THE POLICY WORLD OF AMERICAN-JEWISH LIFE

Methodologically speaking, my account is anchored by an anthropological study of the “policy world” (Shore and Wright Reference Shore, Wright, Shore, Wright and Però2011) of Jewish life and the Jewish future. By that I mean that I study discursive formations, cultural texts, and rhetorical devices that serve to rationalize, reconfigure, and censure certain policy interventions carried out in the name of these tropes. In focusing on the population dimension of quantity, I cannot cover all biopolitical processes implicated in the policy world of Jewish life, but the quantity dimension opens a window onto the domains of the meanings, structures of power, and instruments of governance that these policy processes are embedded within. Rather than taking a pragmatic approach to assessing the usefulness of various policy paths—the practitioner-oriented approach that dominates academic studies on American-Jewish communal policies—I turn these policy conversations into the focus of critical and interpretative study in and of themselves. Like other anthropologists of policy, I divert from studying policy as “a problem-solving device” (ibid.: 3) and instead problematize how interpreting, speaking about, experimenting with, rejecting, and advocating for policy options give shape to logics, discourses, and acts of governance.

This approach allows me to unpack the interchanges and logics that construe American Jewry as a population at risk of decline and loss, and to map the programs envisioned, charted, and debated in response. This map includes governance paths at different levels of agreement and realization. Some interventionist options have been suggested but never translated into concrete steps; others have only been actualized experimentally, sporadically, or locally; while still others have been endorsed institutionally, as nationally scaled communal policies.

Policy language is key in formulating certain policy arenas and naturalizing certain demographic goals (Solinger and Nakachi Reference Solinger, Nakachi, Solinger and Nakachi2016: 4). When American-Jewish leaders, of various affiliations and positionings, communicate ideas about how to sustain the number of Jews, we learn about the social norms, political logics, and cultural sensibilities that shape the functioning of Jewish biopolitics in a communal and voluntary setting. The study from which this essay is distilled explores these policy articulations as they are circulated in institutional, scientific, and public settings.

Specifically, I conducted multi-sited fieldwork in community, scholarly, and policy-oriented public events. These included annual meetings of the General Assembly (GA), the principal conference of Jewish organizations and community leaders in North America; annual meetings of the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS), which customarily hosts several panels on American Jewish socio-demography and policy; and one-off events such as the conference on Jewish socio-demography held at Brandeis University in 2011. The project is also based on archival materials collated by the American Jewish Committee, a leading contemporary Jewish community organization, and the Jewish Federation of North America, the umbrella organization of the Jewish Federations; textual analysis of public discourses, principally articles, opinion pieces, columns, and blogs published in media outlets catering to Jewish audiences; and interviews conducted with more than sixty American Jewish leaders (rabbis, professional leaders, social scientists, and journalists) differently positioned within the American-Jewish public landscape. In this article I will draw mostly on textual analysis, interviews, and, to a lesser degree, on ethnographic materials.Footnote ³

“WILL YOUR GRANDCHILDREN BE JEWISH?”: NUMERICAL FEARS OF DISAPPEARANCE

The historical narrative of American Jews begins with a small number: the twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil who arrived on the shore of New Amsterdam in 1654, seeking sanctuary on American soil. From this settlement of Jews in colonial America, through their dramatic increases during the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrations, to today, when an estimated 5.4–6.7 million Jews live in the country, American Jews have confronted being a religious minority in a predominantly Christian nation (Sarna Reference Sarna2004: 357). These challenges have evolved under the American constitutional infrastructure and social ambience of religious pluralism, freedom, and voluntarism. Excluding periods of heightened xenophobia, this setting has generally encouraged integration.

This ambience has catalyzed anxieties about the erosion of social boundaries and Jewish identities, a dynamic with clear numerical implications. Waxing and waning repeatedly across the history of American Jewry (ibid.: xiv), these anxieties have centered around the possibility of losing Jews to the allure of integration and mobility, whether through conversion, intermarriage, or—no less alarming to many community leaders—indifference and un-affiliation.

