Introduction to the Special Issue

There are many ways to interpret the results of Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of Jewish Americans, but two broad narratives about Jewish life in the USA seem to be most common, including in the essays in this special issue of Contemporary Jewry. One is a narrative of decline and loss: a story of secularization, assimilation, and antisemitism. The other is a narrative of resilience and change: a story of demographic stability (or even growth in the US Jewish population) and continuing cultural relevance—not just the relevance of Jews to American culture but also the relevance of Jewish culture to American Jews.

On the surface, these two storylines seem opposed. One might think that, surely, only one can be true. Yet, in our view, the two dominant narratives about American Jewish life need each other. Each is rooted in data from the Pew surveys in 2020 and 2013 as well as prior demographic studies and other, more qualitative research. Yet neither, alone, is complete. They are intertwined, destined to live together in some harmony and some tension. They are, sociologically, beshert.

Furthermore, the 2020 survey was designed, as we will explain, to capture elements of both narratives. By comparison with the 2013 study, the 2020 questionnaire devoted more attention, in particular, to four topics: perceptions and experiences of antisemitism, economic precarity in parts of the Jewish population, incentives and disincentives to participation in synagogues, and cultural (as opposed to traditionally religious) expressions of Jewishness. These topics emerged as priorities in wide-ranging consultations by the research team with Jewish leaders and leading scholars of American Jewry.

Decline and Loss

The narrative of decline and loss—what we call the “lachrymose view of the Jewish present”—typically begins with a shake of the head at rates of intermarriage. In the 2020 survey, 42% of all married Jewish respondents (those in current, intact marriages) said their spouse was not Jewish at the time of the survey, which was in the field from November 2019 to June 2020. Furthermore, the intermarriage rate rises to 61% when looking only at US Jews who got married between 2010 and 2020, and to 72% when also excluding the Orthodox (i.e., calculating the intermarriage rate only for non-Orthodox Jews who got married in the 10 years prior to the survey).

From intermarriage, the story typically moves to patterns in childrearing: While 93% of the in-married Jewish respondents with children under 18 years at home said they were raising their children exclusively in the Jewish religion, just 28% of the intermarried Jewish parents said they were doing so.

These childrearing practices, in turn, help explain the rise of Jewish “nones.” About a quarter (27%) of Jewish adults surveyed in 2020—and fully 40% of those aged 18–29 years—identify as Jewish culturally, ethnically, or because of their family background, but not by religion. When asked “What is your present religion?,” they identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” rather than as Jewish. Many sociologists call this category “Jews of no religion” or, alternatively, “Jews not by religion”—in either case using the same acronym, JNRs. Other questions in the 2013 and 2020 Pew surveys show that this rapidly growing segment of the Jewish population tends not only to be less religiously observant but also to have much lower levels of connection with fellow Jews and Jewish organizations than do Jews who identify with the Jewish religion. And JNRs are, on average, relatively disconnected from Israel, displaying lower levels of emotional attachment to Israel than do American “Jews by religion,” or JBRs.

A final, disturbing element in the narrative of recent decline in American Jewish life is the resurgence of antisemitism. In the wake of mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Poway, California, in 2018 and 2019—among other violent incidents—most Jews surveyed in 2019–2020 said they thought there was more antisemitism in the USA than there had been 5 years earlier. Fully 75% took that position, while 19% said there was no change, and just 5% felt antisemitism was diminishing.

Resilience and Change

By contrast, the survey-based narrative of Jewish resilience—what we call “the hallelujah view” of Jewish life in America, although acknowledging (with apologies to Leonard Cohen) that in some respects it may be a cold and broken hallelujah—typically starts with a recognition of secularization across the whole of society.

Religious intermarriage and the rise of the “nones” are neither limited to Jews nor especially high among Jews compared with the general public. The percentage of US Jews who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” (27%) is almost exactly the same as the percentage of all US adults who answer a religious identification survey question that way (28%, as of 2020). Ditto for young Jewish adults: roughly 4 in 10 Jews aged 18–29 years and US adults in the same age cohort do not identify with any religion. Though Jewish intermarriage rates are surely higher now than they were decades ago, the same is true for religious (and racial) intermarriage in general in America (Pew Research Center 2017). And the survey finding, both in 2013 and in 2020, that more than half of all Jews who are married have a Jewish spouse reflects, statistically, a continuing strong pull toward endogamy. Given that Jews make up only about 2% of the US adult population, if Jewish Americans chose their spouses without any regard for (i.e., no statistical relationship to) religion or ethnicity, intermarriage rates would be considerably higher than they are today (Phillips 2013).

