Americans of Jewish Origin in an Era of Intermarriage:

An Overview

Joel Perlmann

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INTRODUCTION

Americans of Jewish origin—the phrase itself is awkward and unfamiliar. One is either

a Jew or not, right? And so why not “American Jews”? The answer lies in the rest of

the title: the processes of identity in an era of intermarriage make it much less clear than

it has been in the past just who, in fact, is a Jew. Or to put it differently, it is far from

clear today that “one either is a Jew or not.” There is nothing mysterious in all this: the

same processes have been occurring in other groups. If one’s great grandfather was an

Italian immigrant, is one an Italo-American? The answer, we know, depends on who the

other 7 great grandparents were, and how the individual relates to his or her ethnic

origins. This essay deals with the advent of similar issues among American of Jewish

origin—not as the highly exceptional exotic trend, but as the patterns of the majority.

But before elaborating any further on what I hope to cover, it will be best to clear

away likely misunderstandings. These misunderstandings, I fear, will be stimulated by

topics that other writers have brought front and center—but do not concern me here.

The first of these: can the American Jewish community survive in the future? Probably,

but I won’t be dealing with this question at all. Obviously there is a connection between

the effects of intermarriage and the question of group survival, but it is by no means a

straightforward connection. For one thing, a notable fraction will not intermarry for the

foreseeable future; for another many who do intermarry will retain strong and creative

links to things Jewish; and finally these considerations ensure a continuation of American

Jewry for at least a century, and beyond that it is reckless to engage in predictions. But

then can we say that the numbers of American Jews will decline rapidly as a result of

intermarriage? Probably not. However, the more important response is that the

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meaning of the question depends on the prior question of whom we chose to count as a

Jew; and that question, I will argue, becomes largely meaningless as the variants of

attachments in a world of intermarriage are transformed. Furthermore, given the

dynamics of intermarriage, there may indeed be more, not fewer, people who claim a

connection to Jewishness in the future—just as fewer than 4 million Irish immigrants

came to the United States but over 40 million Americans today report Irish ancestry.

Well, then, if this essay is not about predicting the future existence or size of

American Jewry, is the essay going to bemoan the effects of Jewish intermarriage, or

support what have become known as “outreach” efforts—to reach out to the non-Jew

who marries a Jew and to children of the intermarried? The answer is that supporting or

opposing such efforts is not my concern here—nor, indeed, is any other normative or

public policy goal. My goal is that of the sociologist—to understand what is happening,

not bemoan it or welcome it, not support one or another ways to confront these trends.

More precisely, my goal is that of the social historian and sociologist, since the involved

trends that develop over long periods of time, even if a snapshot of their results is taken at

one point in time.

But I should say another word at the outset about intermarriage, since my

experience has been that sentiments are so charged about this theme that even a

disclaimer like the one in the preceding paragraph is hard to hear until the reader

establishes how the author “treats intermarriage.” The bottom line is that intermarriage

does not come out of nowhere, like some sort of grim reaper acting upon a cultural

community; no, intermarriage is itself a symptom of a trend towards “entering the

mainstream” of American life (as Richard Alba and Victor Nee define ethnic assimilation

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in their authoritative treatment of the subject). It is the very success of American Jews,

like most other ethnic and religious minorities, to become part of American educational

institutions, to percolate through the American class structure, and to move out across the

American continent, that has brought Jews to feel and think much like other Americans—

not exactly like them, of course, but enough like them. What is “enough like them”?

Enough so that marriage with someone from a non-Jewish background can be

contemplated as something in which two people find much more that they share than that

keeps them apart. This trend may of course be more advanced on average among those

who intermarry than among those who don’t. But it would be foolish to leave the matter

there. Most of those who do not intermarry also are characterized by these

developments to a considerable extent.

And finally, if intermarriage is, as the sociologists say, a characteristic of

advanced ethnic or religious assimilation, what then of the children of the intermarried?

No, I do not think they “are hopelessly lost to the Jewish world.” Sentiments,

commitments, and intellectual curiosity often remain among the children of the

intermarried, and it may be that the uniquely developed institutions of American Jewry

will provide a context within which the children of the intermarried often find their way

to various forms of involvement, and indeed themselves often may be quite likely in

future to marry other Jews. Or these institutions may fail to produce this result among

the majority of the children of the intermarried; at the moment we don’t have a good

basis for predicting, because the institutional world is just now developing its responses.

We do have good evidence from other ethnic groups, and there the evidence is that the

intermarried household generally retains ethnic features less fully than the single-origin

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household. After all, what unites the parents in the household is precisely the non-ethnic

dimension. But then too, Jews are different both because of the congruence of religion

and peoplehood among them and because of that institutional density that I have

mentioned. So the verdict is out. My hunch? These special Jewish factors will slow

the familiar assimilatory processes among the children of the intermarried, and slow it

enough so that the trends over the next century will be hard to predict, and beyond that it

is pointless to try. But it is just a hunch.

To repeat: these efforts to predict the future are not the purpose of this essay. I

mention these themes at the outset to clear them away, in the effort to avoid

misunderstandings. My goal is rather to illuminate what we know about the group that

started out as American Jews in the later decades of the twentieth century: how they

define their attachments today and what we know about the contours of the processes I

have been describing. It is widely known that intermarriage is widespread among

American Jews; but it is much less well known that we have excellent data available, not

only about just how widespread it is, but also that we have excellent data on what has

happened to the children of the intermarried—not how they were brought up, but how

they see their world as adults.

Part of my purpose, therefore, is present this evidence—to survey those

Americans who were raised by one or two Jewish parents. Many such Americans, of

course, define themselves as Jews today, others do not. Another part of my purpose is

indeed to call attention to the quality of the evidence we already have (and to argue that

we need more like it). The evidence comes from a costly survey known as the National

Jewish Population Survey of 2000–2001 (NJPS 2000). This survey has been widely

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used, but to my mind not in the most advantageous way. That is because the results have

been limited to those respondents whom the survey organizers defined (post-hoc) as

“Jews.” By contrast I use the survey to study Americans who had one or two Jewish

parents and ask how they define their attachments today. To repeat: many see

themselves as Jews today, many others do not.

The NJPS 2000 generated great debate at the time it was undertaken; part of that

debate is about technical matters that (while important) are not terribly interesting in

substantive terms. And indeed, my non-expert opinion about these technical matters is

that the quality of the resulting sample is more than adequate to the purpose; every

dataset used by social scientists has limitations; the NJPS is surely better than most such

datasets. The real issue is not the quality of the data collected in the sampling process,

but the nature of the decisions made about whether to exclude many respondents of

Jewish origin because they no longer are Jews today—according to one or another

definition of “who is a Jew?” And here the problem is with the published reports resting

on the dataset; to repeat: the full dataset includes an adequate sample of Americans of

Jewish origin. It is the analysts who chose to exclude many of these Americans from

their reports. From one vantage point, I understand the decision: the analysts saw their

task as providing information useful for the community of those who are Jews, so why

include those “who are not?” But from my own vantage point—as sociologist and social

historian—this very problem (“Who is a Jew”?) is itself a function of the current moment

in the evolution of American Jewish life. And so the last part of this essay takes up the

question of how this group—American Jews—and other groups— have tried to deal with

the question of who is a member of the group in a period of intermarriage. Other “white

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ethnic” groups—Italians, Irish, Poles—have confronted such questions, although I will

argue that the confrontation was mostly at the family rather than institutional level. And

the history of American Christian denominations is shot-through with widespread

intermarriage across denominational lines. But also, some useful comparisons can be

made to the discussions of multi-raciality among African Americans and of tribal

membership among American Indians—for these are cases in which discussion has not

been only at the family level, but also at the institutional level. So the last part of this

essay seeks to set the Jewish experience of dealing with intermarriage—dealing with it in

the debate over the NJPS and dealing with it in institutional terms—in a wider American

context.

