Sarah Bernstein:
Welcome to the conversation about the New Pew Report on American Jews. I'm going to ask you all to stay muted as we have this conversation so we don't get any feedback and can hear our speakers very clearly. I am Sarah Bernstein, I'm a current sophomore. I'm doubling majoring in education studies and near eastern and Judaic studies, with a minor in psychology. I am the President of Hillel, and it is my honor to introduce Michelle Shain and Emily Sigalow.
Sarah Bernstein:
Dr. Shain is Assistant Director of the Orthodox Union Center for Communal Research. She's a social scientist who combines academic expertise and policy research with a passionate commitment to the wellbeing of the Jewish community. Before joining the OU, Dr. Shain spent 10 years as a researcher at Brandeis University's Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. She holds a BA in anthropology and near eastern and Judaic studies from Brandeis University, an MA from the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in social policy from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Sarah Bernstein:
Dr. Emily Sigalow directs the research evaluation and measurement department at the UJA Federation of New York. She recently finished a book about the historical and contemporary encounter between Judaism and Buddhism in America titled, American Jew Bud, Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change. She holds a BA in sociology, anthropology, with a minor in mathematics, from Swarthmore College, an MA in the history of the Jewish people from Ben Gurion University, and a PhD in sociology and near east and Judaic studies from Brandeis University.
Sarah Bernstein:
A big thank you to Brandeis Hillel for helping make this all happen. So, how today will work is Dr. Shain and Dr. Sigalow will speak for about 20, 25 minutes. Then we will have a Q&A portion and we welcome you all to write questions in the chat as they're speaking. I will try and get to as many questions as we can, and they will answer. So, without further ado.
Michelle Shain:
Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here today, thank you, Brandeis Hillel for inviting us. I'll tell you, Brandeis Hillel was my home away from home when I was an undergraduate on the Brandeis campus from 2000 to 2004. I also had the pleasure to get to know Rabbi Winberg a little bit when I was back at Brandeis for grad school and to work for a few years. So, I'm glad to be able to come home and share some of this report with you.
Emily Sigalow:
I wanted to say thank you for having me too. Just for all of you in the audience, today is Dr. Shain's birthday. So, I feel like it's special that she's sharing her birthday day with all of us, but I did my doctoral work at Brandeis, so it's a little bit of coming home to be back here too. So, thanks for having me, us.
Michelle Shain:
So, who are we and what do we do? So I work for the Orthodox Union, for one of the OU's newest departments which has the job of doing research on the communities that the OU is trying to serve, program evaluation for the programs that the OU runs, and then dissemination, meaning sharing that work with communal professionals and with audiences like you.
Emily Sigalow:
I direct, as Sarah opened, the Research, Evaluation and Measurement Department at the UJ Federation of New York. We do research about the New York Jewish community. Our team does evaluation of our programs and grant making and measurement and monitoring of our grants to make sure that they hit their performance indicators.
Michelle Shain:
We get to do a lot of fun things during the day, from observation of programs, to interview studies, to focus groups, to surveys to analysis of administrative data. We had the opportunity to serve as peer advisors to the Pew Research Center when they were conducting their brand new 2020 survey of American Jews. We're here to share a little bit of the findings with you.
Michelle Shain:
All right, so Pew Research Center calls itself a nonpartisan fact tank. They are a social science research institute, they do public opinion polling, they focus on US social and demographic trends, politics, policy, religion, and so forth. You guys probably remember that back in 2013 they did their first large survey of US Jews, and in 2020 they did another one surveying a large representative sample of US Jews. Basically what they did is like this, they took the US Postal Service's list of all the home addresses in the United States. They took a random sample of those addresses, they screened, meaning talked for a few... had a short screener questionnaire with more than 68,000 people. Those who were Jews were asked to take a longer survey.
Michelle Shain:
The reason that this kind of work is valuable is because it lets us answer questions like, how many Jews are there in the United States? What proportion of them think like that or did this thing? To asses broad trends in American Jewish life, and also to have a touchpoint with those Jews who are minimally connected to Jewish life, and so are often missed by surveys of Jews who are connected to Jewish Institutions.
