Contemporary Jewry https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-020-09315-5

Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination of Jews from the Former Soviet Union in Canada and the United States

Robert Brym1 · Anna Slavina2 · Rhonda Lenton3

Received: 16 August 2019 / Accepted: 4 March 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract The leading theory of the Jewish diaspora asserts that Jewish communities outside Israel are steadily shrinking and assimilating to dominant cultures, with the decline being especially advanced among Jews from the former Soviet Union. We test this proposition with data from the 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews and the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews. Our fndings suggest that Canada deviates from the global trend to a degree that afects even Jews from the former Soviet Union residing in that country. Although only about 25,000 Canadian Jews currently residing in Can- ada were born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated since 1970—a small frac- tion of the number who immigrated to Israel, the United States and Germany over the past fve decades—the Canadian outpost is worth studying because its features require a qualifcation of the leading theory of the Jewish diaspora, namely that assimilation rates vary by identifable features of national context.

Keywords Jews from the former Soviet Union · Canada · United States · Religious retention · Ethnic retention

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium in honor of Dr. Mark Tolts, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 27 June 2019. We are grateful to the anonymous Contemporary Jewry reviewers for especially insightful and gracious comments that signifcantly improved the fnal product. We also thank Anna Shternshis, Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, for subsidizing the oversample of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews. Funding and in-kind contributions in support of the larger study were provided by Robert Brym (through the S.D. Clark Chair of Sociology at the University of Toronto), the Environics Institute (Keith Neuman, Executive Director) and Rhonda Lenton (President and Vice-Chancellor, York University). Additional funding was provided by the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba, the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal and Federation CJA (Montreal).

* Robert Brym [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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The Leading Theory of the Jewish Diaspora

The leading theory of the Jewish diaspora claims that Jewish communities outside Israel are shrinking due to a total fertility rate below the replacement level; a con- comitant increase in mean age; a high and rising intermarriage rate leading to wide- spread assimilation; and ongoing out-migration to Israel, though much moderated in recent decades. Due to these factors, the population of the Jewish diaspora stood at 10.5 million in the middle of the twentieth century and declined to 8.2 million in 2000. According to DellaPergola et al. (2000), the Jewish diaspora population can be expected to fall to just fve million by 2080, with no Jews left in the former Soviet Union (FSU) by that date. Gitelman (1998, 2013) is among the leading proponents of this theory. He argues that nationalism and religion are the only enduring bases for Jewish exist- ence, so disaspora Jews who are neither ardent Zionists nor religiously observant are bound to diminish in number and fnd the strength of their Jewish identity weaken- ing. The results of multiple surveys in various countries add weight to his claim. For example, surveys conducted in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus show that Jews who do not plan on emigrating from the FSU tend to be more religiously and ethnically assimilated to non-Jewish cultural norms than are those who decide to emigrate, while Jewish émigrés choosing to go to the West tend to be more religiously and ethnically assimilated than those choosing Israel as their destination (Brym with Ryvkina 1994; Gitelman 2013; see also Shrayer 2017). To be sure, the research literature identifes exceptions to the general trend. For example, unlike the Jewish community of the former Soviet Union, the Jewish communities of Western Europe and the United States have not experienced mass out-migration. The relatively high level of formal education achieved by diaspora Jews and their concentration in relatively high-status socioeconomic locations has increased opportunities for intra-ethnic interaction and thus mitigated assimilation (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984; Hartman and Hartman 2009; Rebhun 2015). Still, in most of the diaspora, total fertility and in-migration rates have been low enough to lead to population decline, while the permeability of ethnic boundaries and the thinning out of cultural content has been made possible by increasing inter- marriage and other forms of close association with non-Jews. As Gitelman (2013) wrote, “American Jews, who had all the cultural and religious facilities during the 70 years that their Soviet brethren had very few, are ‘catching up and overtaking,’ as Nikita Khrushchev liked to say.” Nor does he restrict his generalization to American Jewry; provocatively, he claims that “we are all Russians now.”

1 Hebrew and Yiddish: “In a place where there is no person, a herring is a fsh too.” 1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination…

Table 1 The Canadian Jewish community is more cohesive than its counterpart in the United States: indicators of Jewish religious and ethnic retention, Canada 2018 and USA 2013 (in percent). Sources: Pew Research Center (2013a) and Brym et al. (2019a) USA (n = 3475) Canada Diference (n = 2335)

Percent endogamous, 18–29-year-oldsa 29 68 39 Non-synagogue Jewish organization membership (yes) 18 47 29 Synagogue membership (yes) 31 58 27 Percent ­endogamousa 50 77 27 All or most friends Jewish 32 57 25 Lights shabat candles weekly or usually 22 46 24 Financial donation to Jewish cause in past year (yes) 56 80 24 Attended Jewish summer ­campb (yes) 38 58 20 Attended full-time Jewish ­schoolb (yes) 23 43 20 Average 26 a Canadian fgures based on 2011 population data b In the US survey, asked only of people who said they were brought up Jewish or who have at least one Jewish parent

Canadian Exceptionalism?