I also want to be explicit right at the outset about the “lessons” from the study of

other “white ethnic” groups—that is of other groups whose ancestors immigrated from

Europe in the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Whatever the unique features of

American Jewish developments, surely these developments will bear some resemblance

to the patterns prevalent among the descendents of these other European immigrant

groups. After all, the first Jewish immigration of modest scale to the United States can

be sloppily subsumed within the large immigration from German lands in the decades

1820–1880; in total some 2–3 million immigrants were involved, of which perhaps a

quarter million were Jews. And then between 1880 and 1920, many millions of Italians,

Slavs, and others from Southern and Eastern Europe immigrated, among them nearly two

million Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. All these immigrations

were cut off by congressional legislation in the years after World War I; by the time

immigration legislation renewed the flow of serious numbers of immigrants after 1965,

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world patterns had changed, and in any case, the Holocaust had eliminated most of the

great population center of central and east-European Jewry. While several hundred

thousand Jews have come to the United States since 1965—either from eastern Europe or

from Israel, or from other lands—the great majority of American Jews trace their origins

to those earlier European immigrations during the century 1820–1920, and most from

1880–1920. So, to repeat, the fate of other European ethnic groups is the backdrop for

understanding what is similar and what is different about the Jewish case. I have already

mentioned most of the key differences: Jewishness involves both peoplehood and a

religion limited to that people; and Jewish institutional density is especially great. Both

of these may also be related to the fact that throughout millennia Jews functioned only as

a minority; the American experience is not new in that regard. All these factors retarded

the development of intermarriage between Jews and others. Or, to put it another way,

Christians ethnics intermarried among themselves earlier than with Jews. But whatever

the differences, it is worth beginning with a brief look at the assimilatory and

intermarriage experience of the descendants of other European immigrant groups.

Typically the European immigrants themselves were culturally very distinct, and

that they often entered the American class structure near the bottom. But the next

generations—typically the next two generations—clawed and scraped their way up

through the American educational system and the American class structure. As they did

so, the second and third generations also lost a good deal of their cultural distinctness.

A crucial indicator of that transformation among the children and grandchildren of the

immigrants was the extent to which they married people who were of different ethnic

origins. Intermarriage must be seen a both an effect and a cause of assimilation. It is

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an effect of extensive prior assimilation; and it generally works to accelerate later

assimilation because, other things being equal, the home environment will be dominated

by what the two parents share—that is, the home environment will be dominated by their

shared American background and not their differing ethnic origins.

Now ethnic intermarriage tends to be common quite early in the history of

American ethnic groups, probably earlier than most people realize. I have studied the

case of Italians after 1900, for example. The Italians were a large, cohesive group,

heavily concentrated at the bottom of the urban social structure, and more disliked by the

old-stock Americans than most immigrants. Yet, among the American-born children of

the Italian immigrants, fully one in three married outside the group. And among the

grandchildren of the Italian immigrants, just about half also had a grandparent who was

not of Italian origin.

A question on the United States Census, the ancestry question, sheds an

interesting light on the long-run effect of these patterns of ethnic blending. Respondents

are asked, “What is your ancestry; that is, with what place of origin in the world do you

identify?” Now what’s at least as interesting as the answers is the nature of their

inaccuracies. First, the great majority of Americans don’t know where in Europe most

of their ancestors came from, and even if they did know there wouldn’t be room on the

form to record all their different origins—the result of many generations of intermarriage.

So people radically simplify their actual origins; they give one or two or three ancestries

that have some meaning to them—not necessarily much meaning, but at any rate some

meaning. And note that indeed two or more ancestries are often listed—that is, people

identify themselves as being, so to speak, more than one thing, connected with more than

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one group. The second point about the inaccurate reporting is that many people are

highly suggestible as to which ancestries they will remember. A classic example

concerns the Italians. They were listed as an example in the directions for the ancestry

question in both the 1980 and 1990 census, but in the later year, the “Italian” example

was listed closer to the beginning in the list of all examples; the result was a 20% rise in

the number of people from the same birth cohorts who mentioned Italian ancestry in the

latter census. Thus, for many Americans, ties to their European ethnic origins are very

weak, involve many different origins, and reports tend to shift. All this does not mean a

total loss of ethnic identity; a great many people will still report some particular European

origins; only a minority will protest that they have no idea and don’t care.

All this intermingling makes it hard to answer a question such as “how many

Italian-Americans are there in the United States”? The reason it is hard to count

meaningfully is not just because people’s reports tend to fluctuate. Nor is it hard to

count only because we lack a precise definition of whom we mean to include among the

Italian-Americans. The real problem is that whatever definition we chose will drastically

transform the answer—not by 5% or even by 35%, but by hundreds of percents.

Consider for example the following three definitions for Italian-Americans: 1) all those

with some Italian origin whether they know of it or not, 2) those with only Italian origin,

and 3) all those who identify with their Italian origin. So yes, perhaps we can create an

accurate count once we agree on a definition, but there is a difference between an

accurate count and a meaningful count. In the context of the blending of American

ethnic groups, the critical point will always be not the single number but the caveats

about other ways to look at the issue of who is an Italian-American.

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Against this background, I turn to the Jews. And by way of beginning, note that

the peak years of Jewish immigration to the United States occurred fully 100 years ago,

between 1904 and 1908, so we will expect most American Jews come from families that

have lived in the United States for more than three generations. Will the Jews then also

exhibit extensive intermarriage? I have stressed reasons for thinking that the American

Jewish situation will not perfectly parallel the situation of other descendants of European

immigrants. Nevertheless, there are also much in common; one key measure that shows

that the blending between Jews and other Americans has in fact progressed quite far.

This measure is the intermarriage rate, which has been high for at least a generation now.

NJPS 2000 AS A SURVEY OF AMERICANS WITH RECENT JEWISH ORIGINS

We can now turn to the evidence, and in particular to the National Jewish Population

Survey of 2000–01, the NJPS that I mentioned at the outset. Recall that I will use the

NJPS as a sample not of American Jews but as a sample of Americans of recent Jewish

origin. Many of those with recent Jewish origin define themselves today as Jews, many

others do not.

Surveying American Jews through stratified random sampling, no matter how

sophisticated the stratification design, is difficult because the Jews comprise less than 2%

of the American population, and so many screening calls must be made (typically using

random digit dialing) before reaching a Jewish respondent. Furthermore, there is always

the question of what to ask: are the Jews to be identified as a religion, an ethnic group, or

in some other way? The NJPS obtained a sample of 5,148 respondents who were

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selected from a vastly larger number of initially screened households through a series of

four screening questions:

What is your religion, if any?

Do you have a Jewish mother or Jewish father?

Were you raised Jewish?

Do you consider yourself Jewish for any reason?

