Posted by David Bernstein:
A "Certain People" on College Campuses:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.shtml#1137034906
About twenty years ago, Charles Silberman wrote a controversial book
called A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today. I
remember the book well, because I was required to write a paper on it
for a class on American Jewish sociology (hmm, if I can remember this,
why can't Alito remember joining CAP?)
The book was primarily a celebration of the fact that American Jews
were now able to both be high achievers and to live open and explicit
Jewish lives--in contrast to prior generations of American Jews, who
often found that "making it" required them to downplay or abandon
their Jewish identity.
The most controversial part of the book was Silberman's prediction
that intermarriage, rather than constituting a demographic threat to
the Jewish community would likely wind up increasing the number of
American Jews. This prediction was based solely on anecdote, and it
outraged scholars who argued that this prediction flew in the face of
prior data on intermarriage, and their own, more scholarly
predictions. As I recall, my own paper expressed significant
skepticism about Silberman's thesis.
I was reminded of this controversy when I read today in Ha'aretz:
Some 4.5 million to 6 million Jews now live in the U.S., according
to various counts. According to Hillel, only about half of the
350,000 young people who define themselves as Jewish in American
colleges have two Jewish parents. The number of students with one
non-Jewish parent is about 47 percent, much higher than could be
expected according to previous studies.
Hillel says its study shows that Jewish background is a source of
pride on U.S. campuses. And it is not just the children of mixed
marriages who are choosing Judaism. One surprising statistic is
that 3 percent of the students who consider themselves Jewish have
no Jewish parent.
When these students' parents got married, the intermarriage rate among
American Jews was about 40%, lower for first marriages (now it's
around 50%). Statistics are not a strength of mine, but if I'm
figuring things out right, if 47% of college students who identify
themselves as Jews are the products of intermarriage, that means that
the majority of children of intermarriage identify as Jews, just as
Silberman predicted (one caveat: this may turn out to be wrong if
substantial numbers of students who have two Jewish parents don't
identify as Jews, though it would still support Silberman's thesis of
intermarriage being a demographic plus compared to in-marriage).
I'm not familiar with the relevant Hillel study, but assuming it's
accurate, it has some very radical implications for the future of
Jewish life in America:
(1) Less attachment to Israel, because both of less familial memory of
persecution and because Israel clings to a Jewish-law definition of
Judaism which requires the mother to be Jewish; apparently, almost 25%
of the next generation of American Jews will have only a Jewish
father.
(2) Jewishness will become more about religion and religious
tradition, less about culture. "Bagels and lox Judaism" was already on
its way out as American Jews become more distant from their
(primarily) Eastern European heritage. This will accelerate the trend
(as will the fact that a substantial percentage of American Jews are
now of recent Israeli or Russian origin, and neither group has
affinity for bagels and lox Judaism).
(3) A bias toward a further decline in anti-Semitism. The more
non-Jewish Americans have close Jewish relatives, the more one can
expect anti-Semitism to decline. Contrariwise, ingrained Jewish
suspicion of Christianity, the product of centuries of persecution,
will decline as more Jews have close Christian relatives.
(4) Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, which accept patrileneal
descent, and also are more liberal about conversion, will grow at the
expense of Conservative Judaism, which is in trouble for other reasons
anyway (as an officially halachic movement with few halachic
adherents, and as a movement that appeals primarily to traditionalists
when Reform is becoming more and more traditional).
(5) A general decline in some of the attributes one typically
attributes to American Jews, as Jews with a partially non-Jewish
genetic and cultural heritage play an increasingly large role in the
community. For example, Jews seem to have a genetic predisposition
against alcoholism, but a genetic disposition in favor of depression,
each the source of perhaps well-founded stereotype. Jews have a
cultural disposition in favor of the Democratic Party, and that will
likely weaken (though I suspect that some Jews prefer intermarriage
with a Christian to "intermarriage" with a Jewish Republican, so this
effect may not be as large as one might expect!)
(6) Paradoxically, the Orthodox and other traditional Jews will play
an increasingly disproportionate role in American Jewish life. The
half of the next generation of Jews who will have only one Jewish
parent are, on average, likely to be less committed to Judaism and
Jewish causes then those with two Jewish parents, for a variety of
reasons that seem to obvious to go bother going into. This means that
Jewish organizations--charities, JCCs, synagogues, are likely to be
dominated by the more traditional of Jewish factions, whose members
will more often be the progeny of two Jewish parents.
(7) Oddly, and also paradoxically, the popularity of Jewish day
schools may continue to grow among the non-Orthodox. For generations,
American Jews, as a cultural matter, have had a strong aversion to
religious day schools of any sort, including Jewish day schools. I'm
inclined to believe that the progeny of mixed marriages who embrace
Judaism are less likely to inherent this aversion.
There are probably other interesting implications, but I'll leave it
at that.
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