As the controversy surrounding the size of the American Jewish population continues, one question looms over all the rest: Are Jewish communal politics to blame?
Last month the United Jewish Communities announced the results of its National Jewish Population Study. By any account, it has been a long — and expensive — slog. Supposed to begin in April 2000 and taking 2-1/2 years to complete, NJPS 2000 has cost $6 million.
Then came the headlines: “American Jewry an aging and declining” population of 5.2 million.
How much had it shrunk? According to the UJC press release, by about 300,000 during the 10-year interval since NJPS’ 1990 study. Confusion reigned when, using an admittedly smaller sampling, demographer Gary Tobin’s S.F.-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research showed a more optimistic view. It suggested that Jews were “thriving” and had produced a “powerful American subculture.”
Who’s right?
In 1990, I directed the National Jewish Population Survey. It was sponsored by the former Council of Jewish Federations (swallowed up by UJC) but located within an academic institution, the City University of New York Graduate Center. Its budget? Under $500,000, with a full report and methodology made available within 12 months.
Last year, I carried out a replicate study of the 1990 NJPS with Egon Mayer and Ariela Keysar at the CUNY Graduate Center. Called the American Jewish Identification Survey, it interviewed 1,250 households containing Jews, at a cost of $300,000. We published a full report within four months. It’s been up and universally accessible on the CUNY Web site for almost a year. By contrast, UJC had trouble finding Jewish households. It paid respondents to participate in its survey. Its full results will not be available until April.
So here is the $6 million question: Why has NJPS cost 20 times the money and taken nine times as long as AJIS? How is it that the UJC “ran out” of Jewish households and had to pay people to participate?
The answer: politics. Disaster is predictable when a philanthropic organization tries to do science and when a self-study becomes a self-serving study. Rejecting an objective, university-based repeat of 1990, UJC insisted on carrying out a proprietary, custom-made survey.
Religious politics played a role as well. The professional and lay leaders of the old CJF operated with integrity and objectivity. They gave the team of social scientists complete autonomy and academic freedom to report the 1990 NJPS data as we found them. As is common in social research, the results gored some people’s oxen.
The much heralded return to Judaism in the 1980s and growth of Orthodoxy (7 percent of U.S. Jews) turned out to be of little statistical significance. Instead, the headlines ran with a 52 percent rate of intermarriage among people born and raised Jewish, and a drift away from religious and communal affiliation among large sections of the Jewish public.
The response was expected: Kill the messenger. Despite its acclaim by the wider American social science establishment, NJPS was shamelessly attacked by vested interests and a few Jewish journalists. They said it exaggerated the rate of intermarriage and counted the wrong types of Jews.
Next, a political battle broke out over communal policies and funding priorities. Proponents of outreach programs like Birthright Israel, which aims to recapture the alienated fringe, were pitted against advocates of “inreach” to the loyal core, mainly by increasing federation subsidies for Orthodox day schools.
This ideological shift had consequences.
First the fund-raisers of the former United Jewish Appeal purged most of the social workers of CJF from the new UJC. Then NJPS 2000 was re-engineered to meet the demands of inreach. The survey changed its methodology, using restrictive definitions of the Jews who would be interviewed and counted. It also employed a stratification system that focused interviews in geographical areas with “known” concentrations of Jews.
Like party politics, demography is about numbers and counting. When your side doesn’t have the votes, you reduce the size of the electorate by disqualifying your opponents’ supporters. By failing to adequately count “fringe” or “marginal” Jews — the intermarried, the secular, the unaffiliated and those living outside the large metropolitan areas — narrow sectors within the Jewish community artificially increased their share of the population by reducing its overall size.
The new NJPS has reported a decline of 300,000 in the core Jewish population between 1990 and 2000. Yet we know that there was a positive influx of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Israel during these years, amounting to at least 100,000 people. That means American Jewry, according to the UJC’s figures, lost nearly half a million people.
Are we prepared to believe that a population the size of the Jewish communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul vanishes annually? Are there hundreds of Jews streaming south across the Rio Grande every night? Could tens of thousands of Jews be converting to Christianity, Buddhism — maybe Islam — every year?
The UJC press release offers a clue: lack of births. Seriously? Are we really to believe that it’s the “fault” of career women? In fact, the figures on the age structures of the population in 1990 and 2000 tell a different story: The losses between 1990 and 2000 occur mostly among those born in the 1960s to 1980s. AJIS, however, managed to located these “missing persons.” They’re the ones who reported having “no religion” and are secular in outlook. Whatever the answer, no trained demographer would think of blaming young Jewish women for failing to give birth to adults who were alive and well in 1990.
Even NJPS 2000’s claim of a high “drop-out” rate for disaffected youngsters turns out to be convenient for certain parties — especially institutions seeking a decline in the intermarriage rate. It also serves vested interests in the United States and Israel who would like to see a higher proportion of Orthodox and traditionalists in the American Jewish population. This political bias explains much of the hostility to NJPS 1990, Tobin’s survey and AJIS 2001.
Given the differences between the results of the UJC National Jewish Population Survey 2000 and the CUNY American Jewish Identification Survey 2001, the Talmud (Megilla 6b) is worth quoting: “If someone says, ‘I’ve tried hard but didn’t find,’ don’t believe them. If someone says ‘I’ve found, but didn’t try hard,’ don’t believe them either. But if someone says, ‘I’ve tried hard, and I found’ — believe them.'”