When at least one adult member of a household provided an affirmative answer to one of

these questions, that household was included in the sample, and one qualified adult

household member was randomly selected as the sampled respondent. Study

administrators wrote that this battery of screener questions “reflects the view that there

are many ways to define the Jewish population, based on religion, ethnic, and purely

subjective or ideological definitions.” The questions leave a nagging awareness that the

context of exploration is set by a question on religion, but I doubt that any alternative

strategy would have made an appreciable difference.1

In any case, from my point of view, the big advantage of the NJPS screener

questions is that they do a reasonably good job of capturing people who came from a

family with some recent Jewish origin. That is, the respondents had a parent or guardian

with Jewish origins. Also, of course, the screener questions will capture “Jews by

choice,” those who formally converted to Judaism under the auspices of some rabbinic

authority or chose to become Jewish informally. My interests in this paper generally

bypasses the Jews by choice; these Jews can be easily isolated from those of recent

Jewish origin in the dataset. And so when I compare respondents with single and mixed

origins below, Jews by choice are among the small group excluded altogether (others

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excluded are respondents with missing data on some relevant aspect of origins). On the

other hand, in discussing the contemporary attachment categories that respondents report,

Jews by choice are included among other Jews.

Now comes the crucial conceptual point. The UJC staff, after collecting the

sample based on these four screener questions chose to further refine their sample; they

defined some NJPS respondents as only “Jewish connected” (rather than “Jewish); and

the Jewish connected group was omitted from many (indeed most) of the analyses. The

UJC staff also identified a second group of NJPS respondents that they considered to be

non-Jews, and these respondents the UJC excluded from all their analyses. Those

reports, therefore, do not deal with the population of recent-Jewish-origin, a population of

5 million adults. Rather, the reports focus chiefly on “Jewish” adult population, that

numbers in the mid-3 million range. On occasion, the reports also describe another

group of some 700,000 “Jewish connected” individuals. The Jewish connected person

“has some Jewish background... and belongs to a non-monotheistic religion” (Klaff and

Mott 2005, 236). Now there are only two other monotheistic religions and few

American Jews have converted to Islam. So in plain English, if a person of Jewish

origin defines himself as a Christian, he or she is no longer “Jewish” or “Jewish

connected.” However, if a person simply says he or she is a member of some other

religion—then the respondent is “Jewish connected” (but not Jewish). The NJPS

administrators define the non-monotheistic religions as theologically compatible Judaism,

while labeling Christianity (except Unitarianism) and Islam as incompatible on the basis

of historical struggle between the monotheistic religions. One senses that this tortured

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reasoning justifies what is really a sociological insight about assimilation and the

mainstream role of American Christianity.

How many NJPS sample members were affected by the creation of these two

categories of excluded people? (see Figure 1; the excluded groups are shown in yellow

and red). Now, UJC administrators have on occasion published the effect of these

decisions in connection with their unweighted sample (the relevant numbers are found in

the first column of the table at the bottom of the page). Thus, 376 “Jewish connected”

respondents and 625 “non-Jewish” respondents are involved; and since the entire sample

includes 5,148 respondents, the two excluded groups comprise 19% of the entire

unweighted NJPS sample. But the NJPS sample needs to be weighted in complex ways

to be representative of the national population it is supposed to represent. For example,

the NJPS was collected by randomly calling more phone numbers in areas known to have

a high Jewish population, and then weighting up sample members from other areas.

This is perfectly standard procedure and saves huge amounts of money in gathering a

representative sample. But it follows that we need to know how much of the weighted

sample, not the unweighted sample, is made up by the “Jewish connected” and the “non-

Jewish” respondents whom the UJC staff excluded from analyses. To the best of my

knowledge, that proportion has never reported before; it appears in the middle pie chart

and in the middle percentage column in Figure 1B. Fully 33% of the weighted sample

has been excluded. And finally, notice that these excluded groups (the Jewish

connected and the non-Jewish respondents) are especially concentrated among the

younger adults, 18–34 years of age. Among these younger adults, the excluded groups

comprise 42% of the NJPS sample.

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From a sociological point of view, the numbers at the attenuated fringes have

become far too large to be ignored and we need to hear much more about those people.

Thus, we need to look at all the Americans of recent Jewish origin, and to situate those

who are more fully identified with Jewishness in the context of the choices that all group

members have been making. And, much to their credit, the NJPS staff has in fact

preserved the raw data in a way that allows us to study the entire sample (including the

groups they chose to exclude from discussion). So in everything that follows, I will be

discussing the full dataset.

First consider the rapid growth of mixed backgrounds among Americans of recent

Jewish origin over time. Table 1A presents the proportion of respondents in each age

group who reported that they had two parents born Jewish compared to the proportion

who reported only one parent born Jewish. Recall that at issue here is not the

respondents’ own marriage patterns (which in fact I do not discuss at all in this essay).

Rather, the table deals with the respondents’ parents’ marriage patterns. Among

respondents born before 1926, 84% had two parents born Jewish, 5% had only one parent

born Jewish. But among those born between 1976 and 1982, 38% reported two parents

born Jewish, and 43% reported one parent born Jewish. This is of course a massive

transformation over the course of half a century, and it is a way of summing up the

historical importance of the parental intermarriage across the generations of their

children. Notice also that these results already take into account any differential fertility

rates across these types of couples. Thus, if the Orthodox have more children and the

Orthodox are less likely to intermarry, then the effect of intermarriage on the origins of

the next generation will be lower than under equal fertility across groups. But this

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display in Table 1A already takes into account the workings such fertility differentials.

We are after all, looking at a count of that next generation itself. The third column

shows the “other” group. I show them for completeness; these are people of various

unusual backgrounds described in a note to the table; but as will be clear in later tables,

the people in the other column are much more like those with one Jewish parent than like

those with two Jewish parents.

Thus far I have stressed that the people of mixed origin are much more common

among the younger than among the older respondents. Table 1B shows that the mixed

origin people are also more common among people living outside the American

metropolitan centers that have large Jewish populations. In such places, Jewish

institutional development and cultural life are harder to maintain and Jewish

neighborhoods are less common too. About one third of Americans of recent Jewish

origin live outside the biggest Jewish metro centers in just such places. Finally, Table

1C shows how common mixed origins are when we look at the effect of these two factors

together—young adults outside the major centers; outside the NYC metro area, those

with two Jewish-born parents are a minority among Americans of recent Jewish origin;

and three quarters of Americans of recent Jewish origin in fact do live outside the NYC

metro area. To put it differently, the transition to a young adult population in which the

majority have only one Jewish parent has already occurred.

And now we can address the striking connection between single vs. mixed Jewish

origins and how people identify themselves in terms of Jewish attachments today (Table

2). I’ve used a six categories to capture current Jewish attachments. The first four

attachment categories involve no mention of any kind of Christian attachment. Of these,

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the first two attachment categories include people who consider themselves Jewish in

some way. By contrast, categories 3 and 4 include people who said they did not consider

themselves Jewish in any way. Finally, people in the last two attachment categories—5

and 6—reported themselves as Christian. Those in category 5 also reported that they

considered themselves Jewish in some way; those in category 6 reported that they do not

consider themselves Jewish in any way. Using the NJPS weighting scheme, we can

estimate that there were just over 5 million American adults of recent Jewish origin, and

about 20% of these reported themselves as Christian, that is about a million adults; about

a third of these Christians also reported themselves as Jewish.2

Consider now this connection between origin type and contemporary attachment

more closely. Among those with both parents born Jewish, 93% fall into the first two

attachment categories; among those with only one parent born Jewish, the corresponding

proportion is 34%. To put it another way, the other four attachment categories include

fewer than 8% of respondents with two Jewish parents; but these same last four

attachment types include two-thirds of respondents with mixed origins. These last four

attachment categories, in other words, are more or less a new social form, created by

mixed-parentage adults. Of course, not all offspring of the intermarried are found

among these last four attachment types. Fully a third are in more traditional affiliations.

