Marshall Sklare Award Lecture

December 19, 2010, Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry Steven M. Cohen, [email protected], 646-284-1932 Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner In memory of Charles S. Liebman, z”l

As I’m sure anyone who receives a prestigious award in recognition of their life’s work will experience, such an occasion is a time for reflection, and a myriad of emotions. For me, the first emotion is a profound sense of gratitude to my parents, Max and Toby Cohen, of blessed memory, and also to my wife Marion Lev-Cohen, to my children, Adam Wall and Edeet Cohen, and to other beloved family members and dear friends. Over the years, they all have given me the passion, motivation, and industry to do my part for our people and our profession.

My gratitude also extends to our academic community and, in particular, to dozens of co-authors over the years. I checked my CV, and found some 56 collaborators, including seven previous Sklare Awardees. I know they’ll forgive me, and I’m sure you’ll thank me, if I forego a public recitation of all their names. Yet, I’d feel remiss if I failed to at least mention several collaborators to whom I feel especially indebted -- Paul Ritterband, of blessed memory, Paula Hyman, Samuel Heilman, Jack Wertheimer, Ari Kelman, Jack Ukeles, and, of course, my good friend, Arnie Eisen, with whom I had the privilege of writing, The Jew Within.

I also wish to lovingly acknowledge four mentors in my life, albeit with all-too-brief expressions of gratitude. All are men, and all were born between 1934 and 1941.

The first is the dearest friend of my youth, Fred S. Sherrow. Fred was both an energetic and universally beloved Jewish activist, and a doctoral student in Columbia’s sociology department. During my junior year in 1969, Fred guided me in my first Jewish identity study -- a survey of Columbia and Barnard students that would yield my first

1 published article some five years later. Fred modeled for me the notion that the academic study of Jewish life both serves, and is enriched by, a dedicated commitment to the vitality of the Jewish People. An eclectic Jew, for whom nothing Jewish was foreign, he died in 1971, just after completing his dissertation on religious intermarriage, inspiring my own dissertation on interethnic marriage and friendship in 1974.

Next, I thank Leibel Fein. In 1969, I became Leibel’s summer intern, working at MIT on a project on intermarriage, marking the beginning of a life-long mentorship and lasting friendship which I deeply cherish. Among Leibel’s many gifts to me was exemplifying how he combines incisive scholarship with a loving, yet critical, stance to the established Jewish order, one ever in need of repair, as is our world. For Leibel, as for Fred, few things Jewish are foreign; but, for Leibel, not all things Jewish are unequivocally benign.

Probably no one has influenced my thinking about how to conceptualize and to measure Jewish continuity and change more than Calvin Goldscheider. In the early 1980s, not only did he befriend and empower me around the time of my first book, American Modernity and Jewish Identity. He also taught me a foundational principle: That Jewish continuity depends upon the extent of intra-group ties, both formal and informal, buttressed by numerous elements of social differentiation that provide what we may call, “the socio-ecology” for Jewish ethnic cohesion. As he and Alan Zuckerman wrote:

The strength of the Jewish community reflects the number and intensity of ingroup interactions. … Of primary importance are the patterns of residential clustering, strong occupational and education concentrations, extensive institutional networks, and the absence of internal conflicts.

Calvin’s truly imaginative and instructive approach sees Jewish cultural elements, in effect, as epi-phenomena that ride above the cohesive Jewish social ties that undergird them. Intra-group ties and social boundaries are at the core of Jewish vitality and continuity. Jews engage in continuing invention and reinvention of the meaning of Jew, 2

Jewish, Jewishness and Judaism, creating the possibility for ongoing transformation. Accordingly, we social scientists need to continually update and invent measures and modes of observation so that they are attuned to novelty, innovation, and diversity of Jewish expression, as we see beautifully exemplified in the series of Jewish population studies conducted by Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller. As a personal and small example, I’ve come to advocate the inclusion of questions on Jewish friends, Jewish talk, and Shabbat meals as critical to measuring Jewish engagement of younger adults. At the same time as we invent new measures, we need to continue to track what I may call the “legacy measures,” items such as Federation giving and organizational belonging, if only to document both decline and revival, both continuity and transformation. I see the invention of the sociology of Jewish sound, language, and educational tourism by Ari, Sarah and Shaul respectively as refreshing and imaginative responses to new and emerging modalities of Jewish life.

