goldberg is an extreme example, to be sure, but he is an extreme example of a fairly common phenomenon, a naive optimism that seeks to minimize the bad news so as to make the challenge of overcoming it seem less daunting.    I had the privilege, early in the week, of hearing a lecture delivered by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs, who recently retired as Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.  Rabbi Sachs spoke on a different subject, but in the course of his lecture made a comment about the difference between optimism and hope that goes to the heart of how we should react to the results of the Pew survey.  Though people often confuse two, Rabbi Sachs said, optimism and hope are very different.  "Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better.  Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better."   J.J. Goldberg is an optimist.  He excuses himself from seeking solutions by denying the existence of the problems.  Those of us who view the Pew survey results more realistically cannot share his optimism -- but neither can we afford to give up hope.  

Douglas Aronin    


Kol Tuv,
RRW