Following the remarkable post-World War II integration of Jews into the upper-middle-class American white mainstream (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2006), these anxieties crested once again, articulated in the dramatic language of a “survival” or “continuity” crisis, accompanied by shrill warnings of “the disappearing Jews.” This anxious tone is manifest in the vivid words and images used to describe the situation, such as assertions that “American Jews now stand on the precipice of a demographic cliff” (Wertheimer and Cohen Reference Wertheimer and Cohen2014a) and are “demographically endangered” (Steinhardt Reference Steinhardt2003: 9). The anxiety is unmistakable in the blunt question, “Will your grandchildren be Jews?”, supplemented by an image of a gradually fading Star of David (Gordon and Horowitz Reference Gordon and Horowitz2016: n.p.). It is precisely because they feel generally welcomed and secure in the United States, in stark contrast to so many other settings in the Jewish premodern and modern experience, that contemporary American Jewry faces intensified challenges of maintaining a distinct and meaningful collective fate.

In the Trump era, so pregnant with fears of violent and white nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, anxieties associated with being a Jew in America have taken on new meanings. From Trump's election in November 2016, through the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, to the horrifying Pittsburgh shooting of October 2018, the American-Jewish public has reflected upon the success story of Jews as a model minority (e.g., Brodkin Reference Brodkin2016; Ungar-Sargon Reference Ungar-Sargon2018). These new fears of lurking racialization and the politics of hate do not replace worries about the socio-demographic implications of “political conditions of love” (Tobin Reference Tobin2013). Concerns over sociodemographic viability and institutional sustainability in an age of choice and integration are still highly palpable (e.g., Bitton and Cohen Reference Bitton and Cohen2015), but they are being overlaid with apprehensions over the potential re-racialization of Jews.

In any event, the rhetoric of being an endangered population intimately links a consciousness of being a vulnerable minority with an arithmetical specter. Numerically informed, this rhetoric highlights and even iconizes certain numbers as telling indicators of a widespread loss of Jews. These numbers include 1990's infamous 52 percent—the proportion of Jews who had intermarried over the preceding five years (NJPS 1990). Another is the estimated population of 5.2 million American Jews (NJPS 2000–2001), a decrease from the 5.5 million of NJPS 1990. And then there is the 32 percent of millennial Jews who described themselves in the 2013 Pew study as “Jews of no religion,” which correlates closely with declines in Jewish marriage engagements.

The enhanced attention to population numbers is embedded within a tradition of the impassionate counting of Jews and, more generally, a Jewish social-scientific turn that has shaped how American Jews speak of themselves sociologically (Corwin Berman Reference Corwin Berman2009; Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi, Kravel-Tovi and Dash-Moore2016: 145–47). Increasingly since the 1990s, the organized Jewish community has established an elaborate, if decentralized, infrastructure of socio-demographic research and expertise, along with platforms for the dissemination of socio-demographic knowledge and policy-related agendas. Centralized national statistical projects have gained institutional footing through their claims to scientific rigor and policy relevance. I suggest that these processes mark the biopoliticization of the American Jewish community, in the sense that they help reify the notion of an American-Jewish “population” and construct it as an object of socio-demographic knowledge and intervention.

WHO CARES ABOUT POPULATION NUMBERS? BIOPOLITICS, STATECRAFT, AND CRISIS

The Foucauldian framework of “biopolitics” breaks with earlier theoretical traditions developed around the concept (Lemke Reference Lemke2011) and historicizes the emergence of “population” as a modern political problem in the late eighteenth century. Biopolitics, as a form of modern power, sets population as an “object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention” (Thompson Reference Thompson2012: 42, quoted in Jessop Reference Jessop2016: 34). This modern “art of government” (Foucault Reference Foucault, Sharma and Gupta2006 [1991]; Reference Foucault and Burchell2007) targets life processes at the interrelated levels of individuals, households, and collectives (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1978) as a means to optimize dimensions of the population at the aggregate. According to the well-known Foucauldian argument, disciplines such as statistics, demography, and epidemiology first emerged as a “science of government” grounded in knowledge deemed both reliable and essential for operating on behalf of the population and governing the biological life of its political subjects.

The proliferation of studies following Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics—what we might call the “biopolitical turn” (Campbell and Sitze Reference Campbell and Sitze2013: 4)—has demonstrated myriad contexts and ways in which modern powers govern the life-processes of populations. Here I limit my survey to studies that apply the concept of biopolitics to investigate demographic discourses and policies, mostly concerning population size.

Two directions in this body of literature are of special interest to us here. First, in many cases the question of population size mobilizes scientifically based and political action because it is associated with the specter of a “crisis” and a concomitant sense of urgency. Indeed, the very notion of “population” is often linked with alarming numbers and projections and has come to index political and cultural meanings of scarcity (e.g., “underpopulation”: Douglass Reference Douglass2005; Muehlmann Reference Muehlmann2012) or excess (e.g., “overpopulation,” “a population bomb”: Connelly Reference Connelly2008).