Since encountering Calvin in 1982 at Brandeis when Marshall Sklare served as our profession’s dominating presence, Goldscheider has been an ever-present voice speaking in my left ear. That voice reminded me continually of the centrality of measures of ethnic cohesiveness – such matters as in-group marriage and friendship, residential concentration, institutional belonging, and Israel attachment. But, at the same time, starting in the mid-1980s, the ever-present voice speaking in my right ear has been that of Charles S. Liebman, of blessed memory. Charles and I wrote several works together, most notably Two Worlds of Judaism, of which he was, in all ways, the senior author. More than anyone else in my life, Charles has influenced the deepest core of my thinking and feeling about the Jewish enterprise – both how to study it and what to do about it. For these reasons and many more, I am moved to dedicate this talk to his memory, and to do so just about ten years to the day when Charles was honored by the ASSJ with the Marshall Sklare Award in the year 2000.

For his part, Charles strongly opposed Calvin’s thinking, arguing that Calvin denies “an essential Judaism … [or] what Jews ought to value and believe and practice … what they affirm as the beliefs and values and practices of the Jewish tradition.” As Charles wrote,

Judaism (the sets of values, beliefs, rituals, ceremonies and behavior patterns to which Jews subscribe) will continue to evolve over time … But there is a point where Judaism or Jewishness might so transform itself that it can no longer be called Judaism.

Although seen as a pure Judaic essentialist, I viewed Charles more as an “instrumental essentialist,” rather than an “essential essentialist.” He had good, pragmatic reasons for saying, as he often did, “Judaism is not anything you make of it.” He believed that the social construction of authenticity demanded a slow pace of change, and a restraint on Jewish cultural innovation and diversity. In his view, only if Jews believed in the mythic notions of Judaic constancy and continuity, over both time and space, would they feel a moral compulsion to act in distinctively Jewish ways, together with fellow Jews. Change and innovation, especially if they are so recognized as such, undermine the legitimacy and moral integrity of the Jewish values, beliefs and practices that Jews attribute to both their ancestors and their contemporary Jews around the world.

In this, Charles and I differed. For me it’s an open question as to whether the image of a relatively continuous tradition and widely shared culture is conducive to Jews maintaining their engagement with Judaism and Jewish life. The appearance of continuity and uniformity can be helpful, but not essential, to maintaining Jewish engagement.

In that spirit, over the years, I’ve celebrated the many refreshing and invigorating aspects of recent Jewish innovation, developments that I’m sure Charles would have celebrated as well. I’m thinking, for example, of independent minyanim, new cultural 4 endeavors, social justice initiatives, self-directed Jewish learning, and the vast Jewish life on the Internet. In fact, since 2005, largely with Ari Y. Kelman -- but also with Shaul, Sarah, Jack and Sylvia and others -- I’ve been deeply engaged in studying these innovative phenomena. I certainly sought to explore and explicate them using all the social scientific tools of observation and analysis. But, truth be told, my choice of research topics was motivated by an advocacy agenda, in that I sought to contribute to the recognition of these endeavors by philanthropists and policy makers.

Calvin and Charles, each for his own reasons, arrived at very different fundamental perspectives and prognostications on the Jewish present and future. Calvin, for his part, might be labeled an “upbeat transformationist,” seeing the ability of Jews to redefine Judaism and Jewishness as the guarantor of a bright Jewish future. In contrast, we may label Charles an “anxious traditionalist,” fearing that the rapid abandonment and undermining of traditional Jewish values and practices abetted by the proliferation of diversity in Jewish life, would run counter to Jewish vitality and continuity in the long term.

Drawing upon these two perspectives simultaneously, I now have come to see myself as an, “anxious transformationist.” Thus, with Calvin, I see ethnic cohesion and measures of in-group ties and social differentiation as critical and fundamental to maintaining and measuring Jewish vitality and continuity. And, with Calvin, I sociologically welcome – although I may sometimes ideologically reject – most forms of Jewish innovation we have seen as contributing to the vital transformation of Jewish life, reshaping Judaism in line with the larger society and culture. And with Calvin as well, I place significant emphasis in my work upon intra-group ties -- in particular those which reflecting marriage, friendship, residence patterns, institutional belonging, and attachment to the Jewish collective embodied in Israel and the Jewish People.

But, perhaps unlike Calvin -- and much in keeping with Charles -- I find that an empirical assessment of these measures of Jewish cohesion is deeply anxiety-producing. With the perspective of more than forty years of research on American Jewish life – spanning the period when Marshall Sklare was actively engaged in his pioneering research until the present moment – I cannot see how one avoids the overall inference that Jewish group cohesion has been in decline.

