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By comparison, only 11% of Jews ages 18-29 are Orthodox.  Two caveats.  First, only 80% of those 18-29 who were raised Orthodox call themselves Orthodox, so if trends hold the 27% will be more like 21.5%.  Second, there is a confidence interval, unknown to me, and the numbers may not be quite so dramatic.  But I did check with demographer Steven Cohen, who reported these data, and he thinks the figures are about right.  If so, this represents a huge and dramatic shift in American Jewish life.  Given that the Orthodox are by definition more actively involved in Jewish life, and most of the rest of American Jewry not-so-much, a huge percentage of what one might call “Jewish energy” in the U.S. will emanate from Orthodox circles.

As an aside, I was thinking how difficult it must be for demographers to do cross-generational comparisons.  To take one issue, in past generations, lots of people just vanished from the Jewish world without a trace by adopting a non-Jewish identity and never mentioning their background to anyone.  It’s hard to know how common this used to be, but consider that individuals who either didn’t know or claimed not to know about their recent Jewish ancestry include Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, and George Allen.  Bush budget director Richard Darman was raised Jewish, but never told his wife and children.  In my own family, I know that one of my grandfather’s first cousins changed his name to Burns and never told his children he was born and raised Jewish–and they were quite surprised to receive an invitation to the Bernstein family reunion.  I’ve also met quite a few people over time who suspect that one of their parents was raised Jewish, or who are dimly aware of family rumors that a grandparent was Jewish. [...]

The study is getting a lot of commentary, and there is much that one can say. But my top takeaways are that Modern Orthodoxy, Conservative Judaism, Reform Judaism, and Orthodox outreach are, all things considered, overall failures, which implies that American Judaism is a failure. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. American Jews were always rather irreligious, the pious Jews generally stayed in Europe. Going back to the early 1900s, socialism, Communism, and Christian Science(!) were rampant in the Jewish community. Few Jews belonged to synagogues, and the center of world Jewish life was firmly in Europe, where the great centers of both Orthodox and non-Orthodox learning were. After WWII, with those centers destroyed, and an absence of traditional European Jews to replenish the community, one could have expected imminent disaster. Instead, a sociological surprise happened–Jews joined synagogues, in-married, and otherwise became much more religiously involved than sociologists would have expected. But perhaps that period, and not ours, was the anomaly. Anyway:

(1) Modern Orthodox Judaism is a failure. Modern Orthodoxy has a lot to be proud of. It’s built a strong network of day schools and Summer camps, it has very low rates of social pathology (if you want to keep your kids away from sex and drugs in high school, sending them to a modern Orthodox day school would improve the odds dramatically), and its adherents are full and successful participants in American life, including a recent major party Vice-Presidential candidate, a U.S. attorney general, and a White House Chief of Staff. Yet, only 3% of American Jews identify as modern Orthodox. This means that the modern Orthodox are not drawing from the large pool of older people who were raised Orthodox but drifted away, is not attracting young Conservative or Reform Jews to its brand of Judaism, [...]

I’ve randomly come across two stories that illustrate a truism about “nonprofits”–their leaders often act a lot like leaders of for-profit organizations, seeking to expand market share and the like.

In particular, it’s well-known that non-profits very rarely declare their mission to be over and wind up operations. The famous example is the March of Dimes, which started as an organization seeking to wipe out polio, and when it succeeded expanded into birth defects more generally.

Analogously, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded to help resettle Jewish refugees in the U.S. now has precious few Jewish refugees to resettle. Time to fold up shop? Of course not. HIAS has instead transformed its mission to helping refugees in general.

Meanwhile, the “Joint Distribution Committee,” whose mission is to aid Jews in need, has been working in Ethiopia for the last several decades to feed, house, employ and prepare for life in Israel tens of thousands of Jewish Ethiopians. The government of Israel has now declared that mass aliyah to Israel from Ethiopia is over, with everyone sufficiently connected to the Jewish people already given their entry permits. Time to close up shop in Ethiopia? Of course not! Time instead to expand the mission. Maybe young Jewish philanthropists want to give to development in Ethiopia. Maybe young Jewish volunteers want to spend some time in Ethiopia. Maybe the Israeli government thinks that keeping a presence in Ethiopia will help its foreign policy. Maybe Israel will decide that it needs to boost its foreign aid spending to meet OECD targets. But whatever the ratoinale, the last thing the organization wants to do is shrink.

