Pew Research Study of American Jews, 2021

Pew has nothing to do with Forward, they do respectable polls of US population.

Of course, numbers are skewed based on who they count as Jews, given intermarriage rate in previous generations, nebach. So, now “75%” includes many legit marriages between two upstanding bnei Noach who are confused to think they are Jewish. Maybe, we can, l’tzad schus, think of Reform as a bnei Noach movement. Although, they may be struggling with ever min hachai from the time of the treife banquet …

We also need to downgrade 7.5 to some actual number, making Israel a place of most Jews (I presume Israel uses halachik definition in their count excluding non-Jews who came under the law of return).

But the bottom line from Pew is that:
R- intermarries dramatically
C- ages and has no children
O- world grows fast, but organically only. Not many switches from R, C to O, despite Chabad and yeshivot for BTs, and Kars for Kids heroic efforts …
maybe someone can look and compare changes between denominations in previous Pew reports.
I skipped “unaffiliated” here, don’t know how to analyze them

you can probably use Pew numbers of intermarriage going back to the 50s to model what percentage of people they ask are actually Jewish.

AAQ: I know of people who call themselves Orthodox Jews who do not keep kosher except at home, and keep Shabbos only because of their wives and kids. It’s a terrible statistic these days, but they exist. My sister had a neighbor IN WILLIAMSBURG who told them that he eats at McDonald’s all the time, and only builds a sukkah because of his wife and kids. Plus people in Williamsburg know of others like that, and I’m sure Williamsburg is not exceptional. For these people, the geshmak has left Yiddishkeit, sadly.

motcha11,

I am aware of this unfortunate reality.

But those people are not orthodox. They PRETEND to be orthodox, just as they PRETEND to keep kosher.

If they admit that they don’t actually keep kosher, they are admitting that they are not actually orthodox.

Anyone who claims to be orthodox must claim to keep kosher.

The poll honestly just feel extremely inaccurate, and I’m guessing the biggest cause for the faulty proportions is them included tons of non-Jews as others have pointed out.

Only 10% of Jews live in the midwest? The region which includes Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati, etc. There’s no way it has less than half of the “west” which is basically just LA and San Francisco, or the “south” which is basically just Florida.

If 75% of non-Orthodox Jews marry goyim, then at least half of those are producing non-Jewish kids. The proportions of non-Orthodox young people are being massively overestimated.

I don’t understand.

These polls are generally about what people whoare part of a certain segment of society are doing/thinking/etc. If someone is part of an Orthodox Shul and drives on Shabbos to eat in a Burger KIng, then for the purposes of this survey he is Orthodox.

In general, I feel that there is a lot of denial about what goes on in full in a community.

@MenachemSchmei
Re: what makes them orthodox(they are not observant)?

For most of the 20th century Jews in America self identified or were counted based on the ‘denomination’ of the synagogue the grew up in or (still) belonged to.
Many members worked on Shabbos, ate treif, and didn’t perform most Mitzvah. But, they showed up on the Yomin Noraim, perhaps parking a block from shul and their dues kept the congregation functioning. By the 1990s many ‘orthodox’ synagogues had majority of members living in the suburbs and not frum. The shul functioned with the remnant of the members who remained in the old neighborhoods. Other synagogues moved to the right and Euro-traditional Jews no longer felt comfortable and if not needing cemetery privileges (a very OOT system) stopped paying dues. But if they didn’t join a non-orthodox synagogue they would self-identify as orthodox.
The 21st century is a whole new ball game in terms of self identification. So many synagogues have folded. Here in CT I know of 8 orthodox synagogues that were founded between 1882 and 1920 that could no longer function. The buildings were taken over by Chabad(torahs and all) and while the liturgy and ritual may be orthodox, the assorted people who show up to Shabbos Services at 10 am are not what you or I would consider orthodox. No daily minyan exists, but those people who frequent the establishments will label themselves orthodox if asked.

Dear CTL,

The polling does not back up your statement. Though face to face conversations do. So I don’t know. But nobody I know switched their preference to the Democrats.

@n0mesorah

Nowhere did I state people switched their preference to the Democrats. I stated that many who were supportive of Trump no longer are.
I am the lone D in my daily minyan. The rest all voted for Trump in 2020. Many have said they didn’t not support his effort to be elected in 2024. Many feel his actions in trying to overturn the Georgia results and January 6 warrant prison time. They all reman Rs.

