Jewish Identification in the US and in Other Countries

One widely shared assumption, both as a normative statement based on socio-historical observation and in the realm of social scientific research, is that America is different. Many observers would probably concur that in many ways the US is unique in force of its constitutional and political history, the particular implementation of federalism, the patterns of immigration and immigrant absorption, the high societal impact of voluntarism, the singular frequency of legal litigation, and the large scale of the nation. Socioeconomic factors include the strength of US resources, the prevailing mechanisms of socioeconomic mobility, manpower training and promotion, sociocultural diversity, and even diffidence toward the decimal system. How real this paradigm of uniqueness continues to be under contemporary conditions of globalization and of wild competition in nearly all fields where the US may have been dominant in the past is a matter for debate. This chapter explores the nature of US Jewish identification in comparison to appropriate data from other countries around the world. The intriguing result outlines less what exists than what is apparently missing.