Jewish Baby Boomers: A Communal Perspective (review)

The task for Chaim I. Waxman in Jewish Baby Boomers: A Communal Perspective is to transmute anecdote on the first post-Holocaust generation of American Jews into data; and to translate those data—from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS)—into a picture that has coherence and clarity. It is commonplace by now, a decade and more since the NJPS, to note and bemoan the data that gave American Jewish leadership heartburn and worse: the 52 percent intermarriage statistic (although there are very few serious social scientists who accept this number); the substantial number of individuals in the "Jews of Other Religion" category; and, most significant in the view of this observer, the range of data that led to the recognition that Jewish identity, heretofore linked for the most part to scoring on Jewish-identity measures ("The 'more,' the 'more'," in Paul Ritterband's trenchant locution), now comes in many "packages"—ethnic, social, political, as well as religious.¹

But what about the distinctive—indeed crucial—post-World-War-II generation? By 1990 baby-boomers comprised fully one-third of the general American population; Jewish baby- boomers—the first post-Holocaust generation, and the first to grow up after the establishment of the State of Israel—surely merit attention as a discrete and significant group.

Chaim I. Waxman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Rutgers and one of the more canny observers of American Jewish life, draws on the data from the 1990 NJPS on baby- boomers—Jews between 26 and 44 years of age at the time of the NJPS data collection. Waxman does a comparative analysis of the baby-boomers with the preceding generation of American Jews, as well as with baby-boomers from other faith communities. Chaim Waxman is less interested in the traditional concerns of social scientists—family, education, occupation—than he is in the arena that has been the main source of Jewish communal angst over the past decade: identity, and the implications of identity for Jewish survival.² He analyzes in depth the demographics, family patterns, religion, and ethnicity of the baby-boomers. Patterns emerge, particularly in the arenas of religion and ethnicity. The findings: weaker ties with the Jewish community than those of the previous generation, largely symbolic religiosity, and the linkage of functional literacy in Judaism with the degree of Jewish identification. These findings are hardly surprising, but they are noteworthy. The implications of Waxman's NJPS analysis are immediately apparent in terms of Jewish communal policy. They are obverse sides of the same coin of continuity: lower rates of communal identification are a matter of deep concern; Jewish education and Jewish functional literacy, however, are indicators of deepening communal ties.

Waxman's data are significant; his findings are important; his conclusions are on the mark; his speculations eminently reasonable. But these are not the reason this book is valuable. Jewish Baby Boomers is a contribution because Waxman does in this book what he does as well or better than anyone in his field: he sets a context; more accurately, he develops a series of contexts, that illumine alike for the professional historian and social scientist and for the casual "lay" reader a broad range of issues.

Especially strong in this regard is Waxman's analysis of American Jewish religion and ethnicity, and of the place of religion in the world of the baby-boomers. In his two chapters on "The Jewishness of Jewish Baby Boomers" Waxman parses carefully the data, which tell us how the baby-boomers define themselves religiously (they do define themselves as a distinct religious group) even as there are questions about their religious practices (they don't, in large measure, "practice"). Indeed, religion tells us much about how the baby-boomers behave sociologically: they pick and choose those behaviors that they can accept without too much "pain" and which they can...