Cont Jewry (2015) 35:109–128 DOI 10.1007/s12397-015-9141-6

American Jewishness Today: Identity and Transmissibility in an Open World Marshall Sklare Award Lecture Sylvia Barack Fishman1

Received: 17 March 2015 / Accepted: 11 May 2015 / Published online: 25 June 2015  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract Three challenges to Jewish family formation—late marriage and nonmarriage, unwanted low fertility and infertility, and mixed marriage—are produced, in part, by the larger society’s social norms and deeply influenced by American culture. Each of these challenges, in turn, has a profound effect on the transmission of Jewish culture to the next generations. Jewish population density and social circles, including the family, are critical predictors of Jewish identity in adulthood; since the majority of American Jews do not live in densely Jewish neighborhoods, the Jewish engagement of the family of origin and Jewish education are the primary socializing agents for Jewish adulthood. Jews in the past have frequently established Jewish connections when they married and became parents, but today’s younger Jewish adults often value ‘‘finding themselves’’ over establishing families. Adult Jewish engagements are often delayed in tandem with marital status. Demands of community seem less pressing than personal spiritual searches, and this preeminence of individualized spiritual searches is not limited to moderately involved Jews, but is also characteristic of some highly involved younger American Jews. These patterns among American Jews are part of broader American patterns of changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, love, and marriage on family formation beginning in the 1960s. Like delayed marriage and parenthood, intermarriage is enthusiastically supported by the wider American culture. Thus, resisting these trends which undermine cultural transmission demands dynamic countercultural interventions. Keywords Jewish late marriage
Jewish infertility
Jewish intermarriage
Jewish identity & Sylvia Barack Fishman [email protected] 1

Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Mailstop 054, Waltham, MA 02454, USA

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Introduction: Beyond the Jew Within My mentor and teacher, Marshall Sklare, of blessed memory, was fascinated by the influence of social and cultural norms on individual behavior. Half a century ago, in his influential pioneering Lakeville study, ‘‘The Image of the Good Jew in Lakeville,’’ (Sklare 1967), he argued that broader American culture shapes individual Jews’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. This tension between understanding ‘‘Jewish identity’’ as a personal, individual experience on one hand, and as a social experience on the other hand, is at the heart of this paper. ‘‘I am not a typical Jew!’’ declare Jews I have interviewed—across denominational and chronological lines, younger and older, near Haredi to unaffiliated. But the characteristics that they cite to demonstrate their atypicality are actually quite typical. For example, ‘‘I’m not a typical Jew—I spend much more time and money on—the opera, or the soup kitchen—than on Hadassah or Federation or other Jewish causes.’’ Actually, American Jews, on the whole, devote more time and money to non-Jewish than to Jewish causes (National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01). But that image of the typical ‘‘tribal’’ Jew is persistent: a straw man against which many American Jews contrast and measure themselves. In emphasizing their independence, American Jews articulate a popular American value. Americans love to think of themselves as rugged individualists. The song, ‘‘My Way,’’ made famous by Frank Sinatra and subsequently sung by lounge lizards across America, extolled the virtues of independence; it became so much of an American cliche´ that it was a musical joke. Many Americans do not wish to perceive themselves as being influenced by friends, families, and communal expectations, but they are very much influenced both by the values and behaviors of their social networks (Christakis and Fowler 2009). Similarly, Charles Kadushin, Shaul Kelner, and others have shown us how both strong and weak networks have a profound impact on individual behavior, often unperceived by the individuals involved (Kadushin 2011; Kelner 2002, 2010). There is a crisis in American Jewish life today, and that crisis is manifested within social circles and social norms. Physical proximity—population density— continues to be one of the best predictors of Jewish connectedness—Jews who live close to many Jews and have mostly Jewish social circles are more Jewishly connected (Hartman and Sheskin 2011). However, for at least 30 years the vast majority do not live in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jewish mobility has often taken Jews away from centers of Jewish population (Goldstein and Goldstein 1996). Fewer Jews live in the densely Jewish neighborhoods which once characterized American Jewish life and many of today’s Jewish ‘‘neighborhoods’’ hardly qualify as ethnic communities. This is a wonderful development in many ways, and it speaks volumes about Jewish integration into the larger fabric of American life. However, not living in a coherent community with physical proximity complicates the natural, effortless transmission of social capital. A substantial number of American Jews reside in the ‘‘borderlands,’’ to use Steven M. Cohen’s evocative phrase (2012), in terms of their Jewish connectedness as well as their geographic residence.