To make this case, I want to focus upon four nodes of Jewish collectivity. All four of them begin with the letter “I.” We have … In-marriage, Institutions, Israel and, well, In- distress Jews. On all four nodes of collectivity, non-Orthodox American Jews, are scoring lower in terms of both behavior and attitudes than they were 20, 30, or 40 years ago, while younger non-Orthodox Jews are scoring lower than their parents and grandparents, albeit not on every measure.

Sklare’s innovative research on “Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier,” explored a recently settled suburb of Chicago whose Jewish residents were largely third and fourth generation Americans in their 30s and 40s. Their patterns of ritual observance were low-scoring. They actually trail behind Jews in the 2000 NJPS: Only 60% of Lakeville Jews attended a Seder, just 34% fasted on Yom Kippur, and only a quarter attended synagogue services monthly. This was not a particularly observant crowd. Yet, when asked what it takes “for a Jew to be considered a good Jew,” 74% thought it desirable or essential to “marry within the Jewish faith,” as did 75% with respect to belonging “to a synagogue or temple,” and 88% for contributing “to Jewish philanthropies,” 66% for belonging “to Jewish organizations,” and 68% for supporting Israel.

Not only do I contend that, by and large, such numbers would be lower today than then, but that even asking the question runs contrary to prevailing contemporary norms. The last time I ventured to ask a variant of the “good Jew” question was in 1997, in a study sponsored by the JCC Association. Even by then, its leadership felt uncomfortable

6 including such a question lest it imply that JCCs believe that there is such a thing as a “good Jew” or a “bad Jew.” I succeeded in inserting the question only when I suggested putting “good Jew” in quotation marks, effecting a symbolic distance between the concept and the survey’s institutional sponsor.

Clearly, the normative support for the four I’s – in-marriage, institutions, Israel, and in-distress Jews – has significantly eroded over time. And so too have relevant behavioral indicators associated with each domain.

Take in-marriage, or its obverse, inter-marriage, defined as the marriage of a Jew to a born non-Jew who does not assume a Jewish identity, either through formal conversion or by an informal process I’ve approvingly labeled “sociological conversion.” Right now, at least 47% of all Jews who marry are marrying non-Jews who do not convert to Judaism, up from about 23% in the late 1960s, and 43% in the late 1980s, as we learned both from the 1990 NJPS and the 2000-01 NJPS. The 47% figure for the late 1990s comes, of course, from the 2000-01 NJPS. If the Cohen Center critique that the survey under-reached the less engaged Jews is accurate, then the intermarriage rate in the 1990s would be higher still.

The rate of increase in recent years has been restrained by the growth of the Orthodox, and by the departure of the children of the intermarried from the ranks of identifying Jews. Had these children remained Jewish, their very high rates of intermarriage (about two and a half times that of the children of the in-married) would have propelled the recent non-Orthodox intermarriage rate even higher.

The consequences of intermarriage for Jewish life and population are profound. However they might be raised, as Sylvia Barack Fishman reminds us, only about a third of children of the intermarried consider themselves Jews when they reach adulthood. This level is far less than the 50% rate needed for demographic stability, assuming the couples don’t fall short of an average fertility of 2.1 -- which they do. Since the vast majority of 7 even the Jewishly identifying children of mixed marriages marry non-Jews, we can safely estimate that no more than 10% of the grandchildren of the intermarried identify as Jews.

The intermarriage rate is about six times as high among the non-Orthodox as it is among the Orthodox. As we learn from the last NJPS, the Orthodox represent 8% of my generation; they constitute 23% of my grandchildren’s generation. For every 100 Orthodox Jews my age, we have 192 children being raised in Orthodox homes. For every 100 non-Orthodox adults, we have only – 55 – Jewish children being raised in non- Orthodox homes. Thus, as Sergio Della Pergola has long argued, intermarriage, low fertility, and delayed marriage exert profound effects on Jewish populations throughout the Diaspora. I am convinced that US-born non-Orthodox Jewry has entered a population meltdown. Its effects will be most apparent after the passing of the Baby Boom generation, but its signs can already be seen in shrinking pools of children in non- Orthodox educational settings. The non-Orthodox population decline will narrow the range of Jewish choices available to our children and grandchildren.

Incredibly, neither the Jewish institutional world, nor much of our profession, seems at all deeply disturbed by these phenomena. Some of our colleagues seek to minimize the apparent impact of intermarriage, even as they concede that intermarriage exerts a very powerful statistical net effect upon the likelihood that children will be raised as non-Jews and, of course, that they will come to identify as other-than-Jewish in their adult years.