Note that the point here is not to debate what Jewish organizations should be doing, whether Jewish philanthropy should focus more on the Jewish community or on so-called “tikkun [...]

I’m talking to my daughter’s preschool class about Passover tomorrow, and in preparation I’ve been looking for appropriate Youtube videos to show them. This one didn’t make the cut for the particular occasion, but it’s my favorite Passover Youtube video (and one of a series of very clever Passover videos from Aish.com). A must if you are a “Queen” fan.

[...]

Ha’aretz has the details.  Reading this and other accounts of this and other studies, it now seems well-established that:

(1) The mainstream Ashkenazic and Mizrahi  (“Eastern”) Jewish communities share a genetic heritage tracing back about 2,500 years.

(2) These communities maintained sufficient separation from the local non-Jewish populations that despite vast geographic distances, to this day they have greater genetic similarity with each other than with the non-Jewish population among whom they lived.

(3) The idea that Ashkenazic Jews are primarily descended from converted Khazars, most recently propounded by charlatan Shlomo Sand, is nonsense, and only continues to persist against all scientific evidence because it serves the ideological agendas of anti-Semites and anti-Zionists.

(4) Some isolated Jewish communities, like the Ethiopians, either never had, or eventually lost, their genetic connection to the rest of the Jewish people.

(5) Contrary to popular myth, the group that Jews most resemble genetically is not Palestinian Arabs, but the Druze.  Geneticists, in fact, put Jews and Druze into one grouping, and Palestinians, Bedouin, and other Arab populations into another.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think such genetic studies bear any true relevance to modern political controversies (nor would they if they had different results)–since “peoplehood’ is purely a social construct anyway, I don’t see why it matters whether Palestinians or Jews “really” are peoples who have long dwelled in the Land of Israel/Palestine, or just think of themselves that way.  The studies are nevertheless interesting on their own terms.

But there are those, like Sand, who spend a good deal of time and energy trying to prove the lack of common Jewish genetic heritage, promoting the Khazar myth, and so on, for political reasons, and go so far as to dismiss contrary genetic evidence as Zionist propaganda.  To them, the classic response is [...]

Here’s a very interesting report from “The Solomon Project.” The main conclusion is that based on election year exit polls, Jewish support for Democrats and liberalism has remained pretty constant since 1972.

If one digs a bit deeper into the report, one learns that current trends suggest that the American Jewish electorate will grow less Democratic in the future. First, unlike the rest of the electorate young Jews were less likely to vote for Obama in 2008 than were older Jews have been less likely to vote for Democratic presidential candidates over the least three elections. Indeed, about 75% Jews under 30 voted for Obama the Democrat (compared to about 85% of the over-60 crowd)* [by the way, this renders the premise behind Sarah Silverman’s “Great Schlep” rather ridiculous, no? Maybe the alter kockers in Boca should be going up to Pennsylvania and Ohio to persuade their grandchildren to vote Democrat, rather than vice versa], not that much higher than the 66% of the general under-30 electorate that voted for Obama (the study tabulates the last three elections together for age]. Second, more religiously observant Jews are significantly more likely to vote Republican and not identify themselves as liberals. A rapidly increasing proportion of the American Jewish population is religiously observant thanks to high birth rates among the Orthodox, low birth rates and intermarriage among the non-Orthodox, and the fact that the generation of at least nominally Orthodox Eastern European immigrants whose children were not Orthodox has almost entirely died out, so for likely the first time in American history Orthodoxy is concentrated among the young.

One other interesting data point I can draw from the study is that Orthodox Jews (and possibly other observant or “religious” Jews) are substantially underrepresented in exit polls, or at least recent exit [...]