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Without geographical proximity to a Jewish community, the family grouping is key. Many American Jews have few unifying ethnoreligious experiences, except within the family of origin, tight and loose friendship circles, and adult nuclear and extended families. If—with the weakening of Jewish neighborhoods—the family is today’s primary social group that socializes young Jews, it is critical to understand Jewish family construction and the disruptions that have changed patterns of family formation for many Americans and for many American Jews (Fishman 2015). Those changes in family formation are intricately tied to disruptions in transmissible Jewish culture to the next generations, disruptions highlighted in the recent Pew Portrait of Jewish Americans (Lugo et al. 2013). While the sky may not ‘‘be falling’’ (Saxe 2014), Pew and other recent studies show that the Jewish family—the primary social circle of contemporary American Jews—is being challenged in three major intersecting ways, and we had better pay attention. (1) (2)

(3)

First, outside of Haredi societies, marriages and committed partnerships occur later—and sometimes not at all (Fishman and Cohen 2015). Second, for Jewish women and men who wish to have children, childbearing is often further postponed, and the overall American Jewish birth rate has fallen (DellaPergola 2015; Shain 2015), along with the birth rate of other Americans who resemble Jews socioeconomically and educationally (Cherlin 2005; Henig 2010; Nock 2000). The third challenge to the formation of Jewish families is marriage between Jews and non-Jews in which couples do not decide to create unambiguously Jewish homes. I’m going to use the shorthand term ‘‘mixed marriage’’ for such homes, because they are homes in which there are mixed ethnoreligious cultural messages.

On the plus side, a fabulous model of spousal Jewish partnership marriages is flourishing in America today. ‘‘Partnership’’ marriages are what I’m calling marriages in which heterosexual or homosexual spouses share meaningful work outside the home, child-rearing, and household tasks (Gerson 2010; Sandberg and Grant 2015). Partnership marriages give both spouses room to grow and develop as human beings. But there are too few of these marriages, and they are initiated at an age in which it is difficult for spouses to achieve their own goals for parenthood. From the mid-1990s onward Robert Putnam and others asserted that American social networks and ‘‘informal ties of all sorts were unraveling,’’ that familism and communalism were declining, and that ‘‘Americans were becoming an ever more isolated’’ collection of individuals. The ‘‘social capital’’ created by societies—and transmitted to the next generation—is related to willingness among members of those societies to serve that society and to sacrifice individual preferences when necessary. American Jews are illustrative of Putnam’s warning that when societies become more diverse, not only social capital but also ‘‘civic virtue,’’ ‘‘civic engagement,’’ and ‘‘civic health’’ can be disrupted (Putnam 2000, 2007). Echoing Putnam, Riv-Ellen Prell cogently argues that today Jewish ‘‘unraveling has accelerated at a pace that was hard to grasp fully even twenty years ago,’’ and that ‘‘younger Jews have rejected the idea of ethnic solidarity’’ (Prell 2014). The

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distancing of younger Jews from particularistic Jewish civic engagement is influenced by the multicultural diversity of their surroundings, and the Jewish embrace of that very diversity. As Jews increasingly experience the world as individuals, rather than as members of a group, individual experiences, roles, and connections take prominence. Bethamie Horowitz certainly expanded scholarly understanding of Jewish identity in her demonstrations of changing and evolving Jewish connections over the course of a life cycle. When American Jews share the narratives of their Jewish life ‘‘connections and journeys,’’ when Jews talk about how they ‘‘do Jewish’’ (Horowitz 2003, p. 9), they emphasize the individual self that Steven M. Cohen and Arnie Eisen called ‘‘the Jew within’’ (Cohen and Eisen 2000). Today, seeing one’s own Jewish life as an individualized spiritual search is not limited to moderately involved Jews, but is also characteristic of many of the most involved younger American Jews. Three years ago I published a study conducted with Emily Sigalow and Rachel Bernstein on attitudes and behaviors of young Jewish leaders (Fishman et al. 2011). More recently I had the opportunity, along with Steve Bayme, Steven Cohen, and Jack Wertheimer, to participate in a consultation with young American Jewish leaders (11/19/2014). Both the systematic study interviews and the recent consultation included conversations with highly educated, highly committed young Jews in their 20s and 30s who have chosen to devote their lives to Jews and Jewishness. I want to share with you a few statements culled from both sources, which I believe articulate some typical contemporary American Jewish values: 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