But the narrative of Jewish resilience in America really picks up steam from the findings in the 2013 and 2020 Pew surveys that more than half of intermarried Jewish parents say they are raising their children Jewishly in some way—if not by religion, then “culturally” or in some mixture of Judaism with other religious traditions. What is more, when we examine the current religious self-identification of all US adults in the 2013 and 2020 surveys who say they had one (and only one) Jewish parent—i.e., among the offspring of past intermarriages—we see strong evidence that, over time, the percentage of children of intermarriage who choose to identify as Jewish in adulthood has been rising. Together, these trends raise the possibility (not yet to our minds a proven fact, but a hypothesis deserving of consideration) that intermarriage could become, or perhaps already has become, a net source of increase in the size of the US Jewish population—i.e., that the number of people who begin identifying as Jews following intermarriages may exceed the number who stop identifying as Jews following intermarriages, counting not only spouses but also their offspring. (Crucially, of course, this math depends on one’s definition of Jewishness. It may also depend on the efficacy of Jewish education and other programming, such as Birthright, which is discussed in this issue by Leonard Saxe et al.)

And because of intermarriage along with adoption, conversion, immigration, and changing patterns in racial self-identification, the racial/ethnic diversity of the Jewish population is growing. One startling figure from the 2020 study is that roughly one in six US Jews (17%) now lives in a household where at least one person—adult or child—is Hispanic, Black, Asian, another (non-white) race or ethnicity, or multiracial. (This includes household members who may not identify as Jewish.)

Finally, the “hallelujah” story notes that, although the number of antisemitic incidents reported by law enforcement agencies in the USA have been rising, Americans on the whole continue to express relatively favorable attitudes toward Jews. In public opinion surveys, Jews consistently come out at the top of rankings of religious groups using various measures, such as feeling thermometers and favorability scales (Pew Research Center 2023).¹ And more US Jews, themselves, say there is a lot of discrimination in American society against some other groups—including Muslim and Black Americans—than say there is a lot of discrimination against Jews (Pew Research Center 2021).

Diversity and Divergence

The key to reconciling these two narratives, in our view, is to recognize not just the diversity but also the growing divergence of views and experiences within the US Jewish population. If one arrays Jewish Americans on a spectrum ranging from Orthodox Jews to those who do not identify with any Jewish denomination, there are strong signs of growth at both ends, albeit for different reasons.

At one pole, Orthodox Jews have high fertility rates and attendant patterns in family life (high rates of marriage, relatively young ages at marriage, large families, and so on). At the other pole, Jews who do not identify with any particular branch or stream of Judaism have low fertility rates but are growing, nevertheless, because of switching between Jewish denominations and gradual movement of people along the religiosity spectrum over the course of their lives. While some Jews move into Orthodoxy, the overall flow has been toward lower levels of traditional observance, as evidenced by, among other things, net switching from Orthodox to Conservative Judaism, from Conservative to Reform Judaism, and from Reform to not identifying with any particular stream of Judaism (Pew Research Center 2021).

Some scholars have described the growth at both poles as, concurrently, a shrinking or hollowing out of the middle. And if the middle of American Jewry is defined, loosely, as the combined share of all US Jews who identify as either Conservative or Reform, then it is markedly smaller in younger age cohorts than among Jews aged 50 years and older, as Ariela Keysar shows in her article in this issue.

Contrarily, however, the “middle”—if that is how one chooses to talk about it—is still where a majority of American Jews are found. In the 2020 survey, 54% of all US Jews (including JNRs as well as JBRs) identified as Reform (37%) or Conservative (17%), virtually unchanged from 2013, when they also totaled 54%, including 35% Reform and 18% Conservative (all figures rounded to the nearest integer).

The Jewish “Middle” Is Strong

Moreover, in many ways the middle remains strong—i.e., attached to their denominations, concerned about Israel, feeling some responsibility for fellow Jews in need worldwide, and active in Jewish cultural life. For example, of the large denominations or streams of American Judaism, the highest retention rates (the percentage of people raised in each group who still identify with that group) belong to the Reform as well as the Orthodox, at approximately two-thirds of each, as shown in Table 1. By at least one measure, the highest levels of concern for Israel are found among Conservative Jews, 96% of whom say caring about Israel is either “essential” or “important” to what being Jewish means to them, as shown in Table 2. (Percentages are rounded to the nearest integer after calculations.)