The leading theory of the Jewish diaspora notwithstanding, Canada seems to be bucking the global trend. For one thing, the Canadian Jewish population is grow- ing and now stands at about 392,000, or as much as 398,000 according to a recent Statistics Canada estimate (Smith and McLeish 2019). According to the Pew Survey of World Religions, Canada overtook France as home to the world’s sec- ond largest Jewish diaspora community in 2010—second, of course, to the much larger American Jewish community (Pew Research Center 2015). Other analysts claim that the Jewish population of France is still larger than that of Canada, but even their fgures suggest that, if current trends persist, Canada’s Jewish popula- tion will be larger than that of France in less than a decade (DellaPergola 2017, 2018). Beyond the population count, behavioral indicators suggest that Canadian Jews tend to be signifcantly less assimilated than are their American counterparts. The 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews (Brym et al. 2019b) and the 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews (2013b) provide numerous comparable measures of ethnic reten- tion, nine of which are listed in Table 1. The 2335 Jews in the Canadian survey score higher than the 3475 Jews in the American survey on in-marriage, friendship ties with fellow Jews, attending full-time Jewish school, and various forms of Jew- ish religious observance. Canadian Jewry is more “institutionally complete” than is American Jewry, as indicated by substantially higher rates of synagogue and other Jewish organizational membership in Canada (Breton 1964). On average across all nine indicators, Canadian Jews score 26 percentage points higher than do American

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Jews. Despite sampling diferences between the two surveys, we are convinced that most of the observed diference refects the Canadian Jewish community’s greater ethnic cohesiveness.2 These data suggest that what are perhaps the two largest diaspora communities, the United States and Canada, are substantially diferent. What accounts for the dif- ference? We believe three main factors are at play. First, in proportionate terms, immigration has been considerably more robust in Canada than in the United States since World War II. Consequently, 30% of Cana- dian Jews are immigrants compared to just 14% of American Jews. Canadians there- fore tend to have stronger ties to “old country” traditions and languages than do American Jews. The second factor accounting for Canadian Jewry’s higher level of religious and ethnic retention is that Canadian national identity is much weaker than American national identity; raucous displays of national pride, so frequent in the United States, are considered unseemly in Canada, except during some international sports tour- naments (Adams 1997: 171). Because of their strong American patriotism, Ameri- can Jews have historically been less enthusiastic than Canadian Jews about Zion- ism. This tendency has mitigated the assimilation of Canadian Jews for more than a century. The Canadian/American diference in strength of national identity exists partly because the United States was frst settled by Europeans a century earlier and has therefore had more time for a national identity to crystallize. Probably more impor- tant is the fact that Canadian national identity emerged gradually with the peaceful evolution of independence from Great Britain, while American national identity was forged in an anti-colonial war that, like all group confict, sharpened and hardened group identity (cf. Simmel 1955: 88–9). Consequently, when Zionism appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth century, it conficted with American patriotism, par- ticularly for Reform Jews, members of the country’s largest Jewish denomination by far; many Reform Jews thought Jewishness should be based on religion, not a national movement, and so were opposed to the Zionist idea (Kolsky 1990). Not so in Canada, where the Reform movement was much weaker than the Orthodox and especially Conservative denominations. Already by the beginning of the First World War, Zionism was a core element of Jewish identity for the great majority of Canadian Jews (Tulchinsky 1992: 201). Zionism thus facilitated the retention of reli- gious and ethnic identity. It did so by providing a new basis for Jewish identifcation that became even more compelling after the Holocaust. In short, because Ameri- cans Jews have a much stronger national identity than do Canadian Jews, they have