‘‘Why do you worry about survival? Jewish identity dynamics change over time… [You researchers] try to numerate our souls, to quantify us…I want to focus on: How are American Jews Jewish?’’ ‘‘Survival is the golden calf of Judaism. We are so obsessed with survival that we forget what it is we want to survive.’’ ‘‘Isn’t tribalism at the root of what is in essence social engineering, and isn’t this the root of ethnocentric violence?’’ ‘‘I am 31 years old and I’m probably getting engaged soon. Then we will probably wait a while to have children…I would not trade for anything the decade that I’ve had—or maybe the decade and a half I will have—for personal development and discovery’’ [female rabbi]. ‘‘I married when I was well into my 30s. There is no peer pressure to get married earlier. We have permission to take some time to find out who we are— I didn’t want to get locked in too soon—before we lock ourselves into a life partner’’ [male rabbi]. ‘‘What people are looking for is to have options Jewishly, not to be boxed in. They want to have Jewish experiences on their own terms.’’ ‘‘There is an unwillingness to engage in Jewish communal experiences that are not meaningful in some way…a real reluctance to engage in something that is for the sake of the edifice.’’

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‘‘Jewish survivalism, concerns about intermarriage, and baby-making don’t really speak to this generation…[Jewish identity is only worthwhile] if it adds to my life and helps me serve the world, makes me a better person, makes me kind, makes me happy, and allows me to give.’’

The ‘‘survival’’ of the group as a self-evident goal, maintaining the society, and transmitting the culture were values in and of themselves for historical Jewish societies and continue as such for some Jewish societies today. The perception among Jews in their 20s and 30s that Jewish identity is invested in the individual rather than the family is closely tied to the declining centrality of the family, to the postponement of family formation, and to the lack of emphasis on endogamy. The individualistic ideas they articulate also mark a dramatic change in comparison to the communal values of previous generations. But it is not because they are marching to their own drummers, as they believe they are. Instead, these individualistic attitudes are profoundly affected both by the group norms and group attitudes of American millennial social circles, and also by the broader culture. Now, it’s difficult to measure directly the impact of culture, so that piece of the picture is sometimes omitted in our field, but I believe analyzing shifting cultural milieus is crucial to understanding contemporary American Jewish behavior. The surrounding culture is a critical part of the ‘‘collective symbolic discourse,’’ in historian Moshe Rosman’s felicitous summary of Clifford Geertz: ‘‘[T]he most important parts of culture are the least conscious ones, the elements taken for granted…constructs that we rarely reflect upon and often accept as part of the natural order’’ (Rosman 2013, p. 26).

Changes in American Jewish Family Formation I begin with the impact of changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, love, and marriage on family formation today. Critiques of conventional marriage and family life were in the air in the decades which experienced the Vietnam War, the American Civil Rights movement, and Second Wave Feminism, even for those many Americans whose life journeys largely conformed to middle-class norms. Some men and boys were influenced by the ‘‘Playboy’’ philosophy that urged men to enjoy their freedom fully before capitulating to the demands of marriage and family (Ehrenreich 1983). Women too began to view marriage skeptically following Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Feminist commentary on women’s lives and choices raised the consciousness of America’s middle-class women. Today, many of these ideas, which initially seemed disruptive of middle-class norms and lifestyles, have been mainstreamed and internalized by young middleand upper middle-class American Jews. American male and female ‘‘liberation’’ movements were fueled by the increasingly easy availability of birth control, especially ‘‘the Pill.’’ The de facto biological separation between sexual activity and reproduction in 1970s precipitated sweeping societal reevaluations of middle-class sexual mores (Tavris and Sadd 1977). In the words of psychologist Steven Nock, the relationship between love, marriage, and parenthood ceased to be inextricably