Leaders in the vaunted American Jewish communal system – with whom we in the learned profession are in ongoing discourse as the audience, supporters and subjects of our research – often believe that the American Jewish community has somehow defied comparable outcomes found elsewhere, be they among other Diaspora populations, or

8 among all other ethno-religious groups in the United States, with the single understandable exception of African Americans.

One reason for their complacency is they believe that Jews have made huge progress in the battle against the population-effects of intermarriage. They would have had their complacency strengthened had we broadcast the mistaken view that intermarriage rates declined from 52% in 1990 to 47% ten years later. A particularly stark Illustration of the misreading of intermarriage is found in a report published in 2007 by Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a paper that draws upon the 2005 Boston Jewish Population Study. Here, the authors allege in their introduction that:

Intermarried families choosing to raise their children as Jews are [to emphasize] deeply engaged in Jewish practice. In what are widely seen as traditional Jewish ritual practices, intermarried families with Jewish children are generally as observant as inmarried Jewish families. [More emphasis added.] … At key moments, they participate in synagogue life in similar ways to other Jews. They report feeling welcomed and a part of the community.

But elsewhere, the very same report tells us of sharp differences between the fraction of intermarried families who are raising their children as Jews, and in-married families, almost all of whom raise their offspring as Jews exclusively. We learn that only 13% of the intermarried couples’ kids attend Jewish classes after Bar/Bat Mitzvah, as compared with 37% of kids from in-married Reform families. The comparable rates for synagogue membership are 47% and 78%. In fact, 64% of the intermarried families belong to no Jewish institution, four times higher than the 16% among Reform families. While just 3% of Reform in-married families report Christmas trees, the number reaches 82% among the intermarried. And while 15% of children from in-married Reform homes have been to Israel, only 1% among the Jewish children of the intermarried have done so. It’s no wonder that so many children raised Jewish in intermarried homes eschew

9 identification as such when they grow up, and it’s also no wonder that the adult children of the intermarried score so abysmally on measures of attachment to Israel.

It’s also no wonder that the signs of the US-born, non-Orthodox population meltdown are all around us. Consider the second “I” – institutions. We see decline in members of Jewish organizations from B’nai B’rith to Hadassah to the now defunct American Jewish Congress. We see decline in the number of donors to Jewish federation campaigns. We see decline in the number of members of Conservative synagogues. And, as Bruce Phillips’ forthcoming work so masterfully demonstrates, we see decline in the number of Jewish members of Reform temples, where larger proportions of couples are intermarried. Thus, even if the number of Reform congregants had held steady – and it’s dropped – we have fewer Jewish adults among those member units. Consequently, a far smaller share of Jewish adults belongs to Reform temple today than 20 years ago.

As for the third “I,” Israel, the respectful differences between Ari Kelman and me with our colleagues at Brandeis have been thoroughly debated, as you can see in the current issue of Contemporary Jewry. In our central message, Ari and I set aside what may be called a careful rendering of the Beinart thesis. As we know, Peter Beinart argues that an illiberal Israel and an ever-supportive American Jewish establishment have served to alienate progressive-leaning younger American Jews from support of Israel. However, “pro-Israel” and “Israel-engaged” or “Israel-attached” are not one and the same. For Israel attachment, it is intermarriage and travel to Israel that are crucial. With so many non-Orthodox Jews emanating from mixed married homes, owing to the large number of mixed married albeit with few Jewish children, and with such a powerful impact of intermarriage upon Israel attachment, how can we legitimately expect younger cohorts of non-Orthodox Jews to resemble their elders and predecessors in attachment to Israel? As Ted Sasson and I have said, “It’s a race between intermarriage and Birthright.” Ari and I believe that intermarriage is winning; Ted judiciously reserves judgment.

In the interests of saving time, I limit my comments about the fourth “I” – what I may have whimsically termed, “in-distress Jews.” I only wish to say that the admirable and growing passion for saving and serving non-Jews in distress (and may AJWS continue to grow and thrive!) has been accompanied by a diminution in concern for the most vulnerable and hard-pressed who are Jewish, be they in Kiev, Carmel, or California. These trends must be seen as a departure from what gets derided as Jewish tribalism in some quarters, but went by the name of Ahavat Yisrael – love of Israel, meaning fellow Jews – in other times. Somehow, we have collectively failed to appreciate the lesson of the survey evidence among contemporary American Jews, where more commitment to specifically Jewish causes is directly related to more Jewish commitment to repairing the world at large.

