Jewish Community Studies in the United States: A Twenty-First-Century Approach

American Jewish life is undergoing rapid change, and so too are the methods needed to understand Jewish communities. For more than half a century, communal policy in the U.S. has been guided by scientific surveys conducted in local Jewish communities. But these studies are increasingly difficult to conduct and, unlike election polls and surveys done in countries that collect census data about religion, there is no reliable comparison to assess accuracy. This lecture will describe a multi-method approach to local surveys designed to provide veridical data that can be used to enhance communal decision-making. The methods include data aggregation from general purpose surveys that assess religious identify and Jewish-focused surveys of multiple frames that assess characteristics of the population, their attitudes, and the ways in which Jews they engage with their Jewish identity. The approach cross-validates estimates and tries to ensure that Jews who identify with Judaism as a religion, as well as those who are secular, are included. Along with outlining the sampling methods and the way in which Jewish identity is assessed, the presentation will also consider how data are analyzed and used to describe diverse patterns of engagement with Jewish life. Examples from several recently conducted community studies will be provided. Although there has been skepticism about the ability of social researchers to provide the Jewish community with reliable data, the presentation will argue that state-of-the-art methods can be adapted by the Jewish communal researchers to provide useful policy-relevant understandings of contemporary Jewish life