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‘‘united socially, morally, and legally’’—and the ‘‘sense of order and predictability’’ that used to be associated with conventional ‘‘organized domestic life’’ was challenged (Nock 2000). The liberation of men and women to pursue sexual relationships independent from the quest for marriage and family eroded differences between ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ expectations during their single years. As Laura Gardner remembers Brandeis University in the 1950s and early 1960s, parietal dormitory rules were based on the assumption that ‘‘female students were ‘gals’ who needed 24/7 supervision. Male students were supposed to help the women follow the rules.’’ Even ‘‘fathers and brothers’’ were barred ‘‘from women’s dorms’’ (Gardner 2014, pp. 12–15). Brandeis students rebelled against these rules in ‘‘the parietal protest of 1964,’’ as sexual mores began to change and as the American culture of protest began to heat up. As the years went on, college campuses moved quickly toward their current casual freedoms. Economic factors too played an important role in changing attitudes toward sexuality, courtship, and marriage (Cherlin 2005; Chiswick 2014). In the 1960s and 1970s the gap between men’s and women’s educational levels and earning potential was decreasing for well-educated middle- and upper middle-class Americans and American Jews. With effective birth control, women not only had more control over their personal lives but also could make reliable commitments to careers. Economic pressure made those careers desirable not only for those women who preferred to be labor force participants, but also for their families. One ‘‘pillar supporting the stable marriages of the postwar era was the fact that most women could not earn a living wage on their own. Fifty years ago, the average college-educated woman earned less than the average high-school-educated man,’’ family researcher Stephanie Coontz points out. Both men and women expected men to be the primary wage-earners when families were formed, and as late as 1977 ‘‘two-thirds of Americans believed that the ideal family arrangement was for the husband to earn the money and the wife to stay home.’’ In the 1950s college attendance actually enhanced marital prospects because the four years of college served as a virtual marriage market. Coontz notes: ‘‘For men, going to college was the way to get a good job. For women, it was the way to get a good husband’’ (Coontz 2011, p. 108). All of these trends were especially true of Jewish men and women. In the 1950s, few Jewish women were in the labor force permanently after graduation, but instead typically worked for a few years, married, had children, and became homemakers (Chiswick 1986; Fishman 2000). After the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast, American Jewish communities were part of an American trend of women’s career achievement. Today, in contrast to the 1950s, the vast majority of American Jewish mothers work outside the home for pay, even when they have children under age six in the household. These American Jewish families are distinguished for their homogamy or spousal parity—that is husbands and wives have very similar levels of educational achievement and occupational prestige, as the Hartmans have shown (Hartman and Hartman 2009). Fathers in these families tend to be involved in child care and, to a somewhat lesser extent, household chores. Contemporary American families—especially those high on the educational, occupational, and socioeconomic ladder—are undergoing An Unfinished Revolution (Gerson 2010).

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The ‘‘good news’’ is that middle-class families today appear healthy and robust. Contrary to Phyllis Schafly’s alarming question—‘‘Who killed the American family?’’ (Schafly 2014)—the families of well-educated, accomplished middle- and upper middle-class Americans—the socio-economic group which most American Jews belong—are impressively successful and durable. While rates of marriage are at their lowest level in a century, the divorce rate for those who have married is low as well (Miller 2014; Stevenson and Wolfers 2014). There is good news about Jewish vitality also: Higher—not lower—levels of educational attainment of men and women are associated with stronger connections to Jewishness in recent decades, a pattern that Steven M. Cohen identified decades ago (Cohen 1987). Younger American Jewish couples are more likely than the general population to fall into the category of what Nock calls ‘‘marriages of equally dependent spouses’’—that is, the spouses bring in about the same amount of money (Hartman and Hartman 2009, pp. 99–100, p. 214; Nock 2000). Strikingly, as the Hartmans have demonstrated, this pattern of spousal homogamy is true of many Jewishly engaged young couples and is more typical of Modern Orthodox Jews than any other group (Hartman and Hartman 2009). These successful Jewish spousal partnership marriages, in which spouses work together toward the things that really matter to them regarding personal, familial, and occupational goals, provide us with an important model. They show us that Jewishness, career, and family can be combined.