And I trust I don’t have to emphasize that many adults who had two Jewish-born parents

are also highly assimilated by any criterion one might want to use; so I do not mean to

lend support to the recent emphasis on “a tale of two Jewries.” But in describing general

trends, I think it is beyond dispute that, so far anyway, intermarriage in the parents’

generation has been associated in the next generation with the creation of new and

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generally attenuated forms of adult attachment to Jewishness. This picture doesn’t show

up clearly when the dataset is limited to the people the UJC includes, because by

definition most of the sample members in those last four categories have been excluded

from discussion.

Now let me say a bit more about these current attachment categories that I’ve

used in Table 2. The first category, people who mention a denomination, is

overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform with a very small

“other” denomination category. The second category, just Jew, includes everybody else

who said they were Jewish (and not Christian). I’ll say a very little more about this

group in a moment; for now just be warned that the people who use it are very mixed and

probably it’s too simple to just say, “oh, they are ethnically Jewish, maybe proto-

nationalists, but not religiously Jews.” Thirty-year olds in Phoenix use this designation,

not just 60 year olds in New York City.

And yet, I want to add that at least in one respect the “Just Jew” category does

seem to have some specificity—at least by contrast to those who say they have no

religion and no reason to think of themselves as Jewish (category 3). First, those who

report they are “Just Jews” are far more likely than the people in category 3 to have had

two Jewish parents. And second, as we’ll see later, that the two groups also differ on

socioeconomic characteristics and cultural outlooks. To put it another way, when

thinking of those who say they have no Jewish attachment and no religion it would be

misleading to recall the Yiddish-speaking communist in 1910 who might have given the

same response.

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The fourth category, not Jewish in any way and members of a religion other than

Christianity, is a small group; I’ll just note that there are few Muslims here; these are

mostly what might be called “experimental” religions for American Jews: Buddhism,

Hinduism, worship of the earth, and so on. But I want to say something more now about

the two Christian categories, 5 and 6. Following the American sociologist Bruce

Phillips, I classify those who mention an affiliation with Christianity separately from the

rest. The rationale here is that the United States is an overwhelmingly Christian country;

and so reporting oneself as a Christian is a particularly strong indication of assimilation,

of joining the mainstream.3 Note, too, that the Christianity espoused by these

respondents is not Unitarianism—only 3% of these Christians mentioned that faith. Nor

is the drift of these respondents to the highest status Christian denominations either. The

Christian denominations mentioned by the relevant NJPS respondents more or less

mirrors the wider American Christian distribution. On the whole, there is no terribly

distinct way that those of recent Jewish origin become Christian.

Nor do they necessarily stop thinking of themselves as Jews when they do

become Christian; about a third of those who say they are Christian also say they are

Jews. Again, as in the case of the “Just Jews” in category 2, I want to warn against

mechanically attaching an ethnic/national meaning to the “Jewishness” of the Jewish

Christians in category 5. The example of Brother Daniel, the Catholic priest who

requested Israeli citizenship under the law of return because of his Jewish parentage, may

well be profoundly misleading here. Thus, the people in category 5, like those in

category 2, who say they are Jewish in some way cannot be classified as ethnically as

opposed to religiously attached; on the whole they are not explicit about what they do

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mean, but when they are explicit, what they say simply does not support that distinction.

Table 3A show that many “Just Jews” seem to mean something negative—they are not

religious or not members of a denomination. Very few say they are secular or ethnic.

And somewhat similarly (in Table 3B) among the Christian who say they are also Jewish,

many mention specific Jewish religious connections.

I turn now to a brief look at the socioeconomic characteristics and the cultural and

political outlooks of people who chose these attachment categories. It turns out that

there is indeed a reasonable amount of difference in such characteristics across the

attachment categories. These differences are summarized in Figures 2a–2g.

I have not included in these figures all types of attachment; specifically, the two

left-most bars of the figures show reform Jews and those respondents who said they were

“Just Jews.” And the two right-most bars show the two groups who reported themselves

as Christians (these are categories 5 and 6 in Table 2). The middle bar is those who said

they have no religion and no reason to consider themselves Jews (category 3 in Table 2).

Throughout the two Christian-affiliated groups are similar to each other and

different from the Reform Jews and the “Just Jews.” The group with “no Jewish

attachment and no religion” hovers between these poles. Thus, in Figure 2a, NJPS

respondents at the Christian end of the continuum are less likely to live in the major

Jewish metro areas (that is, the yellow bars are highest at the right of the figure).4 In

Figure 2b and 2c, NJPS respondents at Christian end of the continuum have lower

educational attainment and less income.5 Thus, it is neither the most educated nor the

most upper class who are in the most assimilated attachment categories; the reverse is

closer to the case. Still, even among the Christian NJPS respondents, both degree

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completion and attainment of a high household income are notably more common than in

the nation as a whole (e.g., Smith 2005, 5–6). The social history here would be

important to sort out: they involve the connections between parental education, income,

intermarriage, and childrearing choices, as well as the intergenerational transmission of

educational and income levels.6 In Figure 2d, the NJPS respondents with Christian

attachments are less likely to define themselves as liberals or democrats. In Figure 2e,

NJPS respondents at the Christian end of the continuum have decidedly fewer Jewish

friends. In Figure 2f, they are seen as less likely to believe in God. Belief in God does

not carry us very far, but it confirms the notion that the Christian attachments most

approach American norms. Even among those who claim no religion, half say they do

believe in God, as do three fifths of “Just Jews” and three quarters of Reform Jews. Yet,

among those with Christian attachments, the yes proportions soar into the mid 90s.7 And

finally in Figure 2g, they are less likely to feel connected to Israel.8 In sum, if affiliating

with Christianity means greater assimilation, then the more assimilated are distinctly not

the best educated or wealthiest. Rather, the more assimilated end of the continuum

generally approximate the socioeconomic and cultural patterns of the American

mainstream much more than do the people in the Reform or “Just Jew” categories of

Jewish attachment.

Well, then, where does all this leave us? First of all, recall the contexts in which

I warned against applying outdated conceptions to the patterns of today. Thus, when a

person of recent Jewish origin says he or she is “Just Jewish” we cannot assume the

respondent is stating an ethnic or national affiliation; likewise when someone of recent

Jewish origin self describes as Christian, but also as Jewish, we cannot assume that they

21

mean they are Christian by religion and Jewish by ethnicity or nationality; these are not

proto Brother Daniel. And when a person of recent Jewish origin reports that he or she

has no religion and does not consider himself or herself Jewish in any way, these are not

the Yiddish-speaking communists of 1910. And so too, when someone of recent

Jewish origin reports that he or she is Christian the odds are overwhelming that the

person does not mean that they are Unitarian. Finally, when people born to two

Christian parents now consider themselves Jewish in some respect, it frequently does not

mean that they have undergone a formal conversion into Judaism.

All these warnings, to repeat, concern concepts from the past that no longer fit the

social patterns of the present. And I think all of these warnings point in a similar

direction: that the nature of Jewish attachments today can be increasingly described, as

porous, to use sociologist Calvin Goldscheider’s term. Or, to use a distinction suggested

by the sociologist Richard Alba (2006), all these cases involve “blurred boundaries” that

were once “bright line boundaries.”

