Projecting future Jewish demographics in the United States: Whither the Jews? Edieal J. Pinker1 Abstract Drawing upon a recent comprehensive survey of the American Jewish population conducted in 2013 by the Pew Research Center, we estimate the trajectory of the population and its denominational segments, 50 years into the future. Our analysis relies upon estimates of the population in 2013, fertility rates, marriage behaviors, and denominational switching patterns as inputs into a model of population demographics. We project that over the next 50 years, the demographics of U.S. Jews will change dramatically. We project that the share of the population that is Orthodox will rise from 13% to 28%, with their share of the child population reaching 45%. Among Reform and Conservative Jews, the number of 30-69 year-olds is projected to drop by approximately 47% over this period. We also project a slight drop in the total Jewish population followed by a recovery propelled by the growing Orthodox population. Introduction The U.S. Jewish community is distinctive in several ways. Unlike other sizeable religious groups in the United States, Jews are also an ethnic group; and unlike almost all other American ethnic groups, Jews are also a religious group. In comparison with their religious and ethnic counterparts, Jews are unusually cohesive with a wide variety of institutions ranging across a diverse array of sectors including the religious, educational, cultural, philanthropic, political and human service domains, as well as a strong relationship with Israel. Marked by a pre- American history of autonomous institutions and communities, Jews lived for centuries socially apart from the larger societies in which they dwelled. There – in Eastern and Central Europe, the Mideast, and other areas of pre- American residence -- they sustained their distinctive religion, culture, language, geography, and economic pursuits, all of which were reinforced by a sense – albeit varying – of mutual separation, if not at times, disdain and outright hostility. Maintaining communal continuity is an ongoing challenge for the Jewish community and is one faced by other minority groups. How does a minority group maintain its distinctiveness while engaging successfully with the society around it? One could in fact argue that many of the benefits that the United States derives from the diversity of its population are dependent upon subgroups being able to maintain their distinctiveness while being fully engaged in society. Jews in the diaspora around the world have, at different times wrestled, with this challenge especially since the 18th century. In broad terms, Jews’ “survivalist ideology” (Glazer 1957) and distinctive group history have left their mark. While, over the last several decades, both Roman Catholics and Mainline Protestants in the U.S. have experienced significant numerical declines and defections (Putnam and Campbell 2010; Pew 2015a), the Jewish 1 School of Management, Yale University. Email: [email protected] 1 population numbers grew by approximately one million – or almost a fifth – from 1990 until 2013 (compare Kosmin et al 1991 with Pew 2013). This growth was due in part to immigration from the FSU and elsewhere, the growth of the Orthodox, and the children of the numerically large baby boom generation (those born between 1946 and 1964). While all late generation European-origin ethnic groups have experienced considerable assimilation -- seen by Herbert Gans as a transition from “twilight” to “darkness“ (Gans 2014; Gans 2015) – Jews have surely maintained social cohesiveness, as well as a notable cultural and political presence. The aforementioned growth indicates clearly that projections about the size and composition of this population requires taking into account standard demographic factors such as migration and fertility in addition to how much Judaism attracts and/or retains members. Indeed, it has been recognized by many researchers of religious groups that projections about the size of religiously affiliated populations require taking into account not just the switching in and out behaviors of the population but the differing fertility rates across religious groups (Skirbekk et al 2010; Scheitle et al 2011; Hout et al 2001). Yet, notwithstanding the historic and contemporary features that distinguish American Jews from comparable religious and ethnic groups in America, several developments point to changes afoot in the socio- demographic size and contours of American Jewry. Both local Jewish community studies (UJA Federation of New York 2013), as well as the Pew Research Center’s 2013 national study, report high rates of intermarriage, that is, Jews marrying non-Jews. Rates are particularly high among the non-Orthodox, which constitutes roughly 90% of the adult population. A high rate of intermarriage certainly influences the identities of offspring, but, as we will demonstrate, the impact of intermarriage on the number and the denominational distribution of American Jewry is mediated by other factors such as fertility. Another important shift has been to lower-than-replacement levels of fertility as reported in prior studies (Pew 2013; Pew 2015b). These demographic trends underscore the large gaps in socio-demographic and religious characteristics between the current 10% of adult Jews who are Orthodox and the vast majority who are not. In light of these and other considerations, this study makes projections into the future about the size, demographic make-up, and denominational distribution of the US Jewish community. We ask, if current trends continue, what will the community look like demographically decades into the future? These kinds of projections are fraught with uncertainty and come with many caveats. However, we will show that many aspects of the projections are quite robust and point to significant changes, assuming recent trends continue, if only approximately. Projected and prospective demographic and denominational changes among American Jews are significant in their own right, and have direct implications for the religious character of the Jewish community as well as its political leanings, a matter of some consequence for the broader society given the significant involvement of American Jews in political and social causes. Moreover, the study of American Jewry may also hold some implications for other religious, cultural and ethnic minorities. Demographic projections require knowledge of an initial state for a population – its size, fertility and mortality rates, as well as rates of migration into and out of the population be it geographically or by way of identity switching (e.g., conversion and apostasy). Our study seeks to not only project the overall Jewish 2 population size, but also that of the major Jewish religious denominations. Consequently, for the purposes of our study, it is also important to know how the critical demographic factors vary across denominations, the rates of transition from one denomination to another, and the impact of marriage with non-Jews. Our primary source for estimates of most of these parameters is respondent data from Pew (2013) based on interviews with 3,475 individuals whom Pew defined as currently self-identified as Jewish. Relation to other studies This work is very much in the spirit of Hout et al (2001), Skirbekk et al (2010), and Scheitle et al (2011) in combining religious switching behavior with demographic forces to create a projection of a religious group’s population. With the exception of Skirbekk et al (2010) these studies have focused on the much larger Christian denomination populations. Few scholarly projections of the US Jewish population size and characteristics have been undertaken. Most notably, Della Pergola and Rebhun (1999) made projections regarding the Orthodox denomination alone using the 1990 National Jewish Population Study (NJPS) (Kosmin et al 1991). Pew (2015b), Rebhun et al (1990), Della Pergola (2013) and Skirbekk et al (2010) made projections of the entire U.S. Jewish population in the aggregate. Using data from the 1990 NJPS, Della Pergola (2013) carefully spells out the challenges in counting the Jews and in projecting the population into the future. He reviews the main previous data sources and presents a projection to 2020 for the total Jewish population in the US. While valuable and instructive, all of these projections aggregate all Jews without disaggregating by denomination, a critical point of differentiation. In particular, the Orthodox are so different demographically from the other subgroups of the Jewish population that failing to distinguish them as a distinct sub-population yields an imprecise projection of the total population. To be sure, for relatively short-term projections, aggregating Jewish denominations has little impact, especially when the Orthodox population was as small as it was in 1990, comprising just 7% of adult Jews and with an older age profile. However, today the Orthodox population is reaching a critical mass – particularly among children and teenagers -- and is much younger in age distribution than the other groups and has lower a rate of intermarriage and higher rate of inter-generational retention. Accordingly, the Orthodox subgroup must be distinguished in population projections to get a good read on where the US population is heading. Della Pergola and Rebhun (1999) analyze just the Orthodox using the 1990 NJPS data. Based upon their assumptions of fertility and marriage patterns for the Orthodox,