Michelle Shain:
When I say Jews, so for the purposes of this presentation, we're going to define Jews the way that Pew defines Jews, which means either when you're asked, what is your religion, the person says, "Jewish," or, when asked what is your religion, the person says, "I'm Atheist or Agnostic or I have no religion but aside from religion, I consider myself Jewish for cultural or ethnic or family reasons." That that person also has a Jewish parent or was raised Jewish. I also just want to note, the survey was conducted from November 19th of 2019 to June 3rd of 2020. That was back when Donald Trump was still president, when the election was still going on, and the majority of the responses were also collected before the COVID pandemic reached the United States. So that's important social context to keep in mind as we go on.
Emily Sigalow:
So that, the 2020 headline of the broad study is that US Jews are culturally engaged, increasingly diverse, politically polarized, and worried about anti-Semitism. When Dr. Shain and I sat down with the data and we began to think about, what is this presentation going to look like for you today at Brandeis, we decided, well, we're going to focus on the patterns among young adults, among the ages of 18 to 29 because that would be... we had anticipated this audience. So we began to look at, what are the patterns among young adults? A little bit to our surprise, we found, wow, these same main headlines carry forward for the young adults too. That the top headlines for young adults is that they're culturally engaged, increasingly diverse, politically polarized, and worried about anti-Semitism. We are going to actually break down each one of these sections as we go through this presentation today, starting with the cultural engagement.
Michelle Shain:
So the first big narrative from the Pew Report is that there are large groups of young adults who see themselves as Jewish for cultural or ethnic or family reasons, but don't identify with Judaism as a religion at all. Let's dig into some of the data behind that.
Emily Sigalow:
So if we look at the top pie graph, we see overall, 73% of US Jews are Jews by religion. Those are the Jews, when given a choice of all their religions, selected Judaism as their religion. 27% identify as Jews of no religion, those are the Jews again, who said that they were atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular but said also identify as Jewish in some other way, some other cultural way.
Emily Sigalow:
But when we look at patterns broken down by age, we see that 40% of Jews between the ages of 18 to 29 are Jews of no religion, but when we look forward to those 65 and older, only 16% of those are Jews of no religion. So there's a clear pattern in here by age.
Michelle Shain:
We can see a related pattern when we look at the denominational identify of American Jews. So the pie graph on the top is showing you of all US Jewish adults ages 18 and over, the largest segment identify as reformed, 37%. Then after that with no particular denomination at 32%, but when you break down the denominational identity of American Jews by age, you can see two gradients. On the one hand, you see the growth of the proportion who have no particular branch identity over time, from 22% of those who are 65 plus, to fully 41% of those who are ages 18 to 29. If you look all the way on the other side of the chart to the dark blue, you see a similar gradient for the Orthodox population.
Michelle Shain:
So, among American Jews ages 65 plus, only 3% identify themselves as Orthodox, but when you come down to the US Jews who are ages 18 to 29, that figure rises to 17%. Although it wasn't in this chart, you'll be able to see later on when the Pew dataset is made available to researchers and others, that among children, so minors ages 17 and younger, the proportion who identify as Orthodox or are growing up in Orthodox households is even larger than 17%.
Emily Sigalow:
But even though we know that 40% of those young adults between the ages of 18 to 29 identify... they don't identify as, but they are grouped as Jews of no religion, they still have a high degree of cultural engagement. This was asked in different ways in this Pew study, but one of the ways they asked is this question about the... of these different ways of being Jewish, how essential are these attributes to what being Jewish means to you. The way that this question was asked is the respondent was able to say, "Yes, this was essential, something else could've been important but not essential, or not important at all." So we can see the breakdown here by those, the percent of US Jews who say that these different ways of being Jewish were essential to what being Jewish means to them.
Emily Sigalow:
Highlighted in this green are the ones that are really importantly patterned by age. So we can look at remembering the holocaust, and we can see those who are 65 and older, 84% of them say that that's an essential part of what it means to be Jewish. Whereas for the younger age cohort 18 to 29, only 61% say that's an essential part of being Jewish. Again, if we look about caring about Israel, that's similarly patterned by age, where older adults care more, think about caring about Israel as an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, where younger adults think that less so.
Emily Sigalow:
This pattern reverses though, when we think about observing Jewish law. Those between the ages of 18 to 29, 19% said that that's essential. Whereas those 65 and older, only 12% said that's essential. This likely has to do because of the proportion of Orthodox within the young adults. There's a higher proportion Orthodox and a higher proportion of the Orthodox care about observing Jewish law.