The second point I want to highlight is that the study of demographic knowledge, discourse, and policies is largely situated within the framework of statecraft.Footnote ⁴ This scholarly inclination is not surprising because, to the extent that the biological life of individuals and populations is key to the political life of states (Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005), biopolitics are considered to be “the State in action” (Krause and De Zordo Reference Krause and Zordo2012: 139). The interventionist preoccupation of states with demographic trends often serves as a proxy for preoccupations with other concerns, both pragmatic and ideological, including security, national identity, domestic stability, development, economic growth, and the morality of society (Paxson Reference Paxson2004). Whatever the perceived needs of the nation may be—to increase or decrease the population, amend its demographic makeup and geographic distribution, or enhance its “quality” in terms of health, modernization, and welfare—states retain the prerogative to intervene in the life processes of individuals in the name of broader, collective causes (Curtis Reference Curtis2002; Solinger and Nakachi Reference Solinger, Nakachi, Solinger and Nakachi2016; Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005).

As for the quantity dimension on which I focus my account here, the reader may recall Ian Hacking's demonstration of the naturalized links between state, biopolitics, and population size. About the development of official numbers compilations in nineteenth-century Canada he writes: “Why did [the inhabitants] get counted at all? The object was clear, the same object as all biopolitics…: How big is the population, and how might we influence its size?” (Reference Hacking1982: 289). Historically, states have played a central role in emerging projects of enumeration and legibility and in the administration and optimization of collective human life, partially by attempting to know and regulate the size of their populations. Population size is integral to even the most basic and practical functions of states, from security to economy, infrastructure, civil services, and ecological sustainability.

Under the broad category of “population policy,” we find a wide range of national initiatives and projects intended to modify population size, most notably by influencing reproduction, immigration, and health. These policies are enacted by state mechanisms, and include economic incentives, social reforms, legislation, medical care, propaganda, education, and other techniques of norm-setting (Rákosník and Šustrová Reference Rákosník and Šustrová2018).

States vary in their methods and degrees of intervention, depending on the kind of regime and the political modalities that underpin the mechanisms of state power. Some policies are coercive, repressive, and absolutist, while others have a more neoliberal orientation, collaborating with non-state actors while intersecting with and embracing logics of governmentality, the market, and the self (Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005; Solinger and Nakachi Reference Solinger, Nakachi, Solinger and Nakachi2016). Some policies shift between, or even combine such divergent population policy mechanisms (e.g., Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005). State policies differ also in the degree to which they succeed in shaping populations, and the unintended consequences of overt population policies and politics vary also.

JEWISH BIOPOLITICS: SOME COMPARATIVE NOTES

These two points about biopolitics resonate with two points I want to make about Jewish biopolitics, specifically about how Jews engage with their population numbers. First, across the contexts of particular Jewish communities, research and policy engagements with the global Jewish population tend to produce grim discourses of crisis and urgency that express a felt need for practical intervention (see review in Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi, Kravel-Tovi and Dash-Moore2016: 145). International Jewish gatherings, platforms, and institutions, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Conference on World Jewish Population, and The Jewish People Policy Institute, generally share a post-Holocaust sensibility regarding the numerical maintenance of Jewish life and articulate clear, if not anxious interest in the number of Jews.

Secondly, scholars who study the politics of Jewish demography tend to concentrate on the Israeli nation-state: on the production and circulation of demographic knowledge, discourses, and concerns and on the routes of state intervention with regard to the population's size. This literature teaches us that the Israeli nation-state's preoccupation with the size of its Jewish population is closely tied to its attempt to secure a significant Jewish majority in response to the “Arab problem” (Lustick Reference Lustick2019). The few attempts to reframe public discussions of population growth as a potential overpopulation issue remain marginal (Tal Reference Tal2016), demonstrating how the quantitative population logic is inseparable from the Zionist mission of majority-making and state-making. Israel's exercises its statistical gaze upon its population via a centralized and dependable Bureau of Statistics, whose national logics of counting are moored to a sole, monopolistic definition of who counts as a Jew (a matrilineal definition derived from Jewish law).