Declining Birthrates and Unwanted Infertility However, for many American Jews careerism is related to extended singlehood, later marriage, and a marked decline in fertility rates. Among younger American Jews today, the number of children born is below replacement level. In the area of fertility—as in whether men and women cohabit before marriage, whether and when they get married, and whether women work outside the home—the norms and attitudes of one’s social circles make a difference (DellaPergola 2015; Shain 2015). As Steven Cohen, Jack Ukeles, and Ron Miller found in their 2011 study of the New York Jewish population: Among the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) those identified as Hasidim had an average of about 6 children and the yeshivish (non-Hasidic ultraOrthodox) had an average of about 5 children; Modern Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers had an average of 2.5 children per family. The non-Orthodox averaged only 1.5 children (Cohen et al. 2012). In contrast, as Sergio DellaPergola reminds us, like the Israeli society around them, hiloni or self-described secular couples are far more pronatalist than their American counterparts; even hiloni Israeli couples aspire to having between 3 and 4 children, and actually give birth to almost 3 children per family (2.8) (DellaPergola 2015). Hiloni Israeli couples have as many children as Modern Orthodox couples in New York, illustrating the powerful effect of social norms and social contagion (Christakis and Fowler 2009)—the impact of the behaviors of the people around us. What we perceive as the ‘‘right’’ number of children is a very personal decision, but it is powerfully (and sometimes unwittingly) influenced by the people we know who share our lifestyles.

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Impactful Theories in Quotidian Jewish Lives Today’s younger American Jews are influenced by the people they encounter in their social environments, and also by economics (Chiswick 2014) and—less commonly realized—by social theories that were originally considered to be transgressive but have now become mainstreamed. Their values are a coalesced amalgam of Judaic and American norms (Fishman 2000). This often unconscious contemporary coalescence continues a process originating in the earlier conscious synthesis of Judaic and Western values that Jonathan Sarna highlights (Sarna 2004). Most American Jews move to the music of the highly educated liberal American society with which they identify. Few American Jews realize the extent to which personal choices today are influenced by theories—including anti-family theories— promulgated and mainstreamed over recent decades. The words of a thoughtful young Jewish male leader on postponing marital commitments, ‘‘I don’t want to get locked in too soon,’’ echo scathing attacks by Philip Wylie (1942), Erik Erikson (1950), and others decades earlier on the conventional American family. The critique and deconstruction of the conventional family began not with uppity women but with the heterosexual men who benefited most from bourgeois family structures, followed only later by feminist insights and queer theory. This social revolution was fomented by both the margins and the mainstream. Today broad swaths of American society—and American Jews—are affected by the consequences. Observers who speak and write about the ways in which young people sometimes unwittingly work against their own personal aspirations as they make their life decisions, or the ways in which anti-family theories are reflected in some aspects of social transformation, are quickly silenced in the forum of public ideas. For example, in 2002, Sylvia Anne Hewlett published Creating a Life: What Every Woman Needs to Know about Having a Baby and a Career, urging women to plan for parenthood with the same realism and awareness of the facts with which they planned their careers. Within days of its publication, Elizabeth Cohen of CNN’s Medical Unit reported on the reaction to Hewlett’s book: A new book that minces few words about a woman’s professional and maternal life says too many working women in their 20s put their careers first, figuring they can have babies later on. They often end up disappointed…‘subject themselves to humiliating medical procedures, shell out tens of thousands of dollars and derail their careers. Mostly to no avail.’ Not everyone appreciates her message. The topic of talk shows and feature newspaper stories, the book has succeeded in scaring potential mothers say some critics….[my emphasis]. Reviewer Carolyn Cunningham (2003) noted Boston University’s feminist journalist Caryl Rivers as one among others who quickly wrote critiques of the book. Elizabeth Cohen described the reaction as the following: ‘‘[The message] coming across from the media is clearly, ‘Watch out, women, if you’re ambitious. If you don’t get married and have kids right away, you’re going to be miserable the rest of your life,’ says Rivers, who says she has not read the book’’ [my emphasis] (April 17, 2002).

