There’s a quiet revolution taking place in the Jewish community today, changing the way Jewishness is defined and measured.
Social scientists are duking it out in professional journals and speeches at conferences over which approach to gauging Jewish identity will hold sway. The method used in years past looked at traditional religious and ethnic behaviors; the new one is designed to probe the individualistic, highly personalized ways that Jews are now relating to their Jewish identities.
But in reality, the decision to move to new methods has already been made by the architects of the most influential study in the Jewish community: the National Jewish Population Survey 2000.
The questions being asked this time around are distinctly different from those asked in the last National Jewish Population Survey, in 1990. And that is a direct result of the shifts in thinking among many social scientists.
While in years past, for example, when people were asked which Jewish denomination they identify with, they were offered the usual possibilities, from Reform to Orthodox, or “just Jewish.” This time, in addition to those categories, they’re offered a laundry list of other possibilities, including “something else,” “Conservadox,” “post-denominational Jew,” “Jewish Renewal,” “haredi” and “humanistic.” (See accompanying story on new survey questions.)
“Jewish identity itself is becoming more diverse and less predictable,” Steven M. Cohen, a professor at Hebrew University and consultant to the NJPS 2000, told The Jewish Week. “New tools need to be developed to be sensitive to the ways American Jews may have invented new forms of Jewish identity.”
The debate is far from academic: Research data in the Jewish community drives communal policy decisions, and shapes how Jewish organizations view the constituencies that they intend to serve. Also at stake is many millions of dollars in what used to be called “continuity” funding, money in the hands of Jewish federations and private philanthropists who determine which projects they want to underwrite to bring Jews closer to their religious, ethnic and cultural identity.
The UJA-Federation of NewYork’s Commission on Jewish Identity and Renewal alone will spend $10.2 million in its next fiscal year, for example, and its leaders’ funding decisions will certainly be guided by the findings of the National Jewish Population Study 2000.
Initial results from the NJPS 2000, which is currently under way, are slated for release at the next meeting of the United Jewish Communities’ constituent organizations, in November.
At issue is how Jewishness is measured.
It used to be that assessing the strength of someone’s Jewish identity was a straightforward matter, based on behaviors shared by Jews everywhere. A committed Jew was someone who lit Shabbat candles regularly, fasted on Yom Kippur, traveled to Israel and supported one or more Jewish organizations.
And that was the model on which the 1990 population study, as well as just about all the other surveys of Jewish identity conducted in the last 25 years, since it became an area for study, were based.
But in the last decade, the way American Jews live out their Jewishness has changed — or at least social scientists and Jewish communal leaders have begun to catch onto a reality that had been shifting for far longer.
The day when one set of common, traditional behaviors identified engaged Jews is over, say social scientists including Cohen, Bethamie Horowitz and Gary Tobin.
Instead, American Jews are on a very personalized, highly individualistic journey of exploration, they say. Today, Jews pick and choose how they want to identity, and behave in Jewish ways bound not by custom and tradition, but by individual will alone. As a person’s life circumstances, or whims, change, so does their Jewish behavior.
The “new tools” now being employed by Cohen and others include in-depth interviews and open-ended questions, more qualitative than quantitative research.
“The whole question of how we look at identity has changed,” says Horowitz, a consultant to the Mandel Foundation and, formerly, to UJA-Federation of New York.
In her 1990 report “Connections and Journeys: Assessing Critical Opportunities for Enhancing Jewish Identity,” she fleshed out a “journey” metaphor for Jewish identity, which changes through an individual’s life.
“What covered defining Jewishness in the 20th century doesn’t exist. The old question is: How Jewish are American Jews — as Jewish as their grandparents, or more or less Jewish? The new question is: How are American Jews Jewish if at all?”
Others analysts, including Charles Liebman and Steven Bayme, favor more quantitative than qualitative research, though say that both techniques should be employed. But they say that traditional religious and ethnic ways of behaving remains solid measures of Jewish commitment and legitimate predictors of future behavior, and that those kinds of questions should not be abandoned in the quest for a more nuanced picture of Jewish life.
“I’m sure that there are mixed-married couples whose children grow up with deep Jewish convictions and commitments,” Liebman said in a speech at the Association of Jewish Studies conference last December. “Does this mean that our generalizations about the dangers which mixed marriage poses to Jewish continuity are wrong?”
The children of mixed marrieds are far less likely to grow up identifying as Jews than are the children of two Jews.
The new approach, however, is the one that seems to be winning out. It is written all over the NJPS 2000 questionnaire.
“The study design was greatly influenced by new forms of gauging Jewish identity,” acknowledged Jim Schwartz, research director for the United Jewish Communities, which is conducting the survey. “It’s useful to see Jewish identity from multiple perspectives. We wanted to spread the net as widely as we could.”
“The 1990 survey had more black-and-white questions. These questions are more nuanced, and that reflects where the Jewish community is,” said Gail Hyman, vice president for marketing and public affairs of UJC. “There’s an overlay of new behavior at the grass-roots level that we haven’t looked at before,” she said.
A question about denominational affiliation allows the interviewee to choose one of the usual answers, for example, but also to offer a response other than the listed choices, which were the only alternatives — along with “just Jewish” — available in 1990.
It also includes questions asking if respondents look for Jewish things when they travel, and if they go to Jewish destinations on the Internet.
Implicit in this new approach is a shift away from making judgments about what is “good Judaism” and what is “bad,” or legitimate versus inauthentic. All points of entry into connection with Jewish life along life’s journey are considered equally kosher.
“The old notion that there is only one way of being Jewish is wrong,” said Liebman. “But unless you can pull people way past klezmer music and feeling Jewish into some kind of Jewish activity, then I don’t think any of this is meaningful.
“Legitimating a variety of forms of Jewish expression which don’t contribute to Jewish continuity or Jewish survival is a ‘feel-good’ kind of Judaism which may not last a whole generation.”
The changes in approach are also reflected in semantic shifts.
What was originally named the Continuity Commission of UJA-Federation, for example, is now called its Commission on Jewish Identity and Renewal, because its agenda has changed as a result of the work of social scientists including Cohen and Horowitz, which has persuaded the leadership to look toward lifelong opportunities to reach Jews, rather than certain key entry points.
The term “continuity” is out because it implies a focus on youth, which is no longer in vogue, said one New York federation official. “It was all about kids until three or four years ago. No one felt the legitimacy of funding things for adults the way they do now.”
Perhaps the semantic shift is most evident in the NJPS 2000. While the terms “core Jew” and “non-core Jew” are currently being used by the survey’s researchers, as they were in 1990, to distinguish between people raised as Jews who identify that way today and those who don’t, the terms will be dropped in favor of something considered more palatable when it is time to release the study’s findings, said UJC executives.
There is currently “debate and discussion” within the UJC over what language to use, said Lorraine Blass, a UJC senior planner.
“The language is important because someone we call ‘non-core’ might consider their Judaism very relevant to them,” said the UJC’s Hyman. “We don’t want to disenfranchise anyone.”
Though most Jews aren’t aware of, or interested in, these changes, their outcome will make an impact on them in important ways nonetheless, say the social scientists.
“All these discussions are a giant shrug of the shoulders for most Jews. But it affects them,” says Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, which is based in San Francisco.
“If the National Jewish Population Study finds through some narrow definition of Jewishness that there are 4.5 million Jews, or through some broader definition that there are 6 million Jews, that can affect the way the U.S. government relates to Israel. It can affect the spending of Jewish human service agencies as they plan to help certain populations and not others,” Tobin said.
And on an individual level, he said, “whether they perceive themselves as a growing population or declining people can have a tremendous effect on the psyche of Jews.”