2 The Canadian survey includes only cities with a Jewish population of about 13,000 or more. The US survey includes Jews in communities of all sizes and rural areas. However, roughly 85% of Jews in both countries live in cities with Jewish populations of about 13,000 or more. Rural areas in both countries are typically devoid of Jews. And cities with small Jewish populations seem to be more ethnically cohesive in Canada than in the United States. To cite just two examples based on a single indicator of cohesive- ness, Calgary, Alberta, and Alexandria, Virginia, each have Jewish populations of about 5000, but Cal- gary has three synagogues while Alexandria has two; Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, each have Jewish populations of about 2000, but Halifax has two synagogues while Charlottesville has one. 1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination… historically and on average been less enthusiastic about the Zionist idea and have therefore been more prone to assimilation. The third main reason for Canadian-Jewish exceptionalism is that, out of political necessity, fostering the growth of ethnic institutions has been Canadian public pol- icy since the British conquest of New France in 1760. Part of the British strategy for dominating the relatively large French population was not to quash French Catholic culture, but to allow the conservative Catholic Church to maintain religious, educa- tional and cultural control of the French population (while reserving for the English control of trade and, later, industry; Ouellet 1966). The eventual establishment of separate school systems in Quebec—Catholic for the French, Protestant for the Eng- lish—did not easily accommodate Jewish immigrants. It fostered the growth of a private Jewish school system and other Jewish community institutions that promoted the retention of Jewish ethnic identity. For instance, according to Canada’s leading historian of Yiddish, in the early twentieth century, while the “mainstream Ameri- can Yiddish press promoted Americanization, Montreal intellectuals… advocated… yidishkayt” (Margolis 2011: 31). Beginning in the late 1950s, a substantial num- ber of French-speaking Sephardic Jews immigrated to Montreal. They now com- prise about one-quarter of the city’s Jewish population. A distinct Canadian-Jewish bilingual sub-identity crystallized among them, pulling Canadian Jewry even farther from the unilingual and assimilationist American model of Jewishness (Bérubé-Sas- seville 2017). Canada was ofcially proclaimed a bilingual and bicultural country in the 1960s. Shortly thereafter, numerous minority ethnic groups objected that they, too, deserved ofcial recognition and funding. The era of multiculturalism had arrived. For the past half century, strong state support for ethnic institutions has helped all Canadians, Jews among them, to ward of religious and ethnic assimilation. Support for ethnic diversity has become a key component of Canadian identity. In contrast, opposition to ethnic diversity has been stronger in the United States historically and has, if anything, strengthened in recent years. Signifcantly, survey research suggests that the only other diaspora country with a Jewish community as cohesive as Canada’s on a wide range of demographic and behavioral measures is Australia (Graham and Markus 2018). The Jewish popula- tions of both countries are growing. And the two communities seem to be equally cohesive for similar contextual reasons. Thus, while immigrants make up 30% of Canada’s Jewish immigrant population, they make up as much as 48% of Australia’s. Like Canada, Australia gained independence from Great Britain peacefully rather than through an anti-colonial war which, in the United States, led to intense patriot- ism that conficted with Zionism. And like Canada, but unlike the United States, Australia developed a vibrant multicultural policy in the early 1970s that undergirds religious and ethnic identity retention among its citizens. In short, the Canadian case teaches us that context matters. In this case, “con- text” means the timing and volume of immigration and the nature of ideologies and institutions relevant to ethnic identity. The Canadian Jewish community is relatively cohesive, and its Jewish population is growing—a rarity among diaspora communi- ties. Beyond that, the Canadian case suggests that, while the American and former Soviet Jewish communities have without question been the dominant actors on the 1 3 R. Brym et al.

Table 2 FSU Jews in Israel become more religious across generations: indicators of religious assimila- tion 2015 (in percent; n ≈ 568). Source: Theodorou (2016) FSU 1st gen FSU 2nd gen All Israelis FSU 1st/2nd gen diference

Keep kosher at home (yes) 24 50 63 26 Light Chanukah candles (always) 26 43 52 17 Keep kosher outside home (yes) 19 35 52 16 Believe in God? (yes) 55 70 77 15 Light Shabbat candles? (weekly) 19 34 43 15 Average 18

The Pew survey included 3789 Jews, but the number of individuals from the FSU is not specifed in their published report. Based on population data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, we estimate that about 15% of the sample consisted of Jews born in the FSU and their ofspring diaspora stage for the past century, they should not be allowed to monopolize the narrative concerning the future of the Jewish diaspora. Assimilation is taking place among Canadian Jews, but at a relatively attenuated pace. As we will now argue, this circumstance has important implications for Canadian Jews born in the former Soviet Union.

National Contexts of FSU Jews

If, as we have suggested, historical and institutional contexts matter, it follows that Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union arriving in diferent countries should develop religious and ethnic tendencies infuenced by the characteristics of their host countries. That seems to be the case. For example, Judaism is Israel’s state religion, pervading the lives of its Jewish citizenry. We would expect Israel’s strong Jewish religious environment to push Soviet Jewish émigrés toward substantially greater Jewish religious observance over time. And that is in fact just what 2015 Pew data show (see Table 2). On fve meas- ures of assimilation to Jewish religious norms, second-generation FSU Jews score an average of 18 percentage points higher than do frst-generation FSU Jews. Even if this behavior is largely “an adaptive response aiming at social inclusion in the Israeli Jewish mainstream rather than actually emerging religiosity,” it testifes to the exist- ence of a strong contextual efect (Remennick and Prashizky 2012: 55). We might also anticipate a diference in this regard between Jews from the former Soviet Union arriving in the US and those arriving in Canada. That is because Jewish religious observance is more widespread in Canada. However, in neither country is Judaism anything like the pervasive force it is in Israel, so we would expect such Canadian/American diferences to be relatively small. In this connection we can compare three indicators from the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews and the 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews, bearing in mind that we are dealing here with just 515 respondents. Any inferences drawn from such a small subsample must be regarded as little more than suggestive. That said, the data 1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination…

