Marshall Sklare Award Lecture, 2017: Beyond Policy: New Directions for Jewish Demography

The era of national Jewish demographic studies appears to have ended. The 2013 Pew Portrait of Jewish Americans study is an excellent substitute, but it is an opinion survey and lacks demographic questions important for studying intermarriage. The American Jewish Population Project of the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University is an innovative alternative utilizing meta-analyses of national surveys that include Jews, but these surveys usually include only Jews by religion and do not include questions about Jewish identification and practice. Local Jewish population surveys, once the main source for quantitative research on American Jews, remain a viable alternative, but have become more descriptive and policy-driven than theoretical because the 1990 and 2000-01 National Jewish Population Surveys rendered them redundant for this purpose. Even so, local Jewish population surveys can once again be a fruitful resource for Jewish social research when used to study theoretical questions such as spatiality, suburbanization, and the individual community as a predictive variable in comparative analyses. Some studies have included theoretical topics such as spirituality that have not been utilized for secondary analysis. More theoretical questions (which are nonetheless policy relevant) could be added to future studies, but this will require a culture change on the part of the Jewish communities that sponsor them. In the meantime, we should look to qualitative research to break new ground and develop new perspectives that will become so compelling that they will be examined quantitatively in future local studies.