No Apology for Alarm

We thank Daniel Smokler, Jonathan Sarna, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Chip Edelsberg and Jason Edelstein for their responses to our essay, “The Pew Survey Reanalyzed,” and for the opportunity they have given us to sharpen and clarify our argument.

Before turning to narrower questions, we’ll address the charge that our essay was needlessly alarmist or even misleading in its claims. Jonathan Sarna portrays it as a “prophecy of gloom,” while Chip Edelsberg and Jason Edelstein contend that we’ve “artificially constructed” a cliff that American Jewry is about to fall off of.

We offer no apology for our alarm. With 72 percent of non-Orthodox Jews marrying non-Jews, a birthrate of 1.7 children among the non-Orthodox population, over two million adult offspring of Jews who no longer identify themselves as Jewish, and 93 percent of the grandchildren of the intermarried being raised outside the Jewish religion, we are mystified by reassurances that all is well. We ask our critics: are there any data capable of persuading you that something is seriously amiss with the “Jewish Middle”: that is, the population of active American Jews outside of Orthodoxy?