Is It Getting Easier To Count American Jews?
I’ve written in the past about the disconnect between the “official” counts of just how many Jews there are and a count based on halachic standards. It’s popularly assumed that there are around 15 million Jews worldwide and that some seven million of those are in the U.S. Those guesses are based on extraordinarily generous definitions of “Jew”.
The Pew Research Center defines Jews as 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.
After at least five decades of mainstream intermarriage and the informal and often ad hoc conversion processes of the Conservative and Reform movements, Pew is undoubtedly grossly overstating our numbers.
Why should we care? Well as I wrote in that previous article, properly understanding who’s in the club is crucial for a rational allocation of scarce communal resources. As I put it then:
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?
But the misunderstanding also threatens to skew the way Jews are seen by their non-Jewish neighbors. It’s been widely assumed, for instance, that “the Jews” in the U.S. unfailingly vote Democrat despite the fact that Israel’s existential interests are thereby subverted.
You may disagree on the details, of course, but I suspect they’re largely accurate. The point is that the stereotype can drive popular perceptions, politics, and even official policy. All of which, in the context of an inability to clearly define the Jewish community, can be misdirected. And there’s potential for negative consequences.
Well I believe clarity might soon be and hand: in the wake of the recent U.S. elections, the demographers finally discovered Orthodox Jews. This article by Daniel Greenfield is just one I’ve seen analyzing voting patterns in counties and precincts with a dense Jewish presence. Across those dozens of neighborhoods, President-elect Trump won unambiguous mandates, receiving between 70 and 99 percent of votes. Kamala Harris managed to attract only 12 votes in New Square, for example, against 3,456 for Trump.
The overwhelming majority of those deep red areas (Boro Park, Midwood, Ocean County, New Square, etc.) are obviously Orthodox. But some, like Brighton Beach and Beverly Hills (Beverly Hills!?!), have a more traditional population mix.
My suspicion is that those numbers are a far closer match for halachic Jewish demographics than the 70 percent who voted Democrat. And society as a whole might be starting to see things that way, too.
Obviously, this connection is exclusively statistical - individually, we’re not defined by the way we vote.
This may not be the first time that the Orthodox and traditional Jewish vote skewed so heavily rightward. But it does seem to be the first time that it’s being noticed on a national level. I think that’s a good thing.