Emily Sigalow:
This is to me again. The next big headline is that the US Jewish population is becoming increasingly diverse with a pattern that's rising diversity by age. So just as the US overall is becoming increasingly diverse, so too are the Jews. This pattern of diversity becomes really apparent when we look at the younger age group. I also just want to add that measuring diversity is particularly challenging in these studies, and particularly for the Pew researchers. A lot of the questions, at least in the Jewish communal world, there's these questions about, well, how many Jews of color are there? But Pew actually didn't ask the question, do you identify as a Jew of color? So they don't have an answer to that question, the number of Jews of color in the United States.
Emily Sigalow:
What they can answer are the number of Jews who identify according to the census racial categories, which Dr. Shain will go through in the next slide, they know... they asked a question about whether the respondent identified as Ashkenazi or Sephardics, we have numbers about that. They ask about where the respondent was born and where their parents were born. So we have information about immigrant status, but that's the diversity picture that we have using the Pew data.
Michelle Shain:
Okay, so like Dr. Sigalow said, these are census categories. So I hope you guys all remember within the last year, filling out your US 2020 Census. You might've done it online, you might've gotten a form, a person might've knocked on your door. But you were asked whether you thought of yourself first of all as Hispanic, yes or no. Then after that, you were given a list of racial categories, white, black, Asian, American Indian, native Hawaiian and so forth, and you could select as many of those as you felt applied to you.
Michelle Shain:
So what this slide is telling you, that of all US Jews, 92% say that they are white, not Hispanic, and don't identify with any other racial group, but that number is as high as 97% among the 65 plus group, and as low as 85% among the youngest adults. Also note, something that Dr. Sigalow pointed out to me yesterday which I hadn't thought about, which is this 92% white non-Hispanic figure, makes Judaism the whitest religion in America, even more so than American Mormons.
Emily Sigalow:
The next Pew headline was that US Jews are politically polarized. You can see in parenthesis, we added a caveat, especially for the younger Jews because the political polarization that Pew found in their data really has to do with Orthodox and non-Orthodox. US Jews are largely democrat and largely liberal, and have been for a very long time but what we... and we don't see that meaningfully necessarily patterned by age, but what we see is pattern by age of Jews on Israel, especially criticism about the Israeli government.
Michelle Shain:
So, I just want to remind you about the dates that the survey was in the field, from November of 2019 to June of 2020. So the questions that were asked, some of them dealt with the Trump Administration and its handling of US policy toward Israel. This is one of them, the proportion of US Jews who rated Donald Trump's handling of the nation's policy toward Israel as excellent, good, only fair, or poor. I think the easiest way to look at this chart is to look at that light blue gradient, to look at the people who said poor, and see how only 29% of those 65 plus said that the Trump Administration was handling its Israel policy poorly, but that goes all the way up to 50% for the youngest age group between the ages of 18 and 29.
Emily Sigalow:
So this slide really shows feelings about and in connections to Israel and how they're patterned by age. I'm not going to go line by line through this but you can see that there's a clear pattern with Jews feeling less connected than older Jews are to Israel. This holds all the way down the very last question, the belief that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people, in which there's not a clear... a meaningful age difference from the youngest to the oldest cohorts.
Michelle Shain:
When the Pew Research Center did their first major survey of US Jews in 2013, it was decided that anti-Semitism was not a critical issue facing the American Jewish Community. You guys remember that seven years ago? So unfortunately, the 2013 study didn't ask a lot of questions about anti-Semitic experiences or perceptions of anti-Semitism.
Michelle Shain:
The 2020 study rectified that oversight and has a lot of information about how Jews think and feel about anti-Semitism and what their experiences have been. Unfortunately, we're not really able to do a lot of comparing to seven years ago to see how that's changed, but let's look at what they found this year.
Emily Sigalow:
So this is the slide that's really demonstrating perceptions of anti-Semitism. Of course this is not an actual, this is how people feel and how they perceive anti-Semitism to be in the United States today and during the end of the Trump Administration.
Emily Sigalow:
I just want to call attention to the very far left hand column, the a lot, that those who are 65 and older felt that... 52% of those who are 65 and older felt that there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the US today. Whereas only 36% of those 18 to 29 felt that there's a lot anti-Semitism in the US today. So this perception of anti-Semitism is patterned by age.