Table 3 FSU Jews in Canada are somewhat more religious than their counterparts in the United States: indicators of religious retention (in percent; n = 515). Sources: Calculated from Pew Research Center (2013b) and Brym et al. (2019b) USA (n = 366) Canada Diference (n = 149)

Synagogue member? (yes) 21 37 16 Aside from special occasions like weddings…how 8 17 9 often do you attend religious services? (once a week +) Light shabat candles? (weekly) 23 26 3 Average 9

Table 4 FSU-born Jews in Canada are less ethnically assimilated than their counterparts in the United States: indicators of ethnic retention (in percent; n = 515). Sources: Calculated from Pew Research Center (2013b) and Brym et al. (2019b) USA (n = 366) Canada Diference (n = 149)

Aside from religion, does spouse consider him/herself Jewish? 18 62 44 (yes/partly) Member of Jewish organization other than a synagogue? (yes) 13 43 30 Intermarriage rate 42 14 28 How important is being Jewish in your life? (very) 22 50 28 Financial donation to Jewish charity or cause in past year? 48 71 23 (yes) How emotionally attached are you to Israel? (very) 37 56 19 Average 29 shown in Table 3 follow expectations. Religious diferences between FSU Jews in the two countries average 9 percentage points—less than one-third the magnitude of the average cross-national ethnic diference we are about to observe. On non-religious dimensions of ethnicity, we would expect larger diferences between Soviet Jewish émigrés arriving in the United States and Canada. That is because, as noted earlier, the Canadian and American social contexts—that is, their institutional structures, government policies, and cultural environments— difer sharply in the degree to which they ofer material and symbolic support to ethnic groups. We concede that it is not always easy to distinguish religious from non-reli- gious dimensions of Jewish ethnicity. For example, endogamy may be based on religious or non-religious considerations or a mix of the two. To minimize overlap between the religious and non-religious dimensions of ethnicity, Table 4 refers to indicators of ethnicity that do not have an explicitly religious focus. Again as anticipated, we fnd a large diference between FSU Jews in Canada and the United States. On six measures of ethnic retention, FSU Jews in Canada out- score FSU Jews in the United States by an average of 29 percentage points.

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We infer—with the greatest of caution because the sample sizes are small—that the Canadian social environment infuences FSU Jews to retain their religious and especially their ethnic identity to a greater extent than the American social environ- ment does.

Objections

Two objections may be raised to our claim that Canada is exceptional in terms of its efects on the ethnic identifcation of Jews in general and Jews born in the FSU in particular. First, it is often held that Canada lags the United States on a whole range of dimensions and that, in due course, Canada will “catch up” to the US. From this point of view, Canada’s Jews, including its FSU Jews, will eventually be as assimi- lated as their counterparts in the US today. For example, if current trends in inter- marriage persist, Canadian Jewry may reach the current intermarriage rate of Amer- ican Jewry in roughly four decades.3 On the other hand, the Pew Research Center (2015) projects that while the Amer- ican Jewish population will continue to shrink between 2010 and 2050, the Canadian Jewish population will continue to grow. It seems entirely possible that Canadian Jewish population increase, due mainly to immigration, combined with the coun- try’s institutional and cultural context, which we have briefy described, may prevent the level of Jewish assimilation that the United States is witnessing. The second objection to the claim that the Canadian and American social con- texts afect FSU Jews diferently is that divergence between the two groups may not be due to contextual so much as compositional factors (or as demographers would say, “selectivity”). That is, FSU Jews in Canada may difer from FSU Jews in the United States because individual-level characteristics infuencing propensity to assimilate difer between the two populations. For example, proportionately more FSU Jews in Canada may have been socialized in more robust Jewish environments. We now present a multivariate analysis based on pooled Canadian and American data to discover whether that is in fact the case.

