American Jewish History

Let me begin by expressing my admiration for the passion and coherence with which Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl present their argument, and how they have addressed many of the criticisms of the first publication of this argument, to strengthen its impact even more.¹ I do take issue with some of the steps and assumptions in the argument, as I will detail below. At the same time, I do believe that, in the end, I agree with many of the conclusions that must be drawn from its implications and their implicit call to action.

Let me begin with some disclaimers. I am a woman. Not only that, but I am a woman who, both in collaboration with and independently of my husband, Moshe Hartman, z"l, has engaged in the same kind of fertility and intermarriage quantitative analyses of the NJPS and the ensuing PEW surveys that Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl critique.² In footnote thirty-four of their current article, Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl mention our work, perhaps with some puzzlement and uncertainty about what to conclude from the fact that our analysis was not tied to the communal policy discourses directly. While both my husband and I were very concerned about Jewish continuity broadly (and not only specifically in terms of fertility and intermarriage implications—but not excluding them either), we saw our roles as social scientists to produce the knowledge and let someone else use it as they saw fit. Parenthetically, that kept some "shalom bayit" (household peace) since I doubt that the two of us would have agreed on the same policy recommendations, coming as we did from different religious, national, and gendered backgrounds. So why do I bring it up now? Because I also have come to understand how for all of us, our personal and professional narratives are intertwined, and that it behooves us to weigh that interaction when [End Page 235] we interpret research directions, interpretations, and conclusions. I fully embraced Debra Kaufman's guest-edited special issue of Contemporary Jewry, "Demographers on Demography: The Place of Narrative in Jewish Identity Research"³ on the role of narrative in demography. And that is how I understood Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews, as well both the current and the earlier essay by Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl referred to above.⁴ All science is driven by some agenda, and the more we are aware of it, the better we are able to fill in the broader picture with either more appropriate data or more appropriate interpretations.

So, I applaud this exposé. But I am also concerned about where it's going. I am concerned because it threatens to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak (and I'm sorry if the metaphor makes someone cringe, but it's apt). I agree that fertility and intermarriage should not constitute the sole or overriding communal approaches to the problematic of Jewish continuity, nor the sole endeavors of social science as it seeks to reveal the truth of a thriving community. But population size is related to fertility, and population vitality is related to population size, as well as morbidity and mortality. Population dynamics contribute to the numbers, energy, and resources of a population and need to be given due attention. We do need data, and careful interpretation of it, to reveal how intermarriage is related to traditional—and non-traditional—practices of Judaism, as well as how this relationship is changing over time.⁵ The national surveys have received appropriate criticism for adhering too closely to traditional religious measures of Jewish engagement (such as keeping kosher, lighting Shabbat candles, fasting on Yom Kippur); we also have data that incorporates less traditional measures, but maybe not enough of it, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And here the bias toward quantitative measures comes under appropriate fire. But it isn't a bias borne out by the wealth of social science published in Contemporary Jewry, the primary venue for scholarly publications in the social science of Jewry, as I discuss below. [End Page 236]

Some of you may be aware that Contemporary Jewry responded to the revelations of Steven M...