Michelle Shain:
Now I'm going to show you my favorite finding that Dr. Sigalow and I came across while we were preparing this presentation. This is question is about actual personal experiences of anti-Semitism. So respondents were asked if they had seen anti-Jewish graffiti or vandalism with their eyes, if they had been made to feel unwelcome because they're Jewish, if they had been called offensive names because they're Jewish, if they had been harassed online or physically threatened or attacked because they're Jewish. The Pew Research Center added up for us all of these different experiences of anti-Semitism to tell us what proportion of Jews in each age group had had those experiences.
Michelle Shain:
So remember on the last slide, when the oldest Jews were the most likely to perceive that there was a lot of anti-Semitism? They're also less likely than the youngest group to have actually experienced anti-Semitic incident, which I found fascinating. 57% of the Jews ages 18 to 29, so more than half experienced one of these anti-Semitic incidents directed personally at them in their lives in the 12 months before taking this survey. Only 42% of older Jews had that experience.
Michelle Shain:
I'll also let you know that this is the one item, whether you had been called an offensive name because you're Jewish in the last 12 months, that we actually have from 2013. This survey tells us that it's 15% of American Jews overall had that experience. It was 12% back in 2013. Those numbers are so close together that they're statistically indistinguishable, which means on that item which unfortunately is the only one we have that we can compare over the seven year period, there hasn't been significant change.
Emily Sigalow:
What we want to do now is just invite you to interrogate this narrative with us and with yourselves. So the narrative that we showed you today is that there is these clear patterns in the Pew data that vary by age. The questions that we have is whether or not this is because these are lifecycle effects or these are actually generational effects, whether there's something that are specific and unique going onto this new young cohort, this new generation, that there's something different about them than there is about older American Jews right now, or rather, are we just seeing something that is just an artifact of the fact that those between ages of 18 and 29 are at a particular lifestyle moment? What I mean by that is that we know from past research that US Jews become more engaged religiously, culturally, and with Jewish organizations the older they get, especially once they have children and families. Once Jews have children and families, they reengage with synagogues, with organizational Jewish life, they enroll their children in a Hebrew school, they do more of the traditional Jewish practices.
Emily Sigalow:
The question is, is what we're seeing something that is actually new to this new generation or are we actually just seeing a pattern that's been there for a really long time?
Michelle Shain:
So, we welcome all of your questions, your reflections on what we presented, on anything else that you read in or about the report, on its substance, on its methods, or anything else that we can share.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you so much. We have quite a few questions. Apologies if I butcher anyone's name, but from Daniel Cohane, we have... he asked, "Is the growth of the Orthodox as a percentage of the young due to net population growth in that group or disappearance of the others?"
Michelle Shain:
Net population growth. American Orthodox Jews on average start having children five years earlier than other American Jews, and they have about twice as many children, which means that the growth of the Orthodox population is exponential. They also have a very young population, the average age of Orthodox Jewish adults in 2020 was something like 30 something. I don't want to say it wrong, and for conservative Jews it was all up closer to 60. So that's a natural demographic growth.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Okay, Eric Parker asks, "Demographically, how long has the US Census race classification lumped in Middle Eastern with White? What would the Jewish American community's breakdown be if we could separate this out? Would it help us and our non-Jewish friends of Middle Eastern descent, in terms of EEOC and anti-discrimination laws?"
Michelle Shain:
So the US government's Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, define the racial categories that are used in the census and also for other federal programs to designate eligibility and so forth in 1997. They have since been revised but not by much. So I can tell you that the most recent substantive discussion about this that resulted in any policy change was in 1997.
Michelle Shain:
What would the Jewish American community's breakdown be if we could separate this out? I'm not sure if you're asking what proportion of American Jews classify themselves as Middle Eastern as opposed to white. This survey can't tell us that because it didn't ask that question.
Michelle Shain:
Would it help us and our non-Jewish of Middle Eastern descent, in terms of EEOC and anti-discrimination laws? Maybe.
Sarah Bernstein:
Okay, thank you. Jennifer Thompson said, "I've seen complaints that people who say they are Jewish and also have another religion, for example, interfaith families who are both religions or JewBus, are excluded from the survey, but looking at the methodology and screener, I don't see a way for that to have happened." She wants to know, could you comment on whether this complaint is based in reality?
Emily Sigalow:
Pew does not allow you to have two. Actually, I think that you're not allowed two, there's not a multiple select on the religion. That's right, Michelle, right, or Dr. Shain? So when you select on a religion, you are only allowed to select on one and make one single choice there. So by virtue of how that screener is laid out, it doesn't allow for this. You don't get screened in because you're not even allowed to select that you have more than one religion.