Table 1 Retention rates by stream or branch of Judaism

Table 2 Denomination by percentage who say caring about Israel is___to what being Jewish means to them

And if one looks beyond traditional measures of religious observance, such as attending synagogue or keeping kosher, and focuses on some other measures of activity in contemporary Jewish life, then the “middle” clearly predominates. For example, 61% of all the Jewish adults who said in the 2020 survey that they often or sometimes mark Shabbat in a way that is meaningful to them personally (possibly but not necessarily a halachic observance) are Reform (35%) or Conservative (26%). See Table 3. Similarly, a majority of Jews who said they often or sometimes read Jewish newspapers, or who seek out Jewish news online, are either Reform (35%) or Conservative (23%), as shown in Table 4.

Table 3 Percent of US Jews who mark Shabbat in a personally meaningful way by various characteristics of their Jewish identity

Table 4 Percent of US Jews who read Jewish newspapers or seek out Jewish news online by various characteristics of their Jewish identity

Measuring “Cultural” Jewish Activities and Economic Precarity

The survey questions about reading Jewish news and marking Shabbat in personal ways were among a dozen measures included in the 2020 survey at the suggestion of Jewish organizations and scholars who urged the research team to ask not just about traditional religious rituals but also about a range of Jewish cultural activities.

The consultations began in mid-2018 with a meeting of about 35 leading scholars from across the USA, Israel, and the UK at Pew Research Center’s offices in Washington, DC. A smaller panel of 10 expert advisers continued to meet online or in person throughout the process of designing the survey questionnaire, fielding the survey, and analyzing the results. The research team also reached out, individually, to dozens of Jewish organizational leaders, clergy, and scholars on particular issues. Their names and professional affiliations, which are listed in our report Jewish Americans in 2020, are too numerous to include here, but we are deeply grateful to each of them.

Among the topics of broad interest to Jewish community professionals, philanthropies and scholars was poverty within parts of the Jewish population. Some felt this issue had been covered sparsely in prior national and regional Jewish demographic studies and was “hiding in plain sight” in a population that is generally thought to be, on average, economically well off. In response, we developed several new questions about economic well-being and devoted a chapter of the survey report to them. We found, for example, that 11% of Jewish adults said they had difficulty paying for housing (rent or mortgage) in the year prior to the survey, including 19% of Jews aged 18–29 years and 26% of Orthodox Jews.

Insofar as the 2020 survey reflects the input of a wide array of people with differing viewpoints, it is not surprising that it captures elements of more than one narrative about Jewish life in America and is amenable to multiple interpretations. At the same time, we do not think it is true, as some skeptics have suggested, that the findings of the survey are entirely in the eyes of the beholder. The numbers are the numbers: even taking into account margins of error, other potential sources of bias, and a healthy dose of humility about what is known and knowable, they are not entirely malleable.

Take, for instance, the size of the Jewish population. Given the possibility of past undercounts, methodological differences between studies, and continuing disagreements about how best to define a “core” Jewish population, there is ample room for the lively debate that plays out in this issue of Contemporary Jewry. And, yet, we would like to point out that the debate takes place within certain bounds, including a consensus that Jews make up roughly 2% of the total US population, a proportion that has not changed a great deal in recent decades.

Or, consider the number of Jews of color. We avoided defining that term in Jewish Americans in 2020 because of continuing arguments about who should—and should not—be included in it. But the survey collected a lot of relevant information. We asked US Jews about their race and ethnicity, using essentially the same categories used in the US census. We also asked whether they consider themselves Ashkenazi, Sephardi, or Mizrahi, and we inquired about their country of birth and the birthplaces of their parents. Then we did our best to combine all this information into tables, which while limited by small sample sizes, amount to the following invitation: You pick your definition from the list of attributes we asked about, and the survey can provide an estimate of the percentage of Jewish adults who fit it.

In truth, this invitation extends to most, if not all, of the topics covered in the survey, including the overarching question of who counts as Jewish. For the purposes of our report Jewish Americans in 2020, we aimed for consistency with the 2013 study’s categories of Jews by religion (JBRs) and Jews of no religion (JNRs), which together amount to a working definition of Jewishness that is not strictly matrilineal but that excludes people who say they have another religion, such as Christianity, even if they also self-identify as Jewish in some way. At the same time, the publicly available 2020 survey dataset allows researchers to apply broader framings of Jewishness (as Richard Heiberger and Bruce Phillips do in their articles in this issue) or narrower ones (as Sergio DellaPergola does).

In keeping with the “choose your own adventure” design, we thank scholars for using Pew’s data to explore the breadth and depth of American Jewry from different perspectives, and we applaud the spirit of robust but collegial debate that infuses this special issue of Contemporary Jewry.