For four years, the Pew Research Center's 2013 Survey of US Jews has dominated lay and academic discourse about the state of American Jewry. While there is much to learn from this large, representative study of US Jews, there is also much left unanswered—in particular, what aspects of the American Jewish experience are uniquely Jewish, and how American Jews’ responses to the social realities of contemporary America might be different from those of other religious or ethnic groups. Uzi Rebhun, whose existing body of work emphasizes American Jews in comparative context, addresses these questions in Jews and the American Religious Landscape. This new study is based on a different Pew Research Center survey, the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey, which included a representative sample of over 35,000 Americans of different religions and a substantial number of Jews. Rebhun uses this dataset to take a broad look at the social, religious, and political characteristics of American Jews, as compared to other religious groups in American society.
The study's findings related to American Jews’ relative socioeconomic status (high), religious identification (low), and political orientation (liberal) are largely consistent with previous research. It is unsurprising, but nevertheless striking, to see that American Jews ranked higher than all other major religious groups in terms of educational attainment and income, and lower than all other major religious groups in terms of religious identification (Mormons ranked the highest, followed by black Protestants and evangelical Protestants). Unfortunately, as Rebhun himself points out, the nature of the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey was such that its measures of religious identification had to apply across religious groups: for example, religious service attendance and belief in God. Measures related to issues of particularistic concern to Jews, including the State of Israel, the Holocaust, and responsibility to the global Jewish community, were not included.
Because the study relies on measures of Jewish commitment that are explicitly religious, it yields an interesting but incomplete picture of American Jews’ Jewish commitments. Religion per say is far less salient to many American Jews than Jewish culture, history, and peoplehood. In Rebhun's analysis of religious switching in the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey, fully 15 percent of adults with a Jewish upbringing considered themselves religiously unaffiliated. Rebhun notes that these “ethnic Jews” (also called “Jews of no religion”) make up an even larger proportion of American Jews in more recent surveys; in the Pew Research Center's 2013 Survey of US Jews, they were 22 percent of all American Jews. Furthermore, in both the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey and 2013 Survey of US Jews, the proportion of Jews whose Jewish identity is ethnic as opposed to religious was highest among those younger than thirty.
Rebhun is careful to note that ethnic Jews are not estranged from the Jewish community and that some join synagogues and exhibit other traditional Jewish behaviors. He also notes that Jews are not dissimilar from mainline Protestants in their overall levels of religious identification. Yet, the data do not allow him to examine the ethnic modes of Jewish identification that may be more prominent for many Jews. Especially in light of the steady expansion of the number of ethnic Jews within American Jewry, there is a pressing need for more research on modes of Jewish identification outside the traditional religious context.
Similarly, Rebhun's analysis of political orientation underscores the need for more research on the evolving political attitudes and behaviors of American Jews. The book's observations about politics turn on voter preference in the 2004 US presidential elections, when incumbent Republican president George W. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry. One wonders how the determinants of voter preference have changed more than a dozen years later, after repeated clashes between the Obama administration and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over West Bank settlements, the peace process, and the Iran nuclear deal, not to mention the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. More recent data is needed to understand these developments and their impact on American Jews, perhaps beginning with an analysis of the Pew Research Center's 2014 US Religious Landscape Study.
Despite lingering questions about modes of Jewish identification and politics, a scholarly audience will find much to appreciate in Jews and the American Religious Landscape. Rebhun carefully positions his research in dialogue with other scholars across a variety of disciplines, and the book's extensive reference list spans a range of theoretical and empirical works on American Jews, American religious life, and American society writ large. The book's language is technical, and the explanation of findings relies heavily on statistical techniques that may be inaccessible to a lay audience, but scholars will appreciate the analytic detail.
In keeping with the careful and measured nature of his work, Rebhun does not present a definitive diagnosis of American Jewish decline or vitality. He acknowledges the “in between” nature of the Jewish identities of individuals who, in the pluralistic and multicultural context of the contemporary United States, identify as partly Jewish (32). Similarly, he acknowledges both the historical toll that intermarriage has taken on the Jewish population and the increasing tendency of adult children of intermarriage to identify as Jews. To some extent, Rebhun's precise and thorough presentation of facts obscures the narrative arc of Jews and the American Religious Landscape, and this reader was left wanting a more explicit story or set of policy recommendations. Instead, the biggest takeaway from the book was the complex, multifaceted nature of the American Jewish experience, which can best be understood through a series of comparisons spanning religious groups, geographic locations, and time.