Let me say a little more about Alba’s conception. He focused on the fact that in

the past the distinctive feature of Jewish life was that the religion reinforced the boundary

between the Jewish people and others in America; the combination of religion and

peoplehood created bright line boundaries, and these greatly slowed the mingling of Jews

with others. Today, by contrast, we are seeing an “ethnic type pattern” among Jews;

they don’t chose between two peoples or between two religions. In a mixed origin

household one can share Christmas and Easter with one set of in-laws or grandparents,

Hanukkah and Passover with another. This form of behavior will sit well with general

unbelief, but it will sit well also with a view that all faiths worship the same highest

22

ideals and the same dimly perceived creator. Just as the great-grandchild of an Italian

Catholic immigrant may also have roots among Swedish Protestants, the great-grandchild

of a Russian Jewish immigrant may also have those Swedish Protestant roots. And the

latter descendent may also embrace religio-cultural trappings from both traditions.

Boundaries are therefore more blurry and multiple religious origins may be taking on the

attributes of multiple ethnic origin: people are capable of embracing both multiple

ethnicity and multiple religious affiliations.

I think this is a perceptive observation, but obviously it only covers one of several

options available in mixed-origin homes. America, after all, has a long history of

interfaith marriages as well as interethnic marriages—interfaith marriages between

Catholic and Protestant, or across Protestant denominations. Like interethnic marriages,

interfaith marriages can occur when the differences in origins do not seem so very great

to the couple. But there was probably some difference between interfaith marriages and

interethnic marriages. It is easier to see oneself as having had origins in two (or six)

ethnic groups than in two religions or even within two denominations, because religion

involves belief structures. So, a Catholic and a Baptist may marry and each retain their

religious affiliation. But in many such cases, the husband and wife may be only

nominally Catholic and Baptist, but in practice the fact that they don’t chose one religion

may often mean that religious loyalties are so attenuated that they are in fact not involved

with either denomination very much. So a common vague Christianity, or none, pervades

the home. Second, even in such homes, the issue shifts when children come on the

scene. Children, after all, are more likely to be reared as members of one denomination

than confused with two. Or third, for social reasons, even before children come on the

23

scene, one member of the couple may adopt the denomination of the other member

without too much deliberation. Often this pattern involves a kind of status mobility

whereby the sect with the higher social status is the one that both members of the couple

decide to embrace. Any and all these options would seem to be available when

denominational loyalties are weak. And all these options may increasingly describe the

religious side of the American Jewish outmarriage, too. Probably, then, multiple

religious attachments will come to parallel multiple ethnic attachments only among a

minority, but Alba’s emphasis on the transition from the bright-line to the blurry

boundary will characterize a vastly larger fraction of the group.

The crucial word here is indeed options, to paraphrase Mary Waters. Her book

(which deals with non-Jews) is appropriately titled Ethnic Options. In the case of the

Jews there are ethno-religious options. I don’t think that for the foreseeable future the

option of embracing multiple religions will become dominant. And it is crucial to

understand also that the same person may well shift over the course of a lifetime, in and

out of these options. But it does seem that the options will be played out in a context of

blurry boundaries. And it does seem clear that the blurry boundaries are already critical

to the social context in which nearly all younger adult Jews now live.

American Jewish institutions are already in the process of grappling with

decisions about how to relate to this growing group who live among blurry boundaries

and this challenge will grow in the future. It will grow in numeric terms and probably

also grow to encompass more features of community life. The most obvious way in

which institutions have confronted the issue is in terms of denominational decisions when

24

intermarriage is possible, the absorption of a non-Jewish spouse into a congregation the

education of children of mixed origin. In the future, other issues may develop as well.

“WHO IS A JEW?”

I have argued throughout that I am interested in understanding trends, and not in

normative definitions. For purposes of defining a group to study, it is more than

adequate to focus on Americans of recent Jewish origin (those with one or two Jewish

parents, those raised Jewish, or those who are Jews by choice). Nevertheless, it is worth

considering here the question of who is Jewish not by origins, but by current

identification. I approach this question not from the perspective of providing a definition

in terms of some ethnic or religious criterion of belief or behavior. Instead, I have

several goals. First, I want to show that the problem of defining who is a Jew has not

merely pervaded the analyses and publications based on NJPS 2000—this I have already

shown. But also, the problem existed in connection with the earlier NJPS 1990, which

has often been thought to have avoided the contentious debates that plagued NJPS 2000.

Second, I want to argue that a key definition of Jewishness found in NJPS 1990 (and

repeated with less emphasis in NJPS 2000), the “Core Jewish Population” has become

increasingly problematic, and will not serve us as well in the future as it did in the past—

precisely because of the ambiguities caused by new forms of attachment. Third, I want

to suggest that an alternative form of definition based on current attachment is to use the

criterion of self-identification: whoever tells us that he or she is Jewish is counted as

Jewish. I contrast this definition with the one based on “core Jewish population.” For

25

the purposes of this essay it is possible to get by without invoking any definition of

Jewishness, because we can simply trace out the trajectories of those who have had a

Jewish origin. But in many contexts one will want a definition, and I wonder if we can

really do better, in this brave new world of shifting attachments, than to let the

respondent decide. Fourth, if we let the respondent decide, we approach the criterion

that the American Census uses in its ancestry question, or more precisely, the criterion

that the American Census uses in its Hispanic origin question (as I will explain).

The earlier effort to carry out a comparable survey, NJPS 1990, had used

somewhat different screening procedures: it did not include the fourth screening question,

“Do you consider yourself a Jew for any reason?” And so the staff procedures for the

two surveys cannot be strictly compared. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning several

features of the earlier staff procedures in order to follow the emerging awareness of

ambiguity over who is a Jew (Goldstein 1992).

The NJPS 1990, like NJPS 2000, offered a suggested definition of who is

“really” a Jew for most analytic purposes. The crucial definition in 1990 was the “Core

Jewish Population” (CJP). This definition excluded anyone who reported that they had

adopted another religion. Primarily, it will be recalled, these people report Christianity

as the other religion. And so in practice, the 1990, like the 2000 definition, made it

impermissible by fiat for a respondent to claim to be Jewish if one reported oneself a

Christian. Nevertheless, despite the focus on the CJP, the 1990 NJPS administrators

tended to present the problem of definition as something different researchers, with

different questions in mind, would have to solve in their own way. And besides the CJP,

the study administrators showed what some of the other relevant groups would be, and

26

some of these were notably larger populations than the CJP. Thus, despite the

suggestion that what most researchers might “really” be looking for was the CJP, the

study administrators left the clear impression that different questions required different

definitions, and that the dataset could help researchers get at many of these definitions.

By thus highlighting the entire range of attachment types, I think the earlier study

administrators ultimately did send valuable message about the ambiguities that arise from

a legacy of large-scale intermarriage. The shift between 1990 and 2000 represents,

therefore, not the first attempt to restrict the definition by fiat (that occurred in the earlier

survey, too), nor any deletion of excluded respondents from the raw data available to

researchers (that did not occur in either year). But the decade did witness a somewhat

more rigid response to the problem of definition, a sort of circling the wagons, in the face

of greater awareness of the problems, the availability of the “consider yourself” screener

data, and the larger fraction of all NJPS respondents found with problematic attachments

(problematic from the point of the inherited definitions).

The tendency to focus on the CJP has a history of its own because it is widely

used as the most convenient way to estimate the size of the future American Jewish

population. The CJP includes those born Jewish who have not affiliated with another

religion and Jews by choice. Yet, in an era of tenuous attachments, this definition will

be unstable because the subgroups included and excluded are both changing. As already

emphasized, people of Jewish origin who say they have no attachment to Jewishness and

no other religion (included in the CJP) are an ambiguous group, and their social profile is

surely very different from what it was in 1910, and probably in 1960. Similarly, more

than a third of those who have adopted another religion seem to find reasons for

27

continuing to think of themselves as Jewish. Is it so very clear that they should be

excluded from “Jewishness” while those who have not adopted another religion but in

fact say they have no connection to things Jewish should be defined as Jewish? And

what do population projections based on such definition mean when they are carried a

generation or two into the future? If one assumes a group is unlikely to intermarry with

others—such as American blacks in 1940—one can project its size over the generations.