3 This generalization is impressionistic. The calculation of a Jewish intermarriage rate depends on how the researcher defnes Jewish, whether common-law partners are included and whether the researcher ascertains Jewishness at the marriage partners’ points of birth, at the time of their marriage or at the time of the survey. Because of variation in the operationalization of intermarriage, comparison of intermar- riage statistics across time and between countries is hazardous. With this proviso in mind, we note that the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey in the United States found that 27% of married people who were born Jewish were not married to a person who was born Jewish or who had converted to Judaism. In the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews, 23% of married respondents reported that their spouse or com- mon-law partner did not identify as Jewish at the time of the survey (Brym et al. 2019a: 39; Goldstein 1992: 126). 1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination…

Multivariate Analysis: Sample and Measures

Our multivariate analysis pools data on the 515 respondents from the 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews and the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada who identify as fully or partially Jewish and who immigrated to Canada or the United States from the FSU since 1970, when the modern wave of FSU emigration began. Respond- ents in both surveys were asked about their level of engagement with diverse religious and ethnic practices, Jewish upbringing, institutional and cultural con- nectedness and social and economic location. Our statistical models are based on complete case analyses of the subsample. That is, only respondents with valid responses on all independent variables are included in the analysis. Accordingly, our efective sample size is 398 respondents. To examine the extent of Jewish religious and ethnic retention in Canada and the United States, we constructed two measures of retention based on ten survey items tapping respondents’ level of attitudinal, cognitive and behavioral afnity with the Jewish community. Our index of Jewish religious retention includes measures of the importance of the Jewish religion in the respondent’s life, synagogue membership, frequency of attending religious services and frequency of lighting Shabbat candles. Cron- bach’s α measures the internal consistency of questionnaire items, that is, how closely related the items are. The generally accepted rule of thumb is that a Cronbach’s α of 0.7 or greater indicates a level of internal consistency allowing the items to be used as a scale. In the case of the items just listed, Cronbach’s α = 0.769. Our index of Jewish ethnic retention includes items tapping membership in Jew- ish organizations other than synagogues, donating money to Jewish organizations, proportion of friends who are Jewish, self-assessed knowledge of the Hebrew alpha- bet and emotional attachment to Israel. For these items, Cronbach’s α = 0.751. Because the number of response options in questionnaire items varied, items were standardized before the scales were constructed. The indices were then stand- ardized again in the pooled data to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Therefore, the coefcients in our models speak to the average estimated efects of a one-unit change in the independent variable on a one-standard-deviation diference on the indices of religious and ethnic retention. We performed factor analyses for each outcome variable as an additional check to ensure that the items making up our scales measure single, internally consistent con- structs. For both outcomes, constitutive items loaded strongly (> 0.4) on one factor in both the pooled and country-segmented data. Because factor analysis results sup- port the structure of both scales, and because removal of any item lowers the Cron- bach α associated with each scale, we retain the structure of our outcome variables. However, we note that repertoires of religious and cultural practice, and therefore assimilation, may look diferent across national contexts that are more disparate than the US and Canada.

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After constructing religious and ethnic retention scales, we estimated a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions on each of the outcome variables.4 Table 5, Model 1 and Model 3, test the efects of demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly used to explain religious and ethnic retention (or their opposites: religious and ethnic assimilation). Model 2 and Model 4 add a dummy variable for country to examine whether country context afects religious and ethnic retention among FSU Jews (USA = 0, Canada = 1). Our socioeconomic and demographic controls include respondents’ gender (male = 0, female = 1); age in years; level of educational attainment, operationalized as the highest degree attained in eight categories; annual household income in six categories; year of immigration; and couple composition, distinguishing respond- ents who are single, those who have a Jewish spouse or partner and those who have a non-Jewish spouse or partner (included in the models as dummy variables with “single” as the reference category). We also control for level of religious upbringing by including dichotomous measures capturing whether respondents were raised Jew- ish and whether they have at least one Jewish parent.

Findings

Table 5 presents OLS regression results for the religious and ethnic retention models (see the “Appendix” for descriptive statistics). Both unstandardized coefcients (b) and standardized coefcients (β) are presented. A striking fnding that frst emerges from our modeling exercise is that standard socioeconomic and demographic measures account for little variation in religious retention. In Model 1, having a Jewish spouse or partner is the only variable that is signifcantly associated with religious retention; people in endogamous unions experience a higher level of religious retention than do single respondents. However, the relationship between having a Jewish spouse or partner and religious retention becomes non-signifcant once we include country in the analysis. Thus, in Model 2, none of the socioeconomic or demographic predictors are signifcantly associ- ated with religious retention. Said diferently, in our sample of FSU Jews who immi- grated to Canada or the United States since 1970, religious retention does not vary across categories of gender, age, education, income or childhood upbringing, net of the country efect. Context alone matters, with Canadian Jews from the FSU scoring signifcantly higher on religious retention than do American Jews from the FSU.