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When liberal, pro-woman observers speak out about the medical facts of infertility, they are often accused of being anti-woman, because they dare to challenge the prevailing dogma. Hewlett’s goal was not to ‘‘scare’’ potential mothers, but to encourage them to make realistic life decisions. Instead of their messages being considered point by point on the basis of their merits, scholars like Hewlett are lumped together with reactionaries who seek to turn back the clock on women’s sexual and social freedoms, and who see changes in sexual, social, and familial values and behaviors as disruptive and dangerous (Blow 2012; Stevenson 2012). There are realistic reasons to be concerned about anti-woman reactionaries: There is no question that some powerful forces in American society see derailing women’s careers and controlling women’s lives as useful strategies in their visions for social engineering. Some conservative ideology is embedded in economic considerations. When the economic and social price of being unmarried is unbearably high, women may tolerate an unappealing marital prospect, marriage at an inappropriate time in their lives, or a difficult marriage in order to achieve and maintain a married state (Cherry 1998). This is the reason that social conservatives—including Jewish social conservatives—often oppose the expansion of women’s opportunities and women’s control over their own bodies and lives (Johnson 2012). However, when non-reactionaries who try to talk about the medical facts of unwanted infertility are charged with being reactionaries, that accusation is a way of delegitimating and silencing them. The free exchange of ideas in this area has been squelched because the biological facts appear to be unfair to women—they run counter to prevailing ideologies. Late marriage and lower fertility among American Jews are, of course, part of a much larger international Western social phenomenon—a phenomenon I believe is unhealthy and unfortunate both for the individuals involved and for the societies they inhabit. Natalie Angier emphasizes, ‘‘In charting the differences between today’s families and those of the past, demographers start with the kids—or rather lack of them’’ (Angier 2013, p. D1). Globally, these erosions of the traditional, procreative family are one symptom of what reviewer Garret Keizer succinctly calls ‘‘a generation’s failure to generate’’ (Keizer 2012). On one hand, Americans view marriage more favorably than do Europeans, according to Andrew Cherlin (2005). Daniel Parmer also found that most young adult Jews want to get married— someday! (Parmer 2015). On the other hand, ‘‘[y]ounger Americans do not value marriage,’’ Riv-Ellen Prell eloquently responds. Citing a 2014 Pew study of Americans, Prell points out that not only are the rates of marriage for Americans above age 25 ‘‘the lowest in the nation’s history,’’ as many as 50% of Pew’s respondents overall, and 65% of those under age 30, agreed with the statement that ‘‘society is just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children’’ (2014). That pattern has been steadily increasing among American Jews for decades. In Bethamie Horowitz’s ‘‘Connections and Journeys’’ study, when New York Jews were asked, ‘‘How happy or upset would you be if your child never married,’’ only the ‘‘Orthodox engaged’’ saw that eventuality as unacceptable—71% of the ‘‘Orthodox intensively engaged’’ said they would be ‘‘very upset,’’ compared to 26% of the non-Orthodox ‘‘intensively engaged’’ (Horowitz 2003). In other words,

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even the parents of today’s younger American Jews may not have articulated strong valuation of marriage as a life goal worthy of conscious pursuit. Why is this a problem? The Jewish community has a tremendous stake in creating policies that can nurture more robust patterns of marriage and child-rearing. Having babies is ‘‘good for the Jews’’ not only because parenthood produces a new generation, but also because parenthood upgrades the Jewishness of the new parents. Jewish connections are enhanced by marriage and parenthood (Hartman and Hartman 2009). American Jews commonly take on adult patterns of Jewish connections when they achieve the five sociological benchmarks of adulthood: completion of education and professional training, financial independence, independent living arrangements, marriage, and parenthood. While juggling home, career, and Judaic practice involves at least three shifts of work (Bernstein and Fishman 2015), Jews who are married to Jews and parenting children have higher levels of Judaic involvement than those who are unmarried, childless, or married to non-Jews (Fishman and Cohen 2015). Prior to moving into these adult lifestyles, even Jews who grew up in (and will eventually create their own) strongly connected Jewish families tend to allow their Jewish connections to slide. Over one-third of America’s 5.3 million Jews who are married are married to non-Jews (44%), according to the recent Pew Portrait of Jewish Americans (Lugo et al. 2013). Inmarriage or intermarriage signals a whole constellation of familial attitudes and behaviors, including feelings of ethnic connection or peoplehood. The Pew authors emphasized: ‘‘Married Jews who have Jewish spouses feel more connected to and responsible for other Jews.’’ For example, 80% of inmarried Jews say they ‘‘have special responsibilities to care for Jews in need,’’ compared to just 59% of unmarried Jews and 49% of intermarried Jews (pp. 35–37). Unmarried American Jews exhibit lower levels of Jewish engagement than do inmarried American Jews of the same ages and backgrounds. Without the Jewish socialization of family and peer group, however much ‘‘pride’’ in Jewishness they may have, Jews are statistically unlikely to participate in transmitting Jewish culture to the generation that follows them. Inmarriage and parenthood, in turn, promote and reinforce more traditional Jewish values and behaviors, resembling patterns among religious Americans of other faiths as well.