But when group members are very likely to intermarry, and when for so many

descendents, a range of highly tenuous forms of attachment are sure to be the norm, it is

difficult to assign a substantive meaning to the numbers. There are significant

similarities between the efforts to project the size of the Jewish population and the efforts

to project the racial composition of the American population (Goldscheider 2004, 49-55;

Perlmann 2002).

Suppose instead we ask which of these Americans of recent Jewish origin self-

identify today as Jews? In terms of the attachment types shown in Table 2, the answer

would be everyone in Categories 1, 2, and 5. But self-identity would exclude those in

the other categories, not because they mention another religion but because when asked

they say that they don’t consider themselves Jewish in any way. Table 4 shows how

these two definitions—core vs. self-identity—would work for the respondents who did

not have two Jewish-born parents. The main differences between the CJP and a group

defined by self-identity show up precisely in terms of strange new combinations: those

who say they are Christian but still have reason to report Jewish identity; or by contrast

those who say they have no religion whatever, and are not Jewish in any way. The older

form of analysis (the CJP definition) excludes the first and includes the second group in

28

analysis; by contrast, a newer form of analysis, relying more heavily on individual

identification with Jewishness, would include the first and excludes the second group. I

do not argue for such a criterion based on pre-existing normative definitions. But it does

seem to me that in an era of increasingly messy attachments, this may be our best course

for studying what “is out there.”

If we define the relevant population by self-definition, we may find ourselves

struggling for new terms. In this context, it is interesting to observe the formulations of

Bruce Phillips, whose studies of the 1990 and 2000 NJPS datasets have been

pathbreaking in their efforts to go beyond the population that the NJPS staff defined as

Jewish. Phillips tends to designate those individuals of Jewish origin who call

themselves Christians as “Christian Jews,” that is, Jews of the Christian religion (Phillips

2005a, 398-9). I read into this terminology an attempt to make a normative point,

opposite to the one the UJC has made – namely that these people of Jewish origin are

Jews in some normative sense. A non-essentialist might offer the friendly amendment

that we define the population of Jews in terms of self-definition only; full stop.

Consider now how the screener questions differ from the United States ancestry

question, which asks “What is this person’s ancestry or ethnic origins”?9 One

difference, of course, is that the ancestry question explicitly excludes a religious answer,

so “Jewish” is an unacceptable ancestry response. Also, the ancestry question itself does

not ask about membership in any specific origin group and therefore the respondent

decides which origins to list. When one’s origins are all in one or two groups—Italian,

Mexican, Polish—that decision may seem straightforward; but the descendents of many

generations of ethnic blending have many choices. Or rather, they would have many

29

choices if they knew the genealogical record. Consider the offspring of a fourth-

generation Italian and someone of English, German, Swedish, Scotch-Irish, and Native

American roots.

A better comparison of NJPS and federal census questions is actually to the

Hispanic origin question, because that question asks explicitly whether or not an

individual has origins in one particular named group: “Is this person … Hispanic?”

Note, moreover, that answering yes to the Hispanic question does not mean that the

respondent does not have other ancestries as well. It might be said that one difference

between the Hispanic origin question and the thrust of the NJPS screener questions is that

the screener only seeks to go back to the respondent’s own nuclear family of origin in

seeking Jewish roots. Thus, a respondent who is aware of a Jewish grandparent, but

believes that this genealogical fact had no impact on the relevant parent or on him or

herself will presumably be screened out of the NJPS. Of course, in the parallel case the

respondent to the federal questionnaire might not declare him or herself to be of Hispanic

origins either. If there is only knowledge of the roots, but no identification with those

roots, the ancestry question is unlikely to elicit mention of those roots, the Hispanic

question may or may not elicit them. The NJPS seems to be like the ancestry question in

this regard when it comes to knowledge of origins more than one generation back, but

even stronger than the Hispanic question in encouraging mention of relevant roots found

in one’s own nuclear family of origin even if one does not identify with them. Like

both census questions, the screener questions do not tell us anything about how many

generations removed from immigration the group member is.10

30

On the other hand, there is one crucial difference between the NJPS screener

process and the census questions, a wise deviation on the part of the NJPS from a

complete reliance on self-identification. There is a follow-up screener question (not

listed among the four mentioned above) that is asked of those who do not list themselves

as Jewish by religion, parentage, or upbringing and yet respond affirmatively when asked

whether they “Consider themselves Jewish in any way.” The follow-up probes whether

or not the respondent is simply making a Christian theological declaration—for example

a statement that all Christians are in some sense Jewish. This is a problem that the

census ancestry and Hispanic questions do not confront. A purist coming from the

census context might protest that if the respondent identifies with Jews only out of

Christian theological principle that is the respondents business and the researcher should

not weed out such responses. But this purist approach simply cannot be allowed to

stand in studying Jews. The group of Christians involved in these affirmative responses

to the question about considering oneself Jewish are admittedly only a minute fraction of

all American Christians—perhaps 1%. But 1% of American Christians amount in

absolute numbers to about 50% of Americans of Jewish origins. Including these

Christians in a sample of Jewish-origin people would drastically skew the NJPS results in

meaningless directions: not only would huge fractions of NJPS respondents report that

they are Christians; they would also report living in small cities and towns of the South

and Southwest, lower average incomes and education than the rest of the respondents,

higher membership in the Republican party and so on. So common sense must win out

over the purist form of ancestry question in taking on the Jewish questions.11

31

To summarize then: the NJPS screener questions seem to me to do a reasonably

good job in identifying people who are aware of Jewish origins in their parents’

generation and adding to that group the much smaller number who became Jews by

choice. If we wish, we can also use the attachment data of the NJPS to also define a

group of American Jews, based on self-identification (always remembering the caveat of

the preceding paragraph). And this definition is about as close as we can come to the

Census ancestry or Hispanic origin data in discussing American Jews. Quite apart from

comparability with the census data, the definition based on self-identification may be the

most meaningful one available to us as social scientists in an era of “porous” boundaries.

THE CASE OF OTHER GROUPS: GRAPPLING WITH DEFINITION

Since other American groups have faced fuller intermarriage earlier than the Jews, is

there anything to be learned from comparisons with others? To the best of my

knowledge, there are in fact no meaningful parallels with Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians,

or other groups descended from European immigrants; for those groups the issue of

single vs. mixed origin mattered at the family level, but it did not spark extensive

discussion and struggle over resources at the institutional level. The heuristically

interesting parallels to the Jews, rather, seem to me to lie among the racial minorities.

The shift in federal racial statistics procedures, allowing a respondent to claim

origins in more than one race, was a recognition of the salience of intermarriage. There

is evidence that the move got a big boost from conservative Republicans for reasons that

had little to do with recognizing intermarriage for its own sake, but that does not affect

my point that African-American organizations (as well as other racially-based

32

organizations) were anxious about how recognizing the intermarried might affect them.

The chief difference from the Jewish case, I think, is not that the federal government was

involved in these questions, but rather that the African-American organizations were

worried most about dilution of their numbers when voting rights and civil rights cases

will depend on numbers. Jewish institutions may wish to show large numbers (to claim

for example they speak for a bigger number), but the payoffs from increasing numbers

are far less direct. A parallel of minor importance is that some African-American

concern probably also developed from the discomfort of having to recognize complexity

where simplicity had set the definitions in the recent past.