Michelle Shain:
I think I would say also that Pew tried to cast a very wide net, in terms of... so you had the original screener, it was a very short set of questions given to all those 60 whatever thousand Americans who took it. Anybody who indicated that their religion was Judaism or that their religion was... or that they considered themselves Jewish aside from religion, regardless of what they said their religion was. So if I said I'm Catholic and I consider myself Jewish aside from religion, I got to take the survey. If I said that I'm currently Catholic and I don't consider myself Jewish aside from religion, but I had a Jewish parent, I also got to take the survey.
Michelle Shain:
What the Pew Research Center then did was it divided all of those respondents into two groups. The ones that they call the Jews, which are the ones we talked about today, and the one that they call the people of Jewish background or what's the other term they used? Jewish affiliated. So we have data on all those people, they're in the dataset, they answered all of these questions. So for people who are interested in the folks who used to be Jewish or the folks who have a Christian religion but aside from that think of themselves as Jewish, we'll be able to analyze those people. They weren't analyzed in this report.
Emily Sigalow:
I think the only way to pick up on if somebody had more than one religious affiliation would... they would've had to select on other and then write that in. Most people don't do that just because it's work to have to then describe who you are and your whole religious profile. At least in 2013, I haven't seen the numbers now, they had very few write-ins to that effect.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you, well said. Orin Davis asks, "To what extent did you control for people's general opinions about President Trump for all of the questions that pertained to politics?"
Michelle Shain:
I'm going to pick on that word, you. Right now the only people who have access to the dataset are the researchers at the Pew Research Center. Dr. Sigalow and I were part of an advisory team for this project, but we didn't run the analysis. So what the Pew team is showing you here are simple frequencies and simple cross tabs. They're not regression models, it's not like they're showing you the opinions of Trump controlling for age and partisan affiliation and X, Y, Z of the demographic characteristics. Straight up, frequencies and cross tabs. If you look on the report, you will find opinions of President Trump by partisan affiliation. So you can see how democrats and how republicans respond to that question.
Emily Sigalow:
I think it's an interesting larger question that it's going to be I think virtually impossible to answer though, is to the extent to which the previous administration and the President Trump Effect, had on this data. We don't know when respondents were asking, when we asked them if they were liberal or if they were democrats, what effect that Trump had on their answers, but I mean I think it's really fair to assume that there was an effect there because all administrations in all contexts, it's going to affect how we, all of us will answer a survey or how we perceive the world in the moment in which we're asked a question.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Terry Plass says, "In many ways, younger Jews seemed less engaged than older, but the percentage of Orthodox Jews was higher in younger. This seems paradoxical. Could you explain or comment on this?"
Emily Sigalow:
Sorry, I'm just reading this question. Dr. Shain, do you want to field that? I'm just-
Michelle Shain:
Sure, okay, so there are two parallel patterns going on here. One is that in the Orthodox community, number one, retention rates are improving. Meaning, among baby boomers who grew up in Orthodox households, fewer stayed Orthodox when they became adults, compared to millennials and our younger Gen Z'ers who are growing up in Orthodox households, more of them are staying Orthodox as they become adults. On top of that, as I mentioned before, Orthodox Jews have almost twice the fertility rate of other American Jews and start having children about five years earlier. So, those factors together, that natural growth, that high fertility, combined with a better retention rate is leading to an increase in the Orthodox population.
Michelle Shain:
Separate from that, we're seeing that the children of the baby boomers who identified as reformed and conservative are increasingly identifying themselves as having no religion. Those two phenomena are happening side by side. So what you wind up seeing is this growth on both ends of the religious spectrum, on the very right wing end of the religious spectrum and on the atheist end of the spectrum, and this shrinking of that middle.
Emily Sigalow:
But and also, the sample size isn't sufficiently large within the Orthodoxy for them to be able to break down and show meaningful differences around Haredi and other right wing. I'm looking at the question, sorry. Another right wing Orthodox Jews, they just have... by virtue of sample size have to lump Orthodox Jews together. So we can't really say what the differences are within Orthodoxy itself.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you for explaining that. Tobin Beltzer asks, "As the advisory committee of Jewish scholars, what type of input did you provide and how did that influence the study?
Emily Sigalow:
You want me to go first on that? What type of input did we provide? We've had a long and at least what I felt like, was a very positive and fulfilling journey with Pew. I was thinking about this yesterday, when our first conversation began with them and I think it was almost three years ago at initial meetings.