Mixed Marriage, Jewish and Non-Jewish Social Circles, and Transmission of Jewish Culture This brings us to the third challenge: For at least the past 25 years, since the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), observers of the American Jewish community have been engaged in vigorous discussions about the meaning of mixed marriage for the transmission of Jewish culture to the next generation. The most important predictor of intermarriage is the religious character of the households Jews grew up in: 63% of American Jewish adults who grew up with two Jewish parents are themselves married to Jews (37% intermarried), compared to 17% of those who grew up with one Jewish parent (83% intermarried) (Lugo et al. 2013). Likelihood of intermarriage also varies substantially by other factors, such as the

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denomination of Judaism in which one was raised, the type and extent of formal and informal Jewish education, and how old one was when getting married. Some have argued that with dynamic Jewish outreach to intermarried families perhaps a majority can be encouraged to ‘‘raise their children as Jews.’’ Some community studies have demonstrated local success in bringing intermarried families closer to Jewish connections (Saxe et al. 2006), and there is a wide variation from one locale to another in this regard. In part this variation is due to the substantive differences in how the questions are asked and how researchers classify ambiguous answers. Beyond methodological issues, an important social factor is that mixed married families have what sociologist Mary Waters calls ‘‘ethnic options’’—they incorporate more than one ethnoreligious narrative in the household. As Waters showed in her study of varying Catholic families, once several ethnoreligious narratives are available to children being raised in a household, teenage and young adult children often make choices quite different from those expected by their parents (Waters 1990). Adults raised in such households sometimes identify themselves as ‘‘Jewish and something else,’’ or ‘‘Jewish of No Religion.’’ This past fall there was a lively conversation on the ASSJ List Serve about research on the Jewishness of non-Jews and the non-Jewishness of Jews, particularly those living in mixed married families. In my study, Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage, I reported on systematic in-depth interviews with 254 men and women, Jews and non-Jews, living in mixed married, inmarried, and conversionary Jewish households. My informants had a lot to say about ethnoreligious porousness. One Jewish husband made the comment, ‘‘When I decide how Jewish I want to be, I am deciding how different I want to be. Christian holidays are cultural—not religious—no matter how religious they are, because our culture is Christian. But Jewish is different. Jewish is always religious no matter how cultural it is’’ (Fishman 2004, pp. 101–122). This very brief reference to that rich interview data indicates how in many, perhaps most, mixed married families religious identity, if any, is ambiguous. That is one of the reasons that national studies, including the Pew study, show far lower measures of Jewish connectedness in every possible measure of Jewishness among those who grew up in mixed married households (Sheskin and Hartman 2015). In contrast, the process of converting into Judaism offers a strategy for creating unambiguously Jewish families even when one spouse is not born Jewish. In terms of Jewish cultural transmission, when non-Jewish partners formally convert into Judaism, those converts, often called ‘‘Jews by Choice,’’ help to create households with distinctively more Jewish demographic and ethnoreligious profiles than do families with one Jewish and one non-Jewish spouse. Conversionary households almost universally aim to raise their children as Jews. Research on American conversionary families consistently shows that the family’s Jewish engagement levels are very similar to those of inmarried families (Fishman 2006). This contrast in transmitting unambiguous Jewish identity to adult children between inmarried and conversionary households on the one hand, and mixed married households on the other hand is quite clear in the data. That is the principal reason that mixed marriage must be included among the three primary challenges to transmission of Jewish culture in current American Jewish patterns of family

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formation, along with late marriage and non-marriage, and unwanted infertility or low fertility. There is a strong cultural component to the preeminence of mixed marriage among American Jews as well. Mixed marriage is enthusiastically supported by the wider American culture. Television and the print and popular media celebrate multiculturalism and boundary crossing (Fishman 2004). Exclusivity—which is how endogamy is perceived—is widely perceived as an unpopular, illiberal goal, which is often mis-translated as ‘‘racism.’’ The transformative potential of conversion shows that it is not, of course, racism to encourage a single religious narrative in Jewish households. It is, however, a counter-cultural message.

