https://religionnews.com/2021/05/11/pew-research-study-young-jews-are-moving-to-polar-ends-secularism-and-orthodoxy/

It's an article with numbers and bar graphs, so I was like a kid in clover. :). Not much surprising. The same thing is happening in Judaism, particularly among the youth, that is happening in other religions in the US. It is nice, however, to have actual poll data and real numbers, instead of our gut feelings about what is happening.

Reform and Conservative sound like the Jewish equivalent of mainline Christian denominations. They are holding steady. Orthodox Judaism is growing some, and "no religion" is growing faster.

There are about 7.5 million people (adults and children) who identify as Jewish. Of those, 27% claim no religion. Sounds to me like they are roughly the same as the number of people in the US who identify as Mormon.

I wonder how many Mormons identify as Mormons by descent, but not by belief? Mormons really haven't been around long enough to feel a sense of being an ethnic group, in spite of their high level of cohesiveness. Maybe eventually.


I'm hoping, and in fact fully expect that the same trend toward secularism is happening among LDS young people.

Yeah. I have a dream.

I have "always" (since I was, at that time, a NON-Jewish seventh grader at Sutter Junior High School) been interested in these questions--and my interest back then was most particularly prompted by a fellow classmate, who corrected my assumption about her Jewish heritage.

At that time, I had no understanding that there are an enormous variety of Jewish "peoples," and a huge spectrum of all things Jewish (led off by religion and food), and I assumed that my classmate was a Jew like my Uncle Benny was a Jew, which to me meant (although I didn't know these words at that time) that he was Ashkenazi. (Ashkenazi Jews are the best-known Jews to non Jews: they are the descendants of Jewish settlers in Western Germany and Northern France who date back, primarily, to the Middle Ages. Today's Ashkenazi Jews are identified with their European ancestors who later spread across most of Eurasia (including Slavic lands), and who--as their "Jewish language"-- speak Yiddish.)

She immediately corrected me and said "I'm not that kind of Jew!"--which was very confusing to me (I didn't know there was any other "kind" of Jew than my Uncle Benny.) She explained that she was Sephardi (a word I had never heard before), and that HER ancestors were Jews who came originally from the Middle East and North Africa, and that her family had come to the United States from Salonika (in northern Greece). [Sephardi Jews also include the Jews of Spain and Portugal, including their now enormous numbers of descendants, who colonized the Western Hemisphere beginning in the 1400s]. The most common daily language of Sephardi Jews is Ladino, which is mostly a spin-off of Spanish, and also Portuguese (to a lesser extent), with a bunch of Hebrew added, in what could be conceptualized as Jewish "seasoning." ;)

There are many OTHER "kinds" of Jews, too--and they come in all colors and from a wide variety of ancestral traditions (from Africa since Biblical times, from the Arabian Peninsula, from Asia, etc.).

This article is mostly about Ashkenazi ("German"-descended, mostly) Jews, so be aware that there is an enormous body of Jews--the Sephardim and the Africans and those of Arab ancestry, to begin with--who don't appear to be represented in these studies.

The second thing to be aware of is that there is an enormous spectrum of "Orthodox" Judaism alive and well in not only the Western World, but around the world.

On the American (and also the primarily English-speaking, like in the U.K.) left are the Modern Orthodox, which most non-Jews would likely, at a glance, not realize were Orthodox. What they wear is seen on any normal, average, American street everyday. Males may wear a small kipah, and females may not be wearing bikinis anytime soon, but a given average American is unlikely to be able to pick out the "clues" a Jew would notice. Most Modern Orthodox are "invisible" as Jews to most American non-Jews.

On the other, "right," side of contemporary Orthodox Jewish spectrum are the men who have "ringlets" hanging down in front of their ears, they have tzit-tzit (tassels) hanging out from around their beltline [Google: tzit-tzit for pictures and explanations], they wear not only a kippah (Jewish "beanie"), but a male hat (often a very dramatic fur hat) OVER their kippahs--and most all of them will never touch a woman (other than their wife, daughters, and grandmothers) even to shake hands.

Between those two extremes are a sometimes amazing variety of everyday Orthodox Jewish "worlds"--and the individual, inner, personal, beliefs of "this" "kind" of Jew are often as varied as their various outside appearances.

What this article calls "secularism": I'm not sure this is the optimum word when applied to contemporary Jews and contemporary Judaism. There is, in fact, also a huge spectrum of belief and of dis-belief within contemporary Jewish "secularism."

Case in point: A significant number of contemporary Jews are expressing their personal religious views through paths of vegetarianism and veganism (Tel Aviv is, today, "the most vegan metropolitan area on the planet"), working for justice and appropriate rights for not just humans of all kinds (Jews and non-Jews alike), but also for non-human animals, rather than primarily through what are traditionally and usually considered "religious activities."

I don't know how to adequately explain this, but many Jews are expressing their Jewishness and their Jewish beliefs through BOTH secularism AND religion (religious study; prayer; "good works,") all simultaneously. I think it is this group that is being described as "young Jews" in this article--though this group includes Jews from all age categories.

When I converted to Judaism, I grabbed the first opportunity I felt I had ever had in my life to become a Jew, and it turned out that the avenue I connected with was the Conservative movement (which, I later found out, allowed me to convert so well, according to Jewish law, that my conversion would be accepted by the authorities in Israel, should I ever have any need to prove my Judaism by having that kind of official paperwork).

In my daily life, I am betwixt and between right now, which is why reading this article had such an impact on me--I think I may be, right now, more or less an example of what this article is talking about.

Judaism as a whole is about far more than most non-Jews consider when they think of the category of "religious."

I lived through the Civil Rights Era in U.S. history (I was a vehement Civil Rights-supporting youngster in a largely extremely right-wing, segregation-supporting, formerly KKK, and earlier than that: an actual slave-holding, family in Kentucky), and today feels a lot like "life" felt back then, when I was growing up.

I think this article may be the first "announcement" that similar, deep and wide-ranging, changes are already underway within Judaism--no matter WHAT "kind" of Jew a given Jew may have been born, or may appear to "be," today.

From this article, I think that people (probably non-Jews much more than Jews) are confused (for good reason), because they can't yet understand what is REALLY going on.

"Interesting things" (most especially concerning science and scientific discoveries) ARE going on--throughout much of the entire spectrum of Jewish belief and Jewish peoplehood.

Stay tuned.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/13/2021 12:31PM by Tevai.

I grew up "mormon". In my mind, I'm a tribal mormon, even if the tribe doesn't want me.

F--k the ass----- who are steering that ship into the shoals.

I got plenty of popcorn !!!