Jewish population study goes ‘beyond numbers’
New reports from the Pew Research Center and Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute (SSRI) estimate the Jewish population of the United States at 6.7 million and 6.8 million, respectively. Demographer Leonard Saxe, co-author of the SSRI report, believes the similarity of the reports paints a picture of stability that presents an opportunity to “get beyond the numbers” and instead focus on their implications.
Pew’s Religion and Public Life Project on Tuesday released “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” based on a survey of 3,475 Jews from Feb. 20 to June 13, 2013. The report estimated that there are 6.7 million Jews in the U.S., and that 78 percent of that population identifies as Jewish by religion, as opposed to by background or other criteria. A day earlier, SSRI released “American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012,” which concluded that there are 6.8 million American Jews (or 2.2 percent of the total U.S. population), with about 81 percent identifying as Jewish by religion (1.8 percent of the population).
SSRI’s report was based on “data from hundreds of academic, government, and privately funded surveys that ask questions about religious and ethnic identification,” from 2006-2012. Saxe, the director of SSRI as well as the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, had estimated in December 2011 that the U.S. Jewish population was 6.4 million. Amid the release of the new figures, he said the population increase as well as the stabilization of the number of those identifying as Jewish by religion could be interpreted as either a positive or negative narrative, being that synagogue membership and engagement with other Jewish institutions have not risen at the same rate as the Jewish population.
“You can either say, ‘Wow, this is a problem,’ or you can say, ‘This is an opportunity for the Jewish community,’” Saxe told JNS.org. The Jewish community, he said, needs to “focus on this gap between people who identify with [Judaism], consider themselves Jewish, and those people who participate in the community.”