Emily Sigalow:
So I don't want to overstate our importance, in terms of shaping the study. This was Pew and Pew's work, but the advisory group provided, they provided substantive feedback about the survey and its content itself. I would say methodological feedback certainly didn't come from me, but came from other members of the advisory group, and I think analytic feedback too, about how to think about the analysis and different ways of looking at the data and cutting it. Some stylistic feedback also, just about some of their sidebars and some of the ways that they laid out the data and told a story.
Emily Sigalow:
So I say that Pew has been one of the, I think really to their credit, one of the really fabulous parts about working with Pew is they really invested in the community and making sure that their data is important to the community, is resonant, and is informed. So they've taken the feedback very seriously and thoughtfully and have included advisors I think at every, I would say at every stage of this process. Dr. Shain, what would you say?
Michelle Shain:
I would only add that I think Dr. Sigalow's selling her methodological input short a little bit. UJA Federation in New York does a lot of surveying and had done address based sampling before the Pew Research Center went into the field to try to use that method. I remember a meeting where Dr. Sigalow was talking about how New York has these special drop point mailboxes and what proportion of Jews that she thought in New York might have these kinds of mailboxes and how the sampling and the waiting was going to deal with that.
Michelle Shain:
So, it tended to be just depth of knowledge on the community that we were able to offer that maybe tweaked the method or the content of the survey instrument or the presentation a little bit this way or that way.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Phyllis Robbins asks, "Is there a known statistical distinction in the Pew study between modern Orthodox and the Haredi or other right wing Orthodox Jews?"
Michelle Shain:
Hi, Mom. Phyllis Robbins is my mom. So unfortunately, American Orthodox Jews, although the population is growing, are still a small minority in the American Jewish population. You're talking about 9% of US Jews who themselves are only about 2% of all Americans. There are not enough Orthodox respondents to Pew to be able to break them into those categories of modern Orthodox, Yeshivish, Hasidic, Haredi, however you would prefer to break them down. So unfortunately, that's not a function that this study can serve for the Orthodox community.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Marsha Belgrad asks, "Older Jews may be less likely to experience anti-Semitism directly because they may live in less diverse communities. Is there evidence to support this?"
Michelle Shain:
Well, we know about regional differences in where Jews live by age. So it's true that the oldest generation of US Jews are more clustered in traditional American Jewish strongholds in the northeast, particularly the New York area, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston. That younger generations have increasingly moved so that their residential patterns more closely mirror those of other Americans. So we see growth in the south and in the west, places like Atlanta and Texas and tremendous growth in California too.
Michelle Shain:
I can't think of any studies off the top of my head that have looked at the religious or ethnic or racial diversity of the neighborhoods in which Jews live by age.
Emily Sigalow:
It's also an interesting question about the diversity of the community and whether that has a relationship on the experiences of anti-Semitism. I'm thinking just about in New York in particular where there's a lot of the experiences of anti-Semitism are in and around Crown Heights. It's not necessarily the diversity of the community, it's actually it's an artifact of community relations and what's going on between neighborhood communities, at least in that particular instance, but...
Michelle Shain:
I mean to your point, yes, we also know from this study that Jews who say that they wear something that marks them distinctively as Jewish, a kippah or some other kind of head covering or a Jewish star, are more likely to say that they experienced anti-Semitism at some point in the 12 months before taking this survey. So my guess is that outwardly identifiable religiosity is going to be a much stronger predictor of experiencing anti-Semitism than diversity of neighborhood.
Emily Sigalow:
I agree.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you, that is super interesting. Joy Levin wants to know if there was as geographical question on the report.
Michelle Shain:
The Pew Research Center has everybody's zip code. Actually, they have everybody's address because this is an address based sample, remember? So they took the post office's list of every single residential address in the United States and they sampled randomly from those. So they do know that information. Obviously they're not going to be able to release that to the public. So they have to be very, very careful when they're releasing the dataset for other researchers to analyze to be sure that everybody is de-identified and couldn't be identified based on what's in there. So the geographic categories that are going to be available for analysis are likely to be large.
Michelle Shain:
In 2013, they gave us census region, which is basically dividing the country into four, northeast, south, mid west and west. If anybody wanted to look into the regional differences further, they would have to speak to Pew about a way to do that that protected all the respondents' privacy.
