Abstract
It is unsurprising that the Pew Research Center’s “Jewish Americans in 2020” study and report emphasized politics, anti-Semitism, and coronavirus disease 22019 (COVID-19), but there were missed opportunities to collect data and analyze Jewish environmentalism. The Pew data indicated that high percentages of Jews find mining and fulfillment from “being outdoors and experiencing nature” (Pew Research Center 2019–2020 Survey of U.S. Jews Final Topline, 2021c, 3) and that they were concerned with the Trump Administration’s handling of the environment (Pew Research Center 2021c, 8). In addition, the growth of Jewish environmental organizations suggests that the younger generations of Jewish Americans are gravitating towards this work. The data from these surveys and scholarship on Jewish environmentalism will be analyzed alongside my own research on Jewish environmentalism and the Jewish community farming movement. I argue here that based on the data from Pew and other sources like the Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of Jewish Americans are invested in the environment and are concerned about the climate crisis, so future surveys of the Jewish community should incorporate more questions and deeper analysis on this critical contemporary issue.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In the Pew Report “Jewish Americans in 2020,” Jewishness is defined as those who were “Jews by religion” (people who claim Judaism as their only religion) and “Jews of no religion” (people who identified as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” but were raised Jewish or had one Jewish parent and still consider themselves Jewish, even if their Jewish identity is not a religious one (p. 2). In my own analysis of the Pew dataset, I retained this definition of Jewishness and only included analysis of “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion” for the sake of consistency.
A proportion of 92% of the total Jewish respondents were white non-Hispanic and just 1% were Black non-Hispanic, 4% were Hispanic, and 3% were “other/mixed non-Hispanic” (Pew Research Center 2021, 6).
Table 1 Percent of US Jews who rated Donald Trump’s handling of the nation’s policy on the environment as… (“Jewish Americans in 2020 Extended Dataset”) There are myriad responses to Lynn White Jr.’s article and Havah Tirosh Samuelson’s Judaism and Ecology (2002) includes discussion of many of the Jewish responses. The term Judeo-Christian is itself worthy of concern and K. Healan Gaston’s Imagining Judeo-Christian America (2019) is a good resource on this topic.
In 2003 the Union for American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) became the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ).
In 1997 the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC) became the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA).
References
Alper, Becka A. 2022. How religion intersects with Americans’ views on the environment. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/11/17/how-religion-intersects-with-americans-views-on-the-environment/. Accessed 11 Feb 2023.
Informing Change. 2014. Seeds of opportunity: A national study of immersive Jewish outdoor, food, and environmental education (JOFEE). https://issuu.com/hazon/docs/jofee_report. Accessed 11 Feb 2023.
Jacobs, Mark X. 2002. Jewish environmentalism: Past accomplishments and future challenges. In Judaism and ecology: Created world and revealed word, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 449–480. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jones, Robert P., Daniel Cox, and Juhem Navarro-Rivera. 2014. Believers, Sympathizers, & Skeptics: Why Americans are Conflicted About Climate Change, Environmental Policy, and Science. Washington D.C.: Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion. https://www.prri.org/research/believers-sympathizers-skeptics-americans-conflicted-climate-change-environmental-policy-science/. Accessed 20 July 2022.
Krone, Adrienne. 2020. Growing food: Ecological ethics in the Jewish community farming movement. In Feasting and fasting: The history and ethics of Jewish food, ed. Aaron Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan Rosenblum, 273–286. New York: NYU Press.
Krone, Adrienne. 2021. Jewish Environmentalism. In The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, edited by Jennifer Sartori and Judith Rosenbaum. Jewish Women’s Archive. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jewish-environmentalism. Accessed 26 July 2022.
Participant observation. Milk and Honey Farm. June 9, 2022.
Pew Research Center. 2021a. Jewish Americans in 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/. Accessed 20 July 2022.
Pew Research Center. 2021b. Jewish Americans in 2020 Extended Dataset. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/dataset/jewish-americans-in-2020/. Accessed 21 Jan 2023.
Pew Research Center. 2021c. Pew Research Center 2019–2020 Survey of U.S. Jews Final Topline. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/. Accessed 20 July 2022.
Seidenberg, David Mevorach. 2015. Kabbalah and ecology: God’s image in the more-than-human world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements
In the summer of 2022, I was able to go into the field for the first time after the pandemic and my conversations with farmers and volunteers at Jewish Community Farming organizations in Colorado, Arizona, California, and North Carolina motivated me to write this response and helped me shape my argument. The faculty and students of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto invited me to speak and asked insightful questions that helped me fill in some of the missing pieces as I revised this article. I would like to thank my Allegheny College colleagues Christopher Normile, Megan Bertholomey, and Tarah Williams for their generosity, wisdom, humor, and support, as I struggled to learn to use SPSS, and then JASP during a meeting of our writing accountability group. Finally, the peer reviewers rightfully requested a more thorough analysis of the questions that Pew asked related to the environment and although this analysis pushed me out of my ethnography comfort zone, it made this article better and I am grateful for their advice. I would especially like to thank Reviewer #4, who generously stepped in to assist with that analysis themselves when my newly acquired statistical analysis skills were not quite up to the task.
Funding
The authors have not disclosed any funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors have not disclosed any competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Krone, A. Jewish Environmentalism in the “Jewish Americans in 2020” Study and Beyond. Cont Jewry 43, 399–410 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09500-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09500-2