4 Models were estimated using weighted data. Weights for the US data were constructed by the Pew Research Center to adjust for various aspects of the survey design (including oversampling) and demo- graphic characteristics (including educational attainment, census region, stratum, age, gender and race/ ethnicity). The Canadian weights adjust the sample for the age and gender distribution of Jews in the respondent’s city, the national age-cohort-specifc exogamy rate for respondents who are married or have a common-law partner and the size of the Jewish population in each city. Country-level weights were normalized to center around 1 to facilitate comparison in the pooled dataset. 1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination… 0.014 0.014 0.026 0.119 0.114* 0.192** 0.174** 0.281*** 0.263*** β −0.070 0.416 0.016** (0.006) −0.161 (0.202) 0.008 (0.042) 0.007 (0.036) 398 0.001 (0.004) −32.884** (11.483) 0.204 (0.114) 0.717* (0.310) 0.509*** (0.119) b (s.e.) 0.456*** (0.141) 0.413** (0.145) Model 4 0.066 0.071 0.022 0.143* 0.146** 0.355*** 0.199** 0.191** β −0.059 0.037 (0.042) 0.037 (0.041) 398 0.001 (0.004) −37.622*** (11.649) 0.245* (0.117) 0.917** (0.317) b (s.e.) 0.362 0.614*** (0.150) −0.137 (0.203) 0.018** (0.006) 0.411** (0.145) Jewish ethnic retention ethnic Jewish Model 3 0.192** 0.211 0.069 −0.143 −0.008 −0.107 −0.105 −0.040 β −0.111 −0.097 0.416 (0.216) −0.092 (0.064) −0.005 (0.056) 398 −0.006 (0.004) 19.969 (18.244) −0.206 (0.172) −0.283 (0.281) .395** (0.144) b (s.e.) −0.292 (0.199) 0.153 −0.010 (0.009) 0.169 (0.230) Model 2 0.032 0.274* 0.068 −0.108 −0.110 −0.089 −0.018 β −0.104 −0.079 −0.069 (0.065) 0.018 (0.058) 398 −0.006 (0.004) 16.292 (18.502) −0.174 (0.172) −0.128 (0.263) b (s.e.) Jewish religious retention religious Jewish Model 1 0.539* (0.218) −0.273 (0.200) 0.128 −0.008 (0.009) 0.167 (0.227) single. Robust standard errors standard in parentheses. * p < 0.05; Robust single. ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001 = a a ­ partner OLS Regression for Jewish religious and ethnic retention scales ( n = 398) retention and ethnic religious Jewish for OLS Regression ­ partner 2 Reference category Reference

Jewish Jewish Household income R Highest degree Highest n Age Constant Canada Female Non-Jewish Non-Jewish Jewish parent Jewish 5 Table a Year of immigration Year Raised Jewish Raised

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We investigated the possibility that these non-signifcant results were driven by low variation on religious retention. However, coefcients of variation and box plots showed considerable variation in religious retention in both the pooled and country-segmented data. We also investigated the possibility that standard social and demographic variables were non-signifcant because our models were handi- capped by insufcient statistical power due to small sample size. To explore this possibility, we conducted a stepwise regression analysis with backward elimi- nation to see if the removal of the most non-signifcant variables in succession would improve model ft. Stepwise regression analysis with backward elimination left only Jewish partnership and country in the model. We conclude that the non- signifcant results cannot be attributed to small sample size. We surmise that the non-signifcant fndings in Model 1 and Model 2 may be the result of the character of religious socialization in the former Soviet Union and its successor states. The USSR aimed to eliminate religion and promote athe- ism. Religious institutions including schools were shut down, property owned by religious bodies was appropriated by the state, atheism was taught in schools and universities, religious practices were ofcially stigmatized and public displays of religiosity were prohibited. As a result, the Jewish religion was not extinguished but the fame guttered, with urbanization and education probably having as much or more of an efect on religious assimilation than did government campaigns. A representative 1993 survey of Jews in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk found that just 16% of Jews were bringing up their children with Jewish traditions, and a mere 10% regularly celebrated Shabbat (Brym with Ryvkina 1994: 25). A minor religious revival began in the 1980s, but it was strongly associated with the emi- gration movement and in many cases failed to endure (Beizer 2019). There is more evidence of a religious revival in the post-Soviet era, but the resurgence is not strong. For instance, only about one hundred families in Moscow and St. Petersburg are deeply involved in the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, which is sanctioned by the Putin regime (Shrayer 2017). A 2004 survey in St. Petersburg asked Jews which religious doctrine they found most attractive. More than 35% answered “none” and more than 20% answered “Christianity”, with just over 10% replying “don’t know”. “Judaism” attracted only 27% of the respondents (Gitelman : Table 5.4). We suspect that in the context of such weak religious socialization, a person who has a Jewish partner or a Jewish parent, or even someone who has been raised Jewish, is on average unlikely to be much more religious than someone who lacks these characteristics; hence the non-signif- cant social and demographic variables in Model 1 and Model 2. Socioeconomic and demographic factors explain considerably more variation in respondents’ level of ethnic retention. Table 5, Model 3, indicates that having a Jewish partner, having a Jewish parent and being raised Jewish are signifcantly associated with ethnic retention. These relationships hold even when country is introduced into the regression equation in Model 4, suggesting that the compo- sition or selectivity of the Canadian and American samples in terms of Jewish upbringing may not be responsible for the cross-country diference in strength

