FSU Jews in US and Canada (Brym, Slavina, Lenton)
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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 Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 R. Brym et al. 1 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 1 3 R. Brym et al. 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.