Americas Jews

8. Denominational Patterns, Jewish Education, and Immigration

8. Denominational Patterns, Jewish Education, and Immigration In the era of the second-generation community, as discussed in Chapter 3, social class and time of arrival in the United States were highly significant variables in the denominational structure of American Jewry. The general pattern was for those of upper-class status and longest length of time in the country to be associated with Reform Judaism, middle-class Jews with Conservative Judaism, and workingclass and lower-class Jews and those in the country for the shortest amount of time with Orthodox Judaism. Thus in the third generation, Conservative Judaism was the largest, Reform second, and Orthodox the smallest of the three major branches of American Judaism (Reconstructionism, an offshoot of Conservative Judaism founded by Mordecai M. Kaplan, has only recently developed an autonomous institutional structure and is not quite yet a branch in its own; see Kaplan, 1934; Miller, 1969; Liebman, 1970). In their analysis of data from the 1970 National Jewish Population Study, Lazerwitz and Harrison found Reform affiliates to include fewer foreign born and more third-generation Americans than Conservative affiliates, and they found Orthodox to include the largest percentage of foreign born. Socioeconomic differences between the denominations remain, but they are considerably smaller than in the past (Lazerwitz and Harrison, 1979). In analyzing the affiliations of American Jews, Lazerwitz found that as of 1971, 11 percent identified with Orthodox, 42 184 percent with Conservative, 33 percent with Reform, and 14 Denominational Pal/erns, Education, Immigration 185 percent had no denominational identification. With respect to membership, about 50 percent of American Jews were synagogue members (Lazerwitz, 1979). Lazerwitz's data are from the National Jewish Population Study of 1970; thus, significantly , the synagogue membership rate has dropped rather dramatically from that which Sklare and Greenblum found in Lakeville, a community assumed to be representative of American Jewish communities of the future. Whereas Sklare and Greenblum found that approximately 66 percent of their respondents were synagogue members, in shortly more than a decade later the data indicate that membership had dropped to 50 percent. It also seems reasonable to assume that the rate of synagogue membership has declined even further since 1970. When generation was held constant, Lazerwitz found that significantly different affiliational patterns emerged between foreign-born American Jews and those with both parents having been native born. The Orthodox declined from 26 percent among foreign born to 3 percent among native born; the Conservative declined from 47 percent among foreign born to 30 percent among native born; and Reform rose from 14 percent among foreign born to 41 percent among native born. In support of the previous suggestion that synagogue membership has declined even further since 1970, note that those with no denominational identity rose from 13 to 26 percent (ibid.). While not all those with no denominational identity are necessarily nonmembers in synagogues, the data do support the assumption of a break with previous affiliational and membership patterns. On the basis of data from both the National Jewish Population Study and the 1965 survey of the Jewish community of Greater Boston, Lazerwitz predicted that in the foreseeable future the Orthodox will decline further and become a very small denomination of only a few percentage points. The Conservatives, too, will decline because of the decline of the Orthodox, who were a major source of new members for the Conservatives, and also because of some loss to the Reform branch, which will probably become the largest branch of American Judaism (ibid.). There does seem to be an incongruence, however, 186 America's Jews in Transilion between these data and predictions and various as yet unquantified manifestations of a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism throughout the 1970s, as was discussed above (Chapter 5, near the end). Also whether the National Jewish Population Study included a reliable sample of sectarian Orthodox is questionable (Liebman, 1965, pp. 67-85). Rightwing Orthodox, such as those affiliated with the Eastern European advanced yeshivas, with Agudath IsraeL or the various sects of Hasidism, who-as mentioned before-have a considerably higher birthrate than the rest of American Jewry are probably much more resistant to responding to polls, questionnaires, and interviews, especially when conducted by those outside their own communities. On the other hand, Himmelfarb suggests that the impressions of a resurgence of Orthodoxy may, in reality, merely be the result of Orthodoxy 's increased wealth and greater organizational sophistication and institutional proliferation, even while...