1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination… of Jewish ethnic retention. Apparently, single respondents, those in exogamous unions, and those without a Jewish parent have little access to support networks that can sustain ethnic identifcation and are more assimilated than people who enjoy such support. Women are less ethnically assimilated than are men, but this relationship disappears once country is included in the analysis. We expected that year of immigration would be negatively associated with degree of ethnic retention because a disproportionate number of Jews who left the FSU in the early years of the modern emigration movement were zapadniki, that is, Jews from Moldova, western Ukraine and the Baltic states. They were incorporated into the USSR only after World War II and therefore lived in areas where Jewish tra- ditions and upbringing endured longer than was the case in the Soviet heartland (Brym with Ryvkina 1994). Surprisingly, we found the opposite: recent arrivals are less ethnically assimilated than are early arrivals. Apparently, the zapadnik efect cannot be found in our sample because only 10% of the respondents are over the age of 80 and thus old enough to have undergone early socialization in the western regions of the USSR. In sum, consistent with our claim that FSU Jews living in Canada and the United States difer in their assimilation patterns, we fnd strong and signifcant country- level diferences for both religious and ethnic retention. Country of residence is the only signifcant predictor of religious retention. Although various social and demo- graphic factors also help to explain ethnic retention, the β coefcients in Model 4 show that residing in Canada is the strongest single factor mitigating ethnic assimi- lation, even stronger than endogamy.

Conclusion

Our regression models do not specify exactly what features of national contexts account for Canadian/American diferences in level of Jewish religious and ethnic retention. However, we believe that the structural and cultural diferences we identi- fed at the outset are largely responsible for Canadian exceptionalism. Our test of the Canadian exceptionalism hypothesis is less rigorous than we would prefer. Consider in this connection the equation for change in size of a popu- lation over time:

P2 = P1 + B − D + Mi−Mo where P2 = population size at time 2, P1 = population size at time 1, B = number of births between time 1 and time 2, D = number of deaths between time 1 and time 2, Mi = number of in-migrants between time 1 and time 2, and Mo = number of out- migrants between time 1 and time 2. A more rigorous test of our argument than we have provided would frst involve plugging appropriate data for Jews in Canada and other countries into this equation. If, in addition, we had reliable cross-time data

1 3 R. Brym et al. on Jewish intermarriage in Canada and other countries, we would then be able to answer three questions about Jewish population change in each country: Does Jew- ish fertility exceed the replacement level and, if so, by how much? By how much, if at all, does Jewish in-migration exceed out-migration? Do Jewish intermarriage and mortality fail to undermine population gains due to fertility and net migration and, if so, by how much? Unfortunately, we lack data that would allow us to answer these questions. We are thus forced to provide a more elliptical answer than we prefer to the question of whether Canadian Jewry is exceptional. Moreover, our answer focuses on fewer countries than we would like. The con- tinued existence of a Jewish community in the former Soviet Union combined with the dispersion of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews to Israel, the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia over the past half-century present researchers with an oppor- tunity to examine the efect of social context on the pace of assimilation in six coun- tries. While Israel encourages assimilation to Jewish cultural norms, the diaspora afords FSU Jews opportunities for varying rates of assimilation to non-Jewish cul- tural norms. Opportunities of the latter type seem to be greatest in the former Soviet Union itself, followed by the United States and, we expect, Germany. Such oppor- tunities seem to be considerably less evident in Canada and, we surmise, Australia. One hopes that enterprising social scientists will soon undertake a proper survey of FSU Jews and their ofspring in all six countries to test the veracity of our argument. However, even in advance of such research, we believe we have demonstrated that grounds exist for qualifying the leading theory of the Jewish diaspora. By focusing mainly on individual or group characteristics, that theory has tended to defect atten- tion from country-specifc historical, cultural and institutional diferences that infu- ence assimilation processes. By assuming that assimilation processes throughout the diaspora approximate those in the United States and the former Soviet Union, it has eschewed true comparative analysis. Ideally, theory testing should employ evidence from all pertinent cases. In our opinion, generalizations about the fate of diaspora Jewry have been too much infuenced by observing two leviathans and not enough by observing the behavior of smaller fsh.

Appendix Descriptive Statistics

See Tables 6 and 7.

1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination…

Table 6 Variables in the regression models: FSU Jews who immigrated since 1970 n % Mean SD Min. Max.

