Building A Federated Framework
By The Numbers
A new census of U.S. Jews will give communities statistical insight on identity.
NEIL RUBIN
Senior Editor
Atlanta
A
24-year-old woman moves
back to her parents' home
while between jobs. Raised
as a Jew, she now practices
Buddhism, or maybe Messianic
Judaism. The telephone rings. "Were
you or anyone else in the house raised
Jewish?" she's asked. "I'm Jewish," she
says, which clues the questioner to
launch into a string of other questions.
Should her responses help shape
critical data from which community
planners could spend hundreds of
millions of dollars to shape American
Jewish life?
Such myriad nuances of modern
American Jewish identity await a
team of demographers and their
staffs. Within six months, they
are to begin asking 90,000
Americans — culling 5,000 Jews
from the mix — to respond to an
elaborately designed questionnaire.
The resulting data will become the
2000 National Jewish Population
Study, a set of data that in the past
has profoundly shaped common
notions of American Jewish identi-
ty. The struggles of preparing for
the effort were on display here last
week during a workshop at the
General Assembly of the United
Jewish Communities.
Sample questionnaires have floated
through organized Jewry in recent
months, resulting in a litany of feed-
back. The final questions are being
completed now Jim Schwartz,
Research Director for UJC, would only
say that the telephone polls will begin
"within the first half of next year."
The studies can have enormous
impact on the American Jewish psy-
che, noted Dr. Conrad Giles. In
1991, the UJC board member from
Detroit chaired the initial presenta-
tion of the 1990 NJPS. Among its
stunning findings: 52 percent of
Jewish marriages were to non-Jews.
"Few planners could really under-
stand the impact that study was going
to have," he said, alluding to the push
for "Jewish continuity" that it initiated.
The new data study will corre-
spond to the year 2000 U.S. census,
meaning that the NJPS data can be
cross-referenced to the population as
a whole, Schwartz said.
One clear struggle: Who is a Jew?
When asked about Messianic Jews,
NJPS team member and University of
Miami professor Ira Sheskin said the
complexity only begins there. The
group, he said, might need to be bro-
ken into subsets: those born Jewish
and those who were not.
"The general rule in all surveys like
this," he added, "is we use people if
they say they are Jewish. But I can tell
you that having interviewed some of
"The general rule
in all surveys like
this is we use
people if they say
they are Jewish."
— Ira Sheskin
these people in their communities,
when I give the community their
population total, we don't include
Jews for Jesus. But we interview them
because, for one thing, I want to
know how many people they are."
But simply getting people to talk is
a major task. "If we call you up and
say, 'We have some questions to ask
you,' you say, 'How long is that going
to take?' and I said, About one and a
quarter hours,' what would you say?"
asked Schwartz.
The average interview of a Jewish
respondent, he said, is likely to be
about half an hour. Depending on
levels of Jewish activity, it could range
from five to 45 minutes.
People have the option of a tele-
phone number to call back later or
setting a telephone appointment for
the questioner to call them back. If
someone questions the veracity of the
effort — hopefully minimized
through an upcoming advertising
campaign and Web site — they will
be given the given the name of a local
university professor or the Jewish fed-
eration. Respondents will remain
anonymous, eliminating fears that the
questionnaire is a federation fund-
raising effort.
Sheskin noted the potential impor-
tance of such studies when describing
how in West Palm Beach, Fla., the
federation had allocated about
$75,000 to deal with single parents.
Shortly after they did a local demo-
graphic survey and learned that only
two respondents were single working
mothers.
Another example of the potential
impact: Other studies show that
Jewish women are having an average
of 1.7 children; a community needs
about 2.1 to replicate itself without
immigrants, said Vivian Klaff, of the
University of Delaware, another
NJPS team member.
"We might find that younger
women were having one or that they
are having 2.3," she said. "And then
we can take the number of children
that women are having and construct
Jewish identities at various times."
The data is sure to disappoint
some, said Donald Kent, vice presi-
dent, development and marketing for
UJC. "For any individual community
there's unlikely to be enough data,"
he said. "People want to know exactly
what it means to me and my commu-
nity. This will not replace the local
studies, but it certainly provides a
backdrop.
Sheskin noted that in 1990, the
team asked if anyone in the home
had a gambling problem. "No one
did, not one," he said. "So can we ask
about domestic abuse and get an hon-
est answer? No. So there are things
that you are just not going to get
from this because it is imperfect."
There can be some humorous results
as well, he added. During a study for
the St. Petersburg, Fla., Jewish commu-
nity, he asked, "Is anyone in the house-
hold married to a Jew?" The answer:
"Fifty people here are all married to a
Jew. It's a convent."
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