Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist engagements directed toward stemming numerical decline. Analyzing this policy world in terms of a “Jewish biopolitics,” I assess how the voluntary nature of American Jewry has shaped a distinct biopolitical field, reliant on “making Jews” by both biological and cultural reproduction, enmeshing dimensions of quantity and quality. Juxtaposing this Jewish biopolitical engagement with the one exercised by the Israeli state, I flesh out broader considerations and contributions, and introduce the exploratory concept of “minority community biopolitics.” The article is grounded in an anthropological study of policy, including fieldwork, interviews, and a review of the flurry of archival and public materials related to the topic.

中文翻译：

---

数量减少的幽灵：美国的人口数量和犹太生物政治

在过去的三十年里，有组织的美国犹太社区一直专注于社会人口学问题，即在美国维持一个可行的犹太人生活。在本文中，我研究了这种对人口趋势的关注的一个关键维度：犹太人口的数量，即犹太人的数量。我展示了这个维度在塑造一系列旨在阻止数字下降的焦虑话语和干预主义参与方面的中心地位。从“犹太人的生命政治”的角度分析这个政策世界，我评估了美国犹太人的自愿性质如何塑造了一个独特的生命政治领域，依赖于通过生物和文化再生产“制造犹太人”，融合数量和质量的维度。将这种犹太人的生命政治参与与以色列国家的参与并置，我充实了更广泛的考虑和贡献，并介绍了“少数民族社区生命政治”的探索性概念。这篇文章以对政策的人类学研究为基础，包括实地考察、访谈以及对与该主题相关的大量档案和公共材料的评论。