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Peripheral Vision: Exploring the “US Jewish Penumbra” in Pew 2020

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Abstract

The Pew 2020 report focuses on the “net Jewish population,” consisting of Jews by religion (JBR) and Jews of no religion (JNR) and largely ignores the third category, “persons of Jewish background” (PJB’s) who fall outside what I call the “consensus Jewish population." An understanding of the US Jewish landscape is incomplete without taking PJBs into account. I divide PJBs into four subcategories and show that PJBs as a whole are at least as attached to Jewish identification as JNRs and this attachment varies by subcategory. This pattern undermines the longstanding straightline assimilation paradigm. Multiracial perspectives and mixed-race studies offer a better perspective for understanding the unexpectedly high Jewish attachments of PJBs. I end with recommendations for new qualitative research.

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Fig. 1

Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: analysis of Pew 2020

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: analysis of Pew 2020

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Source: analysis of Pew 2020

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Source Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Source: Author’s analysis of Pew 2020 data

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Notes

  1. Accessible at https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=304&mediaId=NJPS1971-Methodology.pdf and https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=304&mediaId=NJPS1971-Original_Questionnaire.pdf.

  2. This category includes Jews by choice, but in the analysis presented here is limited to persons of Jewish parentage, and thus excludes Jews by choice.

  3. I put this term in quotation marks throughout because it has not been used before and is objectionable to some as legitimizing a category they reject as theologically impossible.

  4. Followers of non-Christian religions present a unique classification challenge because current research (Ariel 2011; Sigalow 2019) suggests that these are not competing identities. Pew disqualifies adherents of Eastern religions and new religious movements as Jews, but DellaPergola in his earlier work (2014) includes them.

  5. Here I follow the classification scheme used in the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (Pew Research Center 2008), which classifies Unitarians as having “no religion.”

  6. i.e., Christians of Jewish parentage who do not consider themselves to be Jewish.

  7. It might be that despite the instructions to think broadly, some respondents understood “being Jewish” to mean religion.

  8. This question was not asked of PJB–Christians.

  9. “How many of your close friends are Jewish?”

  10. “Aside from religion, do you consider yourself to be Jewish in any way (for example ethnically, culturally, or because of your family’s background)?”

  11. See Fig. 2

  12. These percentages are higher than 100% due to rounding up.

  13. Among JBRs, 87% of Orthodox respondents, 34% of Conservative respondents, and 14% of Reform respondents said that religion was very important in their life.

  14. The 13-year gap between the two surveys is an important difference if social changes had taken place in the interim. I use this question to help identify what kinds of Christians the Christian Jews and PJB–Christians most resemble, since Pew 2020 did not inquire about Christian denominations.

  15. Because of small sample sizes for some categories, I combined the “Christian Jews” with the PJB–Christians.

  16. This finding, along with identical percentage of college graduates among JBRs in Pew 2020 and the ATP, supports the validity of the Pew 2020 survey.

  17. “Hapa” is a Hawaiian pidgin word used to describe mixed-race people who are half white and half Asian. It is short for hapalua, the Hawaiian word that for "half.”

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    Bruce A. Phillips

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Phillips, B.A. Peripheral Vision: Exploring the “US Jewish Penumbra” in Pew 2020. Cont Jewry 43, 263–297 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09494-x

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