Transmission of Jewish Culture—to Whom? Why Personal Narratives Matter The de-emphasis on marriage and children, the postponement of family formation, and the political incorrectness of preferring endogamy have separately and together had a profound effect on the numerical size of the next generation of American Jews and also on the Jewishness of younger American Jews. Postponement of marriage and parenthood is demonstrably linked to weakened personal Jewish connections. Jewish engagement is tied to the most intimate decisions of our personal lives— personal lives that have undergone profound transformations over the past four decades. Not least, delayed marriage is strongly related to intermarriage: The longer an individual Jew waits to marry, the more likely s/he is to marry out. The ways in which family impinges on but enriches personal development is where I return to my conversations with Prof. Marshall Sklare. I came to Brandeis University to work for and with Marshall on January 15, 1985. On a regular basis, Marshall and I met, most of the time talking about research and writing—he was a wonderful teacher. But on occasion we also talked about our families. Marshall was deeply attached to and very proud of his children, and also fascinated by the way the world was changing for them and around them. One September day, Marshall looked at me and said, perceptively, ‘‘You look very pleased—has something new happened?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ I explained, ‘‘Joseph, my ben zekkunim (my youngest child) just started nursery school.’’ ‘‘Aha,’’ Marshall nodded, with great amusement, ‘‘You think you see the light at the end of the tunnel?’’ I agreed happily as he paused for effect, and then he declared: ‘‘There is no light at the end of the tunnel!’’ Marshall and I talked for a while about the ways in which children disrupt your life—there is no convenient time to have and raise children. We talked about how powerful, profound, and meaningful relationships with children are. He emphasized the way we care about our kids even as they grow and become independent—and give us the ‘‘nachas’’ that he wrote about—our Jewish connections are tied in to our children. Our children’s Jewish connections are tied in to us as well. Deeply personal Jewish journeys are critical not only to individual Jewishness but also to the transmission of Jewish culture. In my research project, ‘‘Generating Jewish Connections: Conversations with Jewish Teenagers, Their Parents, and Jewish Educators and Thinkers,’’ more than 80 teenagers were interviewed, revealing how salient social circles were to

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the way teens felt about their Jewishness. Not surprisingly for the teenagers, peer groups were crucial; the way a person feels about Jewishness for the rest of their lives sometimes depends on whether they had a ‘‘cool’’ Jewish friend when they were 15 years old. But perhaps more surprisingly, the social circle of the family was critical to teenagers as well. Talking to me about their own Jewishness, those teens zeroed in on their parents’ Jewish journeys. Where they felt their parents were passionate in a personal way about some aspect of Jewishness, those teens were moved, even if they didn’t share their parents’ particular passion. But where they felt their parents were ambivalent or apathetic or just conforming to communal expectations and going through the motions Jewishly, teens were scathingly critical and dismissive (Fishman 2007). What I saw in those interviews with teens is that Jewish personal journeys have an impact beyond the individual person. Jewish personal journeys are affected by social circles, and they affect social circles. Asking the questions, ‘‘Why am I Jewish, why does Jewishness matter to me, what about Jewishness matters to me?’’ is critically important not only for the individual, but also for the social circle and for the transmission of Jewish culture. Jews who aspire to transmit Jewish culture to the next generation must pay attention to their own Jewish journeys, must struggle with their own personal Jewish attachments, not only for their own sake, but also for the sake of the children, students, and friends with whom they interact. Social circles are also important to those of us who do research in the field that Marshall Sklare helped to create. One of the great joys of a career in this field continues to be the ways in which our work informs each other. We who participate in this work form some sort of a virtual circle. Not only those whose work I’ve mentioned in this paper, but others as well have contributed profoundly to my work, some no longer with us—Marshall, of course, and Charles Liebman. I’ve learned from many colleagues, and I am deeply honored to receive the Marshall Sklare Award from my colleagues at the ASSJ. To this—very real and also virtual—circle I convey my heartfelt gratitude, and my wish for ongoing work and growth. I return in conclusion to the challenge with which I began: American Jewry today faces a crisis regarding the transmission of Jewish culture to coming generations. Personal Jewish journeys—how Jews ‘‘do Jewish’’—are a central component of that transmission, but they are not the whole story or the whole answer. Thinking about that crisis, complacency is not a useful approach, because it encourages the status quo. Despair is not useful either—it produces paralysis. But alarm and optimism are a useful combination: Alarm triggers adrenalin and optimism makes it possible to act, believing that one can—that one must—make a difference. May we be privileged to study, to analyze, to propose—to argue—to move the field forward, and to nurture the next generation of scholars of the study of Jews and Jewish societies.

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Sylvia Barack Fishman is the Joseph and Esther Foster Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and also co-director of The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. She is currently working on a book entitled Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of the Gender Revolution.

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