Emily Sigalow:
Right now in their report, that's how the geography's divided too, is just in those four regions.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Terry Russel asks, "How does the Pew compare to recent surveys done by Jewish communities around the country?" Then I'm also going to add in Linda wants to know how they compare with surveys done in other countries as well.
Michelle Shain:
Dr. Sigalow, do you want to talk about New York?
Emily Sigalow:
So in New York, we're fielding a survey right now but it's not focused on these same kinds of questions. So in order to really compare Pew to other studies done around the country and around the world, the questions would have to be the same so that we could have some means of comparison. Generally, there's not uniformity of questions across all surveys and especially international versus US surveys, but sometimes there are. On this particular items that are the same across studies, it's really interesting to think about what are the local comparisons too? How does St. Louis... oh actually, so let's say Chicago, that just recently fielded a study. How does Chicago look similarly to or different from the national population? In New York, we're fielding currently a study that's really focused on COVID impact. So the questions are much more about the health and human service needs of the community, mental health, poverty, food insecurity, and those sorts of questions. So it's very difficult to, it's impossible to compare that to Pew because we were asking different questions than they're asking.
Michelle Shain:
Also just want to note that the method that Pew used is state of the art, incredible rigorous and incredibly expensive. I don't know the price tag of this project, but it was certainly in the seven figures. To do this kind of addressed based sample of Jews in any small community is typically beyond the reach of that community and the resources that it has to offer. So that's something that Pew really brings to the table as a gift to the Jewish community.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Susan Cohen wants to know if it is reasonable to think the report overstates Jewish engagement since people who are less engaged might be less likely to respond to the initial survey.
Michelle Shain:
Well, so the initial approach letter that people got in the mail had the Pew Research Center's logo but didn't say anything about being Jewish on it. So it was like, hey, we're looking for Jews, come fill this out and tell us if you're Jewish. That would not be a methodologically sophisticated approach. It was just a general doing a social survey of Americans, please come fill this out. I think there was an incentive, I think there were @2 in the envelope, right, Emily? Right, so imagine, you go to your front door and you get a letter and it looks fancy from the Pew Research Center and it has $2 inside and it says, hey, please go to this web link and fill out this survey. You go there and it asks you some random stuff, how do you like your neighborhood and a few other things, and it asks for your race and it asks for your religion. Only at that point, if it's identified you as Jewish, are you pushed into the Jewish survey.
Michelle Shain:
Actually, because screening this way is really expensive, Pew smartly double-dipped. So that same screener, if you identified yourself as black, also pushed you into a survey of black Americans that they published on several months ago. I know the next question is going to be, but wait, that means we lost all the black Jews. No, people who said that they were both Jewish and black, 80% of them got pushed to our survey of Jews, 20% of them got pushed to the survey of black Americans. There was statistical weighting that took care of that problem. But any reluctance on the part of Jews to talk about being Jewish would not have been reflected at the sampling stage.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. Abby Knob asks, "Can you share information on the types of sub reports that we might see coming out of the Pew Study?
Emily Sigalow:
So, hi, Abby. In our New York study, we're instead of producing one large report, we're producing a series of smaller sub reports. But what our Pew colleagues did is actually, they just produced all of the reports together and so everything is available online. I don't know of anything more than is coming out from them, but if you go to their... it's the 2020 report is now uploaded and it actually has a really beautiful virtual presence on their website. If you go to their sidebar, you can see how they have this one long report but then they have the sidebar with... it's what they think of as their sub reports, but it's their topic areas. You can click on their topic areas and go down through it and explore the data by the different themes that they have outlined.
Michelle Shain:
In general, the Pew Research Center doesn't issue subsequent reports unless they're comparing it to something new. So in 2015, the Pew Research Center did a survey of Israeli Jews and reanalyzed some of the data in US Jews to compare, but most of the subsequent analysis you saw in 2013 were done by other scholars in other communal institutions and in other universities who were using the data that Pew generously makes publicly available for free, usually about six months to 12 months after a survey comes out to their own analysis.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you, as I ask this question, I encourage you guys to keep asking questions over the chat. David Farbman asks, "To the organized Jewish community, it feels as if Jews generally, and younger Jews in particular, are leaving Jewish life in droves. This survey suggests such a trend exists, but not to the extent that we might think. Can you speak to this discrepancy between perception and reality?"