A more instructive parallel is the case of the American Indians. For this group,

issues arising from intermarriage are an old story. Control of tribal institutions and

enjoyment of tribal property (reservation lands, etc.) are restricted to members of the

tribe, and membership, in turn depends on two factors. One is the ability to show that a

certain proportion of one’s ancestors were in fact tribal members—the “blood quantum.”

The blood quantum can be quite low, it should be noticed, far below 50%. The other

criterion rests on showing evidence of involvement with the fate of the tribe. The

important differences from the Jewish case (for my purposes) are not in the fact that the

Indian case involves a very different social class profile and involves federal treaties and

laws about tribal status. Rather, what is helpful to notice, I think, has to do with

property. Jewish institutions are much less likely than Indian tribes to have property

from which only members draw material gain, gains that decline in magnitude as each

new claimant takes a share. While there are exceptions, most American Jewish

33

institutions would seem to be the sort that one joins only if one is in fact interested in the

activities taking place there.

Nevertheless, one can imagine growing tensions and challenges over who has a

right to engage in activities, who has the right to lead institutions and who has the right to

speak for members. Will new joiners of tenuous Jewish connectedness wish the

institutions to change their activities in one way or another—to support less Hebrew, less

involvement with Israel, more interfaith discussions, more emphasis on Jewish

discrimination than on anti-Semitism—whatever. And of no small interest, I think: will

the group that comprises the Jewish electorate change in nature, especially as the oldest

of today’s first and second generation depart from the scene? But the voting issue may

be relatively minor in the end. It is already fractured in terms of liberal vs. conservative

leanings, and that it is entirely possible that on the Israel issue the tenuously involved

may be no less supportive than the more involved—especially given the high level of

support among Americans generally.

Regarding leadership and questions of who speaks for the group, the case of

Walter White, President of the NAACP from 1931–55, is emblematic of numerous

instances. “[White] was estimated by anthropologists to be no more than one sixty-

fourth African black. Both his parents could have passed as white….He had fair skin,

fair hair and blue eyes” (Davi, 1991, 7). But White’s case also illuminates the way in

which the Jewish case may resolve itself. “He had been raised as a segregated Negro in

the Deep South and had experienced white discrimination and violence.” Anyone who

feels strongly enough, who identifies as a Jew, will probably qualify for involvement. In

34

cases in which it matters whether or not such a person is Jewish by Halachic criteria,

formal conversion may be, to paraphrase Henry IV, well worth the price.

One domain in which struggle is likely to increase concerns community resources.

Should material and other resources be expended over drawing in those at the blurry

boundaries or strengthening those already most affiliated? Should the goal be greater

numbers or a leaner and meaner Jewish community? I close with this question because

part of the answer for Jewish institutions will depend in turn on a better understanding of

those at the boundaries. It is not impossible they have stronger attachments or curiosity

than those of mixed ancestry in other European American ethnic groups because

Jewishness has traditionally involved so much self-consciousness about difference and its

preservation. If there is a residue, it may affect behavior among a large number of

people—not forever surely, but perhaps over the course of a generation more than one

might have expected from the experience of other American ethnics. And the need to

understand these questions links the American Jewish institutions and the sociologists of

American ethnicity and assimilation.

35

REFERENCES

Alba, Richard. 2006. “On the sociological significance of the American Jewish

experience: boundary blurring, assimilation, and pluralism.” Unpublished paper.

Davis, F. James. 1991. Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University

Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Goldscheider, Calvin. 2004. Studying the Jewish Future. Seattle: University of

Washington Press.

Goldstein, Sidney. 1992. “Profile of American Jewry: Insights from the 1990

National Jewish Population Survey,” American Jewish Yearbook 1992.

Kadushin, Charles, Benjamin T. Phillips and Leonard Saxe. 2005. “National

Jewish Population Survey, 2000-2001: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Contemporary

Jewry. v. 25, 1-32.

Klaff, Vivian and Frank L. Mott. 2005. “NJPS 2000/01: A Vehicle for

Exploring Social Structure and Social Dynamics in the Jewish Population. A Research

Note.” Contemporary Jewry. v. 25, 226-56.

Lieberson, Stanley and Mary C. Waters. 1988. From Many Strands: Ethnic and

Racial Groups in Contemporary America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Perlmann, Joel. 2002. “Census bureau long-term racial projections: interpreting

their results and seeking their rationale.” Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters (eds.). The

New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. New York:

Russell Sage Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute.

36

Phillips, Bruce. 2005a. “American Judaism in the twenty-first century.” Dana

Evan Kaplan (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

____________. 2005b. “Assimilation, Transformation, and the Long Range

Impact of Intermarriage.” Contemporary Jewry. v. 25, 50-84.

Smith, Tom W. 2005. Jewish Distinctiveness in America: A Statistical Portrait.

New York: The American Jewish Committee.

Tobin, Gary and Sid Groeneman. 2003. Surveying the Jewish Population in the

United States. San Francisco: Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

United States Bureau of the Census. 2006. “Long Form Questionnaire.”

Website: http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/d02p.pdf. Consulted August 10, 2006.

37

1 On the NJPS, I have found Klaff and Mott (2005), and Kadushin Phillips and Saxe (2005) especially helpful. 2 The classification scheme for the more tenuous categories of attachment, that is, for the American Jewish periphery, closely follows the classification system Bruce Phillips (2005a, 2005b)has used, although the criteria by which I sorted respondents into attachment categories may differ slightly from his. Notice that even if a person classified as both Christian and Jew mentioned affiliation with a specific Jewish denomination, the person was classified as Christian and Jew rather than with the denomination. Involved are about a quarter of the respondents classified as Christian and Jew, or about 1.5% of the NJPS weighted sample. 3 By contrast, to note that some peripheral Jews claim to be Jews and Buddhists at the same time may at most say something about marginal patterns of searching for spirituality, or about more modest steps to leave the Jewish fold. 4Not shown is the fact that the median age in the Christian groups is moderately lower than in the reform or the “Just Jew” category, as one would expect given the greater prevalence of mixed origins among the younger adults. Nevertheless, neither the age nor the geographic associations should be exaggerated; for example the Christian categories are by no means found only outside Jewish metro areas. Rather, almost two fifths of NJPS respondents with Christian affiliations were found in the middle geographic category. Finally, those who claim no Jewish attachment and no religion are younger on average than any other group (not shown). This may be a category that respondents leave as they age (rather than a category related to the younger birth cohorts). If so, it is far from clear that respondents who so classified will move to Jewish attachments, especially given the high proportion with mixed origins among them. 5 In summarizing educational and income data, I limited the sample to those 25-64 years of age (in order to avoid distortions created by those who had not completed schooling or had retired from the earning population). 6 In summarizing educational and income data, I limited the sample to those 25-64 years of age (in order to avoid distortions created by those who had not completed schooling or had retired from the earning population). 7 There is relatively little in the NJPS about how the Jewish periphery relates to specific Jewish issues because NJPS administrators chose not to ask them these sorts of questions. 8 Feelings for Israel do not line up quite so neatly, presumably because the Christian groups share some of that feeling, and because those who claim no Jewish attachment and no religion are especially untouched by such feelings. The emotional attachment to Israel is not negligible in the American population generally. Nevertheless, more than such a “base level” connection is involved at least for most of our respondents; thus, for example, those claiming Jewish and Christian attachment are less likely to report low emotional attachment than those only Christian. Acknowledgement of low levels of familiarity with the social and political situation in Israel is fairly rare; such as it is, the spread confirms the general rank ordering of the attachment types. 9 The ancestry question in the 1980 and 1990 censuses phrased the instructions that accompanied the question in terms of “the ancestry group with which this person identifies.” I have not found that feature of the instruction in the 2000 census materials (Lieberson and Waters, 1988, 6; U. S. Bureau of the Census, 2006). 10 The ancestry question in the 1980 and 1990 censuses phrased the instructions that accompanied the question in terms of “the ancestry group with which this person identifies.” I have not found that feature of the instruction in the 2000 census materials (Lieberson and Waters, 1988, 6; U. S. Bureau of the Census, 2006). 11 The size of this Christian group can be seen in categories 12 and 18 of the NJPS administrators’ allocation schedule, which were assigned not to the NJPS but to the control group of other Americans than those who meant the screening criteria (Klaff and Mott, 2005, 234). There are only 38 such sample members, but the average weight for these people is about 50 times the average weight assigned to a respondent in the NJPS dataset. Adding them into the NJPS would have the effect of raising the population that the NJPS purports to represent by close to 40% (from 5,148 sample members representing a population of about 5 million to 5176 sample members representing a population of about 7 million).

