The Salutary Effects of Settings in the Lucky Country: Jewish Families in Australia

In this chapter, we explore the nature of Jewish family life in Australia. Informed by Bronfenbrenner’s classic Ecological Systems Theory (1977), we examine settings in which Jewish families appear distinguished from others. We start by contrasting quantitative data on Jews in Australia with Jews in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, identifying communal norms which align as well as distinguish Australian Jewry from these English-speaking diaspora communities. We then use census data to contrast Jewish families in Australia with all other Australian families, revealing some striking demographic, geographic, and residential differences. In these settings, we observe the Australian Jewish family to be more traditionally-minded than other families both in the diaspora and wider Australian society. Finally, we use census data to compare four family types within Australia: those in which everyone in the household is Jewish, those who are Jewishly mixed families—those who are Jewish and no/unstated religion, and those who are Jewish and another religion—and those in which no one is Jewish. We show that Jewishly mixed families appear to be a kind of halfway house between the fully Jewish and fully non-Jewish families in demographic, economic and geographic terms. This suggests that mixed Jewish households are not simply syncretic religious arenas but also manifest features and habits that transcend the realm of Jewish identity, impacting upon broader aspects of family life that must be considered to more fully understand the meaning of Jewish family life. We maintain that the Australian Jewish family is thriving, and that this success may be attributed to not only living in the ‘lucky country’ (Horne 1964), but also being nested in a vibrant Jewish community.