Michelle Shain:
Well, so one of the interesting things about the way this study was done is that people who used to be Jews who had a Jewish parent, were raised Jewish, but no longer consider themselves such, were interviewed. You can look at the very last chapter of the report for a bit of an overview about who those people are. So if what you mean by leaving Jewish life is completely stopping identification as Jews, then we can look at those numbers. They're not as large as you might... as your question seems to suggest, but I'm wondering if maybe what you mean is something about engagement with Jewish institutions. Emily, maybe you want to talk about that.
Emily Sigalow:
Yeah, I'm glad to followup on this question too, but I think I read into this like this question about the 40% that are Jews of... why is it that there's 40% of the younger age cohort that are Jews by no religion. But I just think this is actually one of the troubles with that category and the name of that category because I think it suggests something that's not entirely true or accurate. So just because somebody's not a Jew by religion doesn't mean that they have left Jewish life. Actually, there's a lot of interesting and really valuable ways that this group of Jews are engaging with Jewish life and I think Pew did an excellent job of exploring a lot of that nuance in this study.
Emily Sigalow:
All that means when there's that group of Jews not by religion, all it meant is that when they were asked their religion, they didn't indicate Judaism and they selected that they were either atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but also were Jewish in some other way, culturally, by family background, ethnically, et cetera. But it doesn't mean that they have left Jewish life or that are no longer Jewish.
Michelle Shain:
I also want to note that American Jews, young American Jews in this generation are marrying later and having children later than previous generations. That means that, like Dr. Sigalow said earlier, their reentry into institutional Jewish life is also delayed to some extent.
Michelle Shain:
There's a really great sociologist named Robert Wuthnow at Princeton, and he has a book called After the Baby Boomers, which is... those of you who like statistics and are interested in American religion should pick it up, but the point that he makes in that book is that the decline church attendance in America, and here we're talking about all Americans, most of whom are Christians. We're not talking about Jews, but the decline in church attendance in America in the 21st century is 100% completely due to the fact that the youngest generation is marrying later and having children later, full stop. So the age at family formation plays a huge, huge role in institutional engagement.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you. I think this will be our final question from Eric Parker. He says, "Based on the Pew study, it looks like the conservative movement has shrunk at a very significant rate from a generation ago, via the other denominations. What will this mean for the legacy conservative shuls many of which are in historic buildings?"
Emily Sigalow:
Dr. Shain, do you have the 2013 numbers for... do you know that off the top of your head? The percent of US Jews who are conservative? It's 17 now.
Michelle Shain:
I have it open, I will look it up while you're talking.
Emily Sigalow:
Okay, I actually... my memory from '13 to today was that there wasn't actually a strong denominational change from then until now. I think there was a slight decrease. Dr. Shain can give us the exact numbers, but I think-
Michelle Shain:
It was only a few percentage points. I think what you're picking up on is that age gradient.
Emily Sigalow:
The age one, is the 8% in the 18 to 29 who identify as conservative and the 25% who are 65 and older who identify as conservative. What does that say about the conservative movement? I think this is another one of those questions we have to stop for a moment and think about lifecycle effects. That 18 to 29, how somebody identifies in terms the movement when they're between the ages of 18 and 29 is not necessarily how they're going to identify, in terms of the movement when they're older and they have families, so we should expect some change there.
Emily Sigalow:
But that being said, even when this goes up to 30 to 49, only 11% are identifying as the conservative movement. So I think you're right in picking up that there's a decline there within conservative Judaism. I think it's going to have real ramifications for shuls and for organized conservative Jewish life.
Michelle Shain:
This is definitely a difficult report to swallow for the conservative movement, but when you're talking about buildings, I also just want to point out that the experience of a shul that's located in a particular physical location has to do both with the conservative identification of the youngest generation and where they live. So you certainly might have some cities and to some extent the Boston area fits this category, where people left the more central urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s and moved out to the suburbs and built these large, beautiful, conservative shuls, and their children are maybe, maybe not identifying as conservative, but also maybe, maybe not living in those suburban communities. So the physically situated conservative shuls have those two trends to contend with. Identification, as well as movement within geographic areas.
Sarah Bernstein:
Thank you so much for those wonderful answers. Thank you, Dr. Shain and Dr. Sigalow, for taking the time today to speak with us about this report. This was very interesting, I know I learned a lot. Thank you to Brandeis Hillel for organizing this, and please stay tuned for more upcoming virtual conversations from Brandeis Hillel. Have an amazing day.