Dependent variables Religious retention scale 515 −0.094 0.965 −1.474 1.941 Ethnic retention scale 515 0.176 0.834 −2.291 1.673 Independent variables Gender 515 0.502 0.501 0 1 0-Male (reference category) 49.80 1-Female 50.20 Age 508 50.627 18.638 18 99 Highest degree 508 6.012 1.722 1 8 1-None or elementary 0.96 2-Some secondary 1.02 3-Secondary completed 9.56 4-Some postsecondary 7.15 5-Vocational degree 12.07 6-University degree 35.56 7-Some postgraduate 2.22 8-Postgraduate degree 31.46 Household income 417 2.602 1.525 1 6 1-Under $50K 35.68 2-$50–75K 16.60 3-$75–110K (CAN)/$75–100K (US) 17.39 4-$110–150K (CAN)/$100–150K (US) 14.37 5-$150–300K 14.13 6-$300K+ 1.83 Marital status 508 1.874 0.633 1 3 1-Single (reference category) 27.07 2-Jewish partner 58.50 3-Non-Jewish partner 14.44 Year of immigration 502 1993.683 9.910 1970 2018 Raised Jewish 514 0.801 0.400 0 1 0-No (reference category) 19.86 1-Yes 80.14 Jewish parent 511 0.967 0.178 0 1 0-No (reference category) 3.25 1-Yes 96.75 Canada 515 0.685 0.466 0 1 0-No (USA) (reference category) 31.46 1-Yes (Canada) 68.54

The outcome variables were standardized (mean = 0, SD = 1) using the full Canadian and US samples before the religious and ethnic retention scales were constructed

1 3 R. Brym et al. 4 4 6 2 4 Max 1 1 1 1 1 Min 0.839 1.176 1.412 0.468 1.047 SD 3.251 2.221 2.800 1.322 2.543 Mean 4.97 7.56 8.66 6.41 7.44 10.71 35.3 32.23 24.91 18.6 26.6 32.29 67.85 32.15 19.49 29.34 28.57 22.61 % 487 512 508 506 498 n Variables included in the construction of the dependent variables: FSU Jews who immigrated since 1970 included in the construction of the FSU Jews dependent variables: Variables services or minyan? at a synagogue, temple, 1-Not at all important 1-Not important very 2-Not 1-Never 2-Sometimes 3-Usually week) (every 4-Always 1-Never 2-Seldom High Holidays as for such times a year, few 3-A 4-Once or twice a month 5-Once a week than 6-More once a week 1-No 2-Yes 1-Not at all important 1-Not important very 2-Not important 3-Somewhat important 4-Very How important is being Jewish in your life? important in your How is being Jewish How often, if at all, does anyone in your household light Sabbath candles on Friday night? household light Sabbath candles on Friday in your often, if at all, does anyone How Aside from special occasions like weddings, funerals and bar/bat mitzvahs, how often do you attend Jewish religious religious attend Jewish often do you how and bar/bat mitzvahs, funerals weddings, special occasions like Aside from Are you, or someone else in your household, currently a member of a synagogue, temple, or other prayer group? or other prayer household, currently a member of synagogue, temple, or someone else in your you, Are How important life? How in your is religion 7 Table Ethnic retention scale Ethnic retention Religious retention scale retention Religious

1 3 Qualifying the Leading Theory of Diaspora Jewry: An Examination… 4 2 5 2 2 Max 1 1 1 1 1 Min 0.868 0.495 0.751 0.483 0.472 SD 3.285 1.582 3.643 1.634 1.330 Mean 5.65 0.44 4.86 10.31 33.9 50.14 41.81 58.19 35.11 49.18 10.42 36.63 63.37 66.96 33.04 38.61 45.71 % 502 512 507 498 497 n 1) using the full Canadian and US samples before the religious and ethnic retention scales were constructed scales were the retention and ethnic religious 1) using the before full Canadian and US samples = 0, SD = synagogue, Jewish school, or group supporting school, Israel? synagogue, Jewish 1-Not at all attached 1-Not attached very 2-Not attached 3-Somewhat attached 4-Very 1-No 2-Yes 1-None of them 1-None at all any 2-Hardly 3-Some of them of them 4-Most of them 5-All 1-No 2-Yes 1-No 2-Yes 3-Somewhat important 3-Somewhat important 4-Very How emotionally attached are you to Israel? to you are attached emotionally How Do you know the Hebrew alphabet? the Hebrew know Do you How many of your close friends Jewish? of your are many How In [year] did you or someone else in your household make a fnancial donation to any Jewish charity or cause, such as a charity or cause, such Jewish any a fnancial donation to household make or someone else in your did you In [year] Are you, or anyone in your household, currently a member of any Jewish organization other than other a synagogue or temple? organization Jewish household, currently a member of any in your or anyone you, Are The outcome variables were standardized (mean standardized were The outcome variables 7 Table (continued)

1 3 R. Brym et al.

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Afliations

Robert Brym1 · Anna Slavina2 · Rhonda Lenton3

1 Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto M5S 2J4, Canada 2 Research Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada 3 Ofce of the President, York University, Toronto, Canada

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