America’s Religious Recession

Jack Wertheimer and Steven M. Cohen fear that the American Jewish community is going to hell in a handbasket. And the news they bring in “The Pew Survey Reanalyzed” is grim: “relentless growth in rates of intermarriage”; “falling birthrates”; “a striking decline in Jewish activity or commitment among those under the age of fifty.” Their reading of the evidence is commensurately stark: “American Jews, whatever [comforting] stories they continue to tell about themselves, no longer constitute a great community.”

As they announce from the start, Wertheimer and Cohen have focused in this essay on the non-Orthodox (mainly Conservative and Reform) and unaffiliated sectors of the community. That’s understandable enough: after all, these constitute the lion’s share of American Jewry, statistically speaking. Nevertheless, excluding those Jews who define themselves as Orthodox—and who stubbornly resist the doleful trends they describe—results in a distorted picture. According to the Pew survey, only 10 percent of American Jews are now Orthodox—or 12 percent of those who define themselves as Jews by religion—yet these are, by far, the youngest and most vibrant of the nation’s Jews. The median age of Orthodox adults is forty, while the median age of their Conservative peers is fifty-five. Moreover, the average number of children born to Orthodox adults is 4.1, compared to just 1.7 children, far below replacement level, born to Reform adults.

Pew estimates that there are currently some 900,000 children being raised exclusively Jewish by religion, and a just-released Avi Chai survey by Marvin Schick shows that about 255,000 of them—28 percent, most of them Orthodox—are receiving a day-school education. This is an all-time high figure in American Jewish history. While no one knows how many of these children will remain religiously committed as they mature, the fact that more than one in four future American Jewish adults will have received a day-school education is worthy of celebration, and harbors lessons for the community at large.