Two weeks ago the Pew Center published its report on American Jewish life that reported what many of us highly suspected: American Jews are, like most Americans, becoming less religiously identified, more intermarried and assimilated. The Pew Study is the most significant demographic study of the American Jewish community completed since 2000 and has received extensive international news coverage. JFNA has curated a collection of some of the more compelling news coverage and commentary, accessible at this link. We will be learning more about what the study may mean for trends in American Jewish life for some time to come. The Pew study will also be informing our own demographic sturdy here in St. Louis, now in the planning stages.
The Pew Study is about 250 pages and I have read through about a 1/3 of it carefully. I began my close read of it after I read a good deal of media coverage about the study. There is nothing (so far) that is particularly surprising to me in the study. There is, however, a lot is shocking about the reaction to it.
What do I mean? The Pew study presents a set of descriptive data about characteristics of the American Jewish community; it does not provide any kind of analysis of that data. That means that any report–I mean any report–that purports to tell you something about what does or does not work in maintaining Jewish life, or makes any kind of causal claim, is simply unsupported by the evidence. The problem is a technical but important one: without subjecting the data to multivariate analysis, the report provides no supportable empirical basis whatsoever for any explanations about what does or does not work.
So reader beware: any causal claim you hear touted based on the Pew study are simply hypotheses that may or may not turn out to be true. We simply do not know if, for example, Orthodoxy is a better institutional force at maintaining Jewish continuity than Reform or Conservative. That may seem to be refuted by the numbers of Orthodox who stay Orthodox, or the number of Reform Jews who do not stay Reform. But it is not.
This is because the claim purports to tell us about how Orthodox movement impacts people, and given the data, it might simply be that more religious people are attracted to Orthodoxy in the first place, the less religious to Reform. More likely there are multiple factors at work. The point is the data as we have them now neither confirm nor falsify that claim.
The reasons for this are somewhat technical and I will be exploring them elsewhere in the coming weeks beginning in the St. Louis Jewish Light next Thursday.
Until then, Shabbat Shalom and good reading!
Andrew