Adjusting Strategy for Changing Demographics

How many Jews are really out there?

There are, according to most published estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million Jews worldwide. Of those, it's likely that 14% of the total Jewish population can be categorized as charedi. In addition, 22% of Israeli Jews and 10% of American Jews are Orthodox (as opposed to specifically charedi).

“But really,” you might ask, “Who cares?” Judaism, like just about everything else in life, is about individuals making choices. The more good choices you make, the greater your success. The ethnic or social status of millions of strangers probably doesn't play much of a role in the really important stuff. Sure, many of our biggest choices involve the influence we can have on people around us. But those normally happen on a personal and not a population scale.

So why should population statistics interest us? I guess it's for many of the same reasons that all statistics interest us. Or, at any rate, interest people like me.

Think about it: if we're blind to the big numbers, then we're almost certainly going to miss big, world-changing trends until it's too late to do anything about them. And that means we'll be unable to capitalize on rich opportunities. Who knows, for instance, whether keener demographic insights might not have allowed us to respond better to problems lying at the root of at-risk teens or the shidduch crisis?

But a better grasp of population profiles can also inform the way we allocate limited communal resources. Which brings us to the train of thought that inspired this particular article.

It's long been accepted common knowledge that the vast majority of the world's Jews are not Torah observant in the mainstream Orthodox way of looking at it. It was this understanding that drove the sense of urgency behind the kiruv movement. "Can we really just abandon 90% of our people to spiritual oblivion?"

Since the early 1960s, billions of dollars have been spent maintaining kiruv institutions. Even tiny, isolated Orthodox communities often spend hundreds of thousands annually on outreach salaries and programming. The steady stream of successful ba'aley teshuva flowing to both outreach (Aish, Ohr Someach, etc.) and mainstream yeshivas through the 70s and 80s likely justified all that spending. But have the facts on the ground now changed? Is this still the best use of such a large slice of the communal charity pie?

Without at least a basic understanding of the numbers, we're making personal and policy decisions without rational support.

More to the point, as a friend recently commented to me in the context of my recent "A History of Torah Observance" article, is it reasonable to trust any of the population numbers that get thrown around?

So let's begin with a look at where the numbers come from. It should be remembered that no population-level statistics are ever perfect. Millions of people seldom stand still long enough to be counted individually, so demographers instead look for easily-measurable proxies that seem to effectively represent large populations.

Some, like the Institute for Jewish Policy Research's 2022 "Haredi Jews around the world: Population trends and estimates" study made creative use of proxies like yeshiva/Bais Yakov enrollments. If you know the average family size within a community, and you also know how many children are enrolled in that community's schools, then you're well on your way to an accurate estimate of their population.

Others, like the well known Pew Research Center, will sponsor surveys of thousands of individuals, and then apply complex mathematical adjustments to the survey results to account for anomalies and outliers, shaping the data into a credible approximation of a complete population.

But here, as my friend pointed out, is where it gets complicated. When assessing various counts of the Jewish people, the big question has long been: how do you define "Jewish"? As Orthodox Jews, we've got a relatively clear answer to that question: if your mother was Jewish or you underwent a kosher conversion, you're a Jew. But those "15 million" figures for world Jewry used other definitions, and that'll be a serious problem for our own analysis.

As an example, what were Pew Research's survey methodologies in their recent "Jewish Americans in 2020" report? How, for instance, did they select the people they would interview? It seems they identified US Census Bureau ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) with higher than average concentrations of Jewish adults. They sent out nearly 69,000 survey screening packages to those areas, which resulted in 4,718 interviews with "Jewish" adults.

And how did Pew define which potential respondents to their survey as eligible Jews? Those would have been anyone who "met any of the following three conditions":

• They identified as Jewish when asked about their religious identity.

• They did not identify as Jewish by religion but said that they consider themselves to be Jewish in any other way, such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family’s background.

• They did not identify as Jewish at all but indicated that they were raised in the Jewish tradition or had a Jewish parent.

How many of Pew's 7.5 million American "Jews" would be Jewish by our count? What impact might the difference have on our sense of where we stand in the overall Jewish community?

Another way to define “Jewish” came from the Israeli Supreme Court. Until fairly recently, the court considered individuals Jewish so long as they belonged to a recognized Jewish community. Variations of this approach have doubtless been used by subsequent demographers and have likely contributed to many statistical assumptions.

So then how many halachic Jews currently live and walk the earth? The actual number is almost certainly much lower than the popular counts. But how much lower?

A good place to start is by looking at intermarriage rates. Around 1970, as few as 20% of all married American Jews had non-Jewish spouses. By 2013, that number had grown to around 44%. Looking specifically at those whose marriages took place after 2010 (meaning, for the most part, younger couples), the numbers for non-Orthodox Jews (using a broader definition) have jumped to around 72%.

Let’s think about what that could possibly mean for us in terms of the make-up of the general Jewish population. Considering how the children of approximately half of all intermarried couples are not halachically Jewish, two generations of growing intermarriage rates will have sharply reduced that population’s real numbers.

To that, we should account for low birth rates in the non-Orthodox population and the countless thousands of non-halachic conversions and “conversions-by-verbal-declaration” that have filled the pews of non-Orthodox temples. It seems reasonable to assume that the 90% (nine million) non-Orthodox Jews of the ten million or so total numbers in 1970, might easily today have only a few million descendants.

So, it would seem that there are relatively few genuine non-Orthodox Jews these days, and that even identifying those still remaining can be difficult.

None of this is actually news. Since at least the 1980s, writers - Orthodox and otherwise - have been projecting the coming demographic shift that would see frum Jews making up larger and larger proportions of the community. And it won’t be a surprise for outreach professionals who, I’m told, have been struggling to identify genuine Jews for years.

But now that the predicted changes have actually happened, what do we need to do differently?