Figure 1. The numeric significance of excluding subgroups of respondents in NJPS 2000

Unweighted sample Weighted sam Weighted sample: Young adults (18-34) only

*At issue are respondents who DID NOT report themselves Jewish by religion (screener question a)BUT DID mention Jewish origins (screener questions b or c)AND1) do not consider themselves Jews (or Christians) -- the "Jewish connected"2) say they are Christians (and may also consider themselves Jews) -- the "non-Jews"

"Jewish" "Jewish-connected" "non-Jewish"

81

"Jewish" "Jewish-connected" "non-Jewish"

67

"Jewish" "Jewish-connected""non-Jewish"

58

Table 1. NJPS respondents: number of parents born Jewish -- by age and metro status

1A. By ageage in NJPS birth cohort parents born Jewish?

both one only other* total75 + before 1926 84 5 11 10065-74 1926-35 74 11 15 10055-64 1936-45 65 19 16 10045-54 1946-55 62 20 18 10035-44 1956-65 55 28 17 10025-34 1966-75 48 32 20 10018-24 1976-82 38 43 19 100

all ages 60 23 17 100

1B. By Metropolitan areaParents born Jewish?

area both one only other* totalNYC metro area 77 15 8 100Other major Jewish metro areas** 64 21 14 100all other U.S. 40 32 28 100Note: 24% of (weighted) NJPS respondents lived in the NYC metro area, 43% in the other major Jewish metro areas 33% in all other U. S.

1C. By Metropolitan area-- respondents 18-34 years of age onlyParents born Jewish?

area both one only other* totalNYC metro area 71 21 8 100Other major Jewish metro areas* 46 34 21 100all other U.S. 25 49 26 100

* Included here are 17% of the (weighted) NJPS sample: a) those reporting a parent born "part" Jewish (5%); b) those with some Jewish origins not included elsewhere (9%: no Jewish parent but "raised" Jewish; others with incomplete / inconsistent data); c) Jews by choice (3%: formal converts; others with no Jewish family origins).

** Includes: the Atlantic corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C.; the Chicago metropolitan area; 4 metropolitan areas in Florida; 3 metropolitan areas in California.

Table 2. NJPS respondents: number of parents born Jewish -- by current Jewish attachment

Current Jewish attachment all respondentsrespondents -- by number of parents born Jewish

both one only other % % % %

Respondent reported Jewish (and no Christian) attachment 1. Jewish religious denomination 49 69 19 172. "Just Jew" 19 23 16 9

subtotal 68 93 34 27

Respondent reported no Jewish (and no Christian) attachment3. no religion 8 3 18 134. non-Christian religion 4 0 8 9

subtotal 12 4 26 22

Respondent reported Christian attachment5. Jewish and Christian attachments 6 2 12 126. Christian only 14 2 28 40

subtotal 20 4 40 52

Total: all attachment types (estimated # of U.S. adults: 5.02 million) 100 100 100 100

Table 3a. NJPS Respondents classified as "Just Jews" (row 2 in Table 2)

Detailed responses to denomination question % responding

"Just Jewish" 76"Non practicing Jew," "no denomination", "other Jewish" 10"Atheist","agnostic", "no religion" 6"Secular", "ethnic/national", etc. 4Other 4

Total 100

Table 3b. NJPS respondents who claimed Jewish and Christian attachment (row 5 in Table 2)

Responses to various questions % responding

Mentioned attachment to a specific Jewish denomination 27

Reported themselves Jewish (or Jewish and another religion) in answer to the religion question 15

Other responses to the denomination question:"Just Jewish" 14"Non practicing Jew," "no denomination", "other Jewish" 9"atheist","agnostic", "no religion" 2"secular", "ethnic/national", etc. 5other 6

Consider themselves Jewish in some way 22

Total 100

Table 4. NJPS respondents who did NOT report two Jewish-born parents (includes "one only" and "other" columns, in Tables 1 and 2)

Current Jewish attachment all respondents respondents who are Jewishwho did not according to:report two "core Jewish "respondent'sJewish-born population" self-identity"parents definition definition % % %

Respondent reported Jewish (and no Christian) attachment 1. Jewish religious denomination 18 18 182. "Just Jew" 13 11 13

subtotal 31 29 31

Respondent reported no Jewish (and no Christian) attachment3. no religion 16 16 04. non-Christian religion 8 0 0

subtotal 24 16 0

Respondent reported Christian attachment5. Jewish and Christian attachments 12 0 126. Christian only 33 0 0

subtotal 45 0 12

total (estimated U.S. adults: 2 million) 100 45 43

Figure 2. Socioeconomic and political composition for selected attachment categories: NJPS 2000

A. Geographic location*

*For metro definitions see Table 3.

B. Education** C. Household income GT $100,000 in 1999**

Weighted sample

*At issue are respondents who DID NOT report themselves Jewish by religion (screener question a)BUT DID mention Jewish origins (screener questions b or c)

1) do not consider themselves Jews (or Christians) -- the "Jewish connected"2) say they are Christians (and may also consider themselves Jews) -- the "non-Jews"

D. American Political perspective

Note: Attachment categories included in figures:

RJ= jJ= nJ, nr= C+J= C, nJ=Reform "just no Jewish Christian, Christian, Jew Jew" attachment, Jewish no Jewish

no religion attachment attachment

0

10

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJattachment type

%

NYC metrometro 2Other U. S.

0

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJ grad. deg.BA

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJ GT $100K

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJliberal/very lib.Dem. voter

Figure 2 (cont.). Jewish-related cultural orientations for selected attachment categories: NJPS 2000

E. Respondents reporting that at least half of friends are Jewish F. Believe in God?

G. Connections to Israel1) Visited? % No Weighted sample 2) Emotionally tied to Israel? 3) Familiar with the social and political situation?

*At issue are respondents who DID NOT report themselves Jewish by religion (screener question a)BUT DID mention Jewish origins (screener questions b or c)

1) do not consider themselves Jews (or Christians) -- the "Jewish connected"2) say they are Christians (and may also consider themselves Jews) -- the "non-Jews"

Note: Attachment categories included in figures:RJ= jJ= nJ, nr= C+J= C, nJ=Reform "just no Jewish Christian, Christian, Jew Jew" attachment, Jewish no Jewish

no religion attachment attachment

0

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJ

attachment type

%

at least half

0

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90

RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJnot very/at all

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100

RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJNo

0

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35

RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJ Not very/at all

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RJ jJ nJ,nr C+J C,nJyes

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