“If you really go into the sticks down south”
I have.

“you would see what real hatred is.”
Not really. Pre-2016, it truly wasn’t a big issue. In NYC, however, there has always been a massive amount of Antisemitism that people seem to just tolerate. You’re much more likely to see “real hatred” there than anywhere else.

“I thought the point of these surveys are to understand the makeup of Jewish Communities. As in what the people are actually like. Not what the definitions are. I feel lost on this thread.”

If a poll was designed to give you insights on the Black community, but 50% of the people they polled were just White people who choose to identify as Black, would that really be very educational? I get it, a secular institution will consider someone Jewish if there paternal grandfather was, but if they’re going to ask about intermarriage anyway, it seems like they could have asked responders which of there parents was Jewish so that we could end up with a statistic like “blank % of American Jews have non-Jewish mothers” to put it in perspective. Otherwise, we’re just guessing here and the results seem kind of meaningless.

SACT5:
Thanks for looking into it. Given that all the “not in top ten” cities are in the midwest, if you add them to Chicago, it massively beats out the South and gets very close to the west. I can believe that the west beats out the midwest, just not by as much as this poll claimed.

Akuperma is right about the confusion.

CTL

Thanks for explaining the history with the denominations.

By the way, I loved how you said that he disapproves of the politics but not the person. I’m going to use that.

On 5% of Orthodox Jews not keeping Kosher: I can think of several possible explanations.
1 is as several have suggested, orthoprax people from orthodox families and/or communities who don’t believe themselves and may sneak off to eat at McDonalds or whatever.
2 there is a type of traditional Jew more common amongst Israeli Sefardim than here who know that the Torah is true, but don’t really practice a fully frum lifestyle themselves.
3 there are baalei teshuva and people converting to Judaism who might, for want of a more accurate option, list themselves as orthodox but who are still working on gradually improving their observance of Mitzvos.
4 there are frum Jews who believe in Torah and want to keep mitzvos but may have succumbed to the yetzer hara. I wish I was perfect.

I say orthoprax, because many of these people will openly act as if they are practicing while at home or in their community but will go off to do other stuff when alone. So strictly speaking you can take issue with the term orthoprax if you want. Would you prefer the term ‘sometimes pretends to be frum, but willingly violates kashrus and other mitzvos when unobserved?’

I can think of one particular man I knew who was a member of a Chassishe family and stayed a respected person in his community, but would sneak off to very non-kosher strip clubs from time to time.

I agree that some people will leave orthodoxy and don’t go anywhere else, but those I’ve heard of probably wouldn’t identify as orthodox anymore. More likely as unaffiliated/none.

Very interesting, but how many of those Jewish mothers were halachicly Jewish? especially amongst the the unaffiliated.

People are human, everyone has sins. That’s why we have communal confessions on Yom Kippur. I have yet to hear of an orthodox shul where they say, oh we skip that part since obviously no one among us has sinned.

Just my view, but I’ve never liked the labels Orthodox, Conservative, & Reform for people. They are affiliations for synagogues or organization. People are Jewish. They can be more or less observant/frum. You can say you grew up in or belong to an O/C/R shul, but even individuals within the same family and over the course of their lives have varying levels of observance.
Here’s a few examples of why I think O/C/R as individual labels don’t work.
There’s a Refom (non-congregational) Rabbi who reads Torah weekly at a local Modern Orthodox shul where I believe he is a member. What is he? Reform? Orthodox?
(Reform + Orthodox)/2= Conservative?
No, he is Jewish.
My friend had a Jewish father and Christian mother, he was Baptized in the church and had a Bar Mitzvah at a Reform synagogue. What is he? A Reform Jew? No, not Jewish.
My friend was ‘raised Conservative,’ he married a non-Jewish woman, they have children, everyone in the home keeps kosher. What are they? One lonely Jew.
Someone who was ‘raised Orthodox’ but no longer is observant? He is Jewish.
A BT or FFB? They are Jewish.
When the little boy at religious school drop-off asks me skeptically if we are Jewish since our family is visibly less observant than others, I say without qualifiers, yes we are Jewish.

“In NYC, however, there has always been a massive amount of Antisemitism that people seem to just tolerate.”
I think it gets lost within the general violence of a big city. Not going to be front page news over yesterday’s 75 other crimes. In a small town where Jews are rare and crime is rarer its more likely to make headlines.

Also being from OOT I feel the need to clarify this statement, edited