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“To have Judaism, we have to have Jews, and the right kind….”
———Sidney Goldstein (1992: 4)
More than once, on introducing my research to potential interviewees, outlining its focus on the saturation of American Jewry with socio-demographic discourses, they have in response referenced Simon Rawidowicz's aphorism “the ever-dying-people.” I was not surprised to find the phrase also invoked in the professional and academic conferences that I attended over the course of my fieldwork, nor that it has been deployed in numerous community publications of American-Jewish socio-demography. Simon Rawidowicz, a renowned philosopher of Jewish history, coined this playful term as a means of articulating the unrelenting preoccupation of Jews with a “sense of being on the verge of ceasing to be” (1986: 53), the sense of being the last Jewish generation. Whether Rawidowicz's aphorism is invoked with half a smile or a critical distance or is used to depict in more substantive terms the minority Jewish experience, its common currency in the American-Jewish communal sphere captures the existential weight assigned to population trends.
This weight has grown markedly heavier over the last three decades. Since the publication of the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS 1990), a national study on the socio-demography of American Jewry, and with each subsequent nationally scaled study (principally NJPS 2000–2001; and the 2013 Pew Research Center's “Portrait of Jewish Americans”), the American-Jewish communal public has been flooded with concerns about numerical decline. These studies lend quantified, scientific “evidence” to long-feared claims of Jewish assimilation. They tie exact numbers to issues deemed crucial to the ability of Jews to maintain a vibrant collective life as a distinct minority ethno-religious group in the United States. Key issues include intermarriage rates, age at marriage, aging, and measurements of Jewish identification and engagement along with intergenerational transmission of identity. Collectively, the aggregated effect of these variables has been massively factored in calculations and predictions over what is often described—interchangeably and somewhat vaguely—as “Jewish life” or “a Jewish future.”
Neither this expensive investment in socio-demographic knowledge about the American-Jewish population nor the “crisis mentality” (Corwin Berman 2009: 144) are uniquely post-NJPS 1990, but since then they have intensified dramatically in both volume and public presence. And while the data have been fiercely debated by community leaders...