Taken together, the trends pertaining to in-marriage, institutions, Israel and in- distress Jews all point in the direction of weakening ethnic cohesion, at least among the decreasing proportion of American Jews who are non-Orthodox. As such, these trends point to several challenges to American Jewry, and research opportunities – and responsibilities – for our profession. I offer the following as examples:

1) Will American Jews be able engage the intermarried and their children in Jewish life, and if so with which strategies? Is the primary obstacle a lack of welcoming, as some have argued, or lack of Judaic competence, networks, and interest, as I have argued? As critically, if not more, can American Jewry act so as to raise the rates of in-marriage, be through the conventional mode of Jewish education, or through as yet untried efforts to explicitly increase the levels of Jewish social networking and association?

2) How well will American Jews build alternatives to diminishing, though not dying, legacy institutions? How will they be able to forge and maintain personal connections, conversations, and private association in the place of the institutional

affiliation and activity that characterized much of the 20th century? As I’ve written elsewhere, Jews have been shifting their focus from People to Purpose, from Goral (or Fate) to Ye-ud (or Destiny), or from a reflexive, primordial attachment to Jewish belonging toward an emphasis on moral, cultural, and spiritual objectives. As they do so, we social scientists will need to attend to such measures as friendships, conversation, and the Shabbat table, as we explore the scope and power of the innovative endeavorsHow will American Jews conduct and sustain a relationship with Israel? More pointedly, how will the organized community contend with the indifference to Israel of many US-born non-Orthodox Jews, in particular the children of intermarried parents? How will it capitalize upon the positive impact of travel to Israel – be it with Birthright or with Masa-supported programs for longer, and more impactful, stays in Israel? And, assuming the continuation of governments marked by what many regard as anti-democratic, xenophobic, racist, and religiously extremist tendencies – how will American Jewry respond in the long run to these odious tendencies – and how should it? And how will we manage the tensions and incivilities that too often characterize very substantial differences of opinion among us?

3) Last, in light of the challenges to inherited notions of Jewish group identity that are cast in dualistic terms of in-group and out-group, or of particularist and universalist, will American Jewry be able to forge a new and adapted sense of group identity, one more appropriate for a post-denominational and post-ethnic America? What does an in-group look like, if the out-groups is not clearly defined? How can we social scientists measure the emergence and movement toward such creative eventualities?

I offer these ideas for a communal agenda and a research agenda not by way of prescription, but by way of illustration. The decline of the major nodes of Jewish collectivity – on the levels of family, of community, of Israel, and of Peoplehood – opens the way for new paths of Jewish creativity. As such, with new methods, new spheres of inquiry, and new measures, we researchers will inevitably chart new courses in unfamiliar territory posing unfamiliar challenges. If we are to continue to learn from one another, and if we are to engage fruitfully with the larger academic and communal publics, we will need to conduct ourselves as collaborative and generous colleagues. We will need to freely share our insights and our data in ways that are accessible to all of us. And as we publicly challenge each other’s analyses in public and to the media, we will need to take care to convey appropriate appreciation of our respective strengths and contributions.

And as we continue to energetically challenge each other’s findings and interpretations, we ought not presume that our collegial critics are questioning our methodological competence, or deriding our academic credentials. We need to recognize the multiple ways of learning and knowing – to see survey data, qualitative observation, social theory, side knowledge, and the accumulated wisdom of years of research as all contributing to our understanding. I am fond of Shaul Kelner’s insightful remark about the mission of social science: “It’s not about the data; it’s about the ideas.”

Last, I rejoice that we are living in the healthiest time in the history of the human race. Younger Jewish adults today are having children at just about the same age when many of our great grandparents had passed on. My parents lived in a world where, for the most part, two intellectually and physically active generations interacted with one another. In contrast, we live in a world where four adult generations co-exist and inform one another. That’s an exhilarating thought, and an unprecedented development in Jewish and world history.

On his 84th birthday, when blessed with the words, “Until 120,” Shimon Peres responded to his well-wishers, “Don’t be so stingy.” In the same spirit, I hope that the Marshall Sklare Award which you have been so kind to bestow upon me, at age 60, will come to mark not so much as a recognition of a life’s work, but, evolve into a mid-career milestone in our ever-growing conversation among several generations of scholars committed to studying, serving, and sustaining the Jewish People.