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c h a p t e r 8 How Jewishness is Related to Gendered Patterns of Secular Achievement We saw in the preceding chapter that Jewishness is related to variation in family behavior, and we were able to isolate some particular elements of Jewishness that are related to such variation. The most striking variation is that the family behavior of Orthodox Jews is very different from that of the other denominational groups, and we could trace some of the reasons for this difference. The difference could be explained partly by demographic features (such as age and age at marriage) and partly by strength of religious Jewish identity, expressed by the Orthodox in their commitment to halachic ritual and religious belief. Family situation also seemed to be closely related to affiliation or lack thereof. In this chapter we turn to secular achievement—education, labor force participation, occupational achievement, and occupational rewards (occupational prestige, annual earnings)—and again ask whether any of the patterns of secular achievement are related to different expressions of “Jewishness .” In Chapters 3 to 5, we considered whether Jewish secular achievement patterns were distinct from those of the broader U.S. population. Here we ask whether Jewish secular achievement varies in ways that are consonant with different expressions of Jewishness, as presented in Chapter 6. By focusing on this relationship, we address the question of whether investment in Jewish “cultural capital,” “religious capital,” “ethnic capital,” or “social capital” might be related to patterns of secular achievement. The literature that has linked the high educational and occupational achievement of Jews to “cultural particularity” and Jewish social networking (summarized in Burstein, 2007) suggests that there is a link between at least certain aspects of Jewish identity and educational and economic achievement. Hurst and Mott (2006) suggest that men and women who have “moderate” Jewish religious connections and behaviors (as opposed to connections that are extremely particularistic or observant, on the one hand, or extremely secular, 172 jewishness and secular achievement 173 on the other) have higher secular achievement. In this chapter we hope to shed further light on this relationship and the patterns of gender (in)equality in educational and labor force achievement. We build on our earlier research based on the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (Hartman and Hartman, 1996a, 1996b). In this work, we found that Jewishness was related to higher education among both men and women, but that the relationship between labor force activity and Jewishness differed for men and women. Married Jewish men tended to work longer hours, as providers; married Jewish women curtailed their labor force participation and consequently had lower occupational achievement: Apparently Jewish involvement, because of the Jewish familial orientation, increases the gender differentiation in the family, which in turn affects the relationship between gender and labor force participation. This gender differentiation in turn affects occupational achievement. Jewishness, however, is not directly related to labor force participation or to occupational achievement; that is, there seem to be no proscriptions of women’s secular achievement, only a positive value attached to family life, which has its own effect on secular achievement . (Hartman and Hartman, 1996a, pp. 247–48) Inquiry into the relationship between secular behavior and Jewishness is important not only from a Jewish standpoint, but in terms of understanding the role that religion and ethnicity play more generally in contemporary society. Although the classical “secularization thesis,” which posited a decline of religion in the contemporary world, has largely been debunked, the interpretation of secularization as a disjunction between religion and secular behavior, especially in the public arena, has to a greater extent been validated (see discussions in Christiano, Swatos, and Kivisto, 2002, ch. 3, and Furseth and Repstad, 2006, ch. 5). Yet it too has been plagued by contradictions , such as the impact of religion on politics, and religion’s impact on gender roles in the economy. Although with our data set we cannot uncover the mechanisms of influence, we can determine the extent to which the secular and religious or ethnic arenas are related for American Jews. Furthermore , we can determine whether it is the “private” or “public” expressions of Jewish identity that are more strongly related to public economic behavior. Because we have separate measures of ethnic and religious identity, we can also address the question of whether religious or ethnic Jewish identity has a stronger relation to secular achievement. Because of secularization, it may be that religious identity has less to do with secular achievement than does ethnic...

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