How Many Jews? Was It the Demography? A Reassessment

Using the disciplinary concepts and tools of demography, this chapter reconstructs the size of US Jewry between 1945 and 2010, looking ahead to 2020. Demography rather than a goal as such, is a sensitive indicator of a deeper and broader configuration of demographic, social, and cultural patterns. The chapter charts (a) the types of documentation available, (b) the boundaries of the investigated population, and (c) the nature of demographic processes at stake. The main demographic trends that have affected US Jewry over the past decades are summarized in the light of the main competing estimates on Jewish population size. The chapter offers a critical reading and consistency check of some of the better known among these sources, and finally suggests one or more scenarios for US Jewish population size in the present and in the short-term future. From demography’s perspective, definitional and analytic rules in the study of US Jewry cannot elude two basic constraints: (a) Jews in the United States integrally pertain to American society, and consequently significantly share and respond to changing socio-economic, cultural, and political stimuli in their country; (b) US Jews, inasmuch as they are part of an historical and cultural global Jewish collective, belong to a transnational entity significantly sharing and affected by unique and crucially important historical processes and identificational commonalities.