Jewish Community Studies in the Twenty-First Century

The Berman Jewish Data Bank contains around two hundred local Jewish population survey data sets, an investment of millions of dollars in Jewish communal funds. In an effort to encourage greater use of this resource I (1) discuss what local studies can be used for that national studies cannot and (2) consider some new directions for local studies.

Unique attributes of local studies:

1) Local studies can track Jewish residential patterns over time, investigate the fate of Jewish “inner-ring” suburbs and see whether Jews are moving back into cities. Working with the datasets directly allows for the creation of more useful analytic geographies as in Los Angeles and Chicago.

2) Community surveys can be used to study the community itself as a variable; for example, the impact of community size, region, and growth as factors that predict communal engagement.

New directions for local studies:

1) The Jewish Federations of North America will no longer sponsor national surveys, so demographers will have to once again depend on local studies.

2) Studies are heavily policy driven and thus of less interest to researchers interested in academic publishing. I discuss some ways to add more theory to local studies as well as identifying those studies that have such content.