Most immediately relevant for my account, this literature teaches us about the domains of policy through which the Israeli state seeks to maintain or enlarge its Jewish population: pro-Jewish immigration (favoring those of a Jewish background, construed flexibly), pro-Jewish conversion, and pronatalism policies. As Susan Kahn writes, “Jewish citizens of the Jewish state come from only three places: from immigration, from conversion and from Jewish mothers” (Reference Kahn2000: 4). These policy domains do not rely solely on a demographic, numeric logic. All three are steeped in Jewish and Zionist ethics, schemes, and ideals. Pronatalism, for example, is fed by the religious imperative of procreation, an immigration to Israel and Jewish conversion are associated with the moralizing notions of the Ingathering of Exiles and homecoming. And yet, all three policy domains are undoubtedly informed by a quantitative logic concerning the size of the national fold, and they converge to form an institutional triangle of Zionist biopolitics directed toward producing and reproducing the national population as Jewish (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2012; Reference Kravel-Tovi2017; Lustick Reference Lustick1999).

We know much less about why and how the American-Jewish community, the largest and most powerful of the diasporic Jewish communities, operates to optimize its population course through mastering its numbers. Some striking counterpoints with the Israeli setting stand out from the outset. To begin with, as noted earlier, here population quantity denotes the precarious position of Jews as an assimilating minority group in an overtly open society in which choice and integration are sacralized. Unlike Israel, the American-Jewish community relies on a decentralized institutional infrastructure of demographic knowledge. Another difference is that, due to its pluralistic nature, it employs a variety of normative and research definitions of who counts as a Jew.

A foundation of these counterpoints is the voluntary nature of American Jewry. It is voluntary in two senses: First, it constitutes a voluntary polity. Alongside the organizational infrastructure of the main religious movements (i.e., Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism), “secular” organizations provide communal services (e.g., providing health, welfare, recreation) and participate in communal planning. The organized community is composed of a network of communities, federations, and leaders, each encompassing only those who wish to belong to them (Mirsky Reference Mirsky2011). This means that American Jewry's institutions govern without sovereignty, and their position of authority is relevant only for those Americans who care to identify as Jewish in one way or another, to associate with other Jews, and to mobilize for various collective Jewish causes (Elazar Reference Elazar1976).Footnote ⁵ As I will show, when American Jewish institutions seek to maintain or even boost the population's numbers by implementing specific policies, their power is unavoidably tethered to their voluntary nature.

Secondly and relatedly, Jewish identity itself is largely voluntary. It is a challenge to align American Jewish self-understandings with only one sociological category of identity. At different points in time, American Jews have used religion, ethnicity, and racial language, sometimes all at once, to describe their distinctiveness to themselves and to others (see also Stratton Reference Stratton2000). Even individuals seemingly ascribed a Jewish identity by virtue of birth (matrilineally, in line with Jewish law, or patrilineally, in line with the liberal principles of the Reform movement), choose for themselves whether to identify as Jews. They can also choose the degree and the means by which such an identification has practical significance in terms of their group bonds and affiliations. Other options are to formally convert out, or simply disengage from Jewish life. In this context, it is no surprise that even “Jews by birth” are increasingly regarded by Jewish organizations as “Jews by choice,” a term once reserved for converts to Judaism. The communal biopolitical endeavor to sustain a numerically viable Jewish community is closely tied to the voluntary nature of the Jewish population. It works on a population constituted not only by ancestry but also by sociological conditions that valorize and enable choice.Footnote ⁶

JEWS BY BIRTH: INSUFFICIENT JEWISH BABIES

In a Jerusalem Post article leading with the assertive and somewhat prescriptive headline “American Jews Need to Have More Babies,” Michael Siegal, outgoing chair of the Jewish Federation of North America remarked, “The one thing that is occurring in the United States which is most damaging is we're just not having enough babies in the non-Orthodox world, and that's going to create all kinds of issues for the American Jewish community 30 or 50 years from now” (quoted in Linde Reference Linde2015).

Siegal's diagnosis and prognosis are neither new nor surprising. Familiar, too, are his terms of discussion that locate the “problem” in the “non-Orthodox world.” Over the course of the twentieth century, since as early as the 1930s and even in the midst of America's post-World War II baby boom, sociologists and demographers have detected a steady decrease in the average size of the American Jewish family (Barack-Fishman Reference Barack-Fishman, Bayme and Rosen1994).Footnote ⁷ Time and again, this trend has caused apprehension among Jewish leaders and organizations, most notably following the publication of major socio-demographic studies.

But these studies have also had another effect: they have objectified the perceived gap between the Orthodox population and the rest, which is often termed, simply and tellingly, “non-Orthodox.” Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews differ considerably in their reproductive behavior: while Orthodox Jews (currently about 10 percent of American Jews) produce an average of 4.1 children per Jewish adult (markedly higher than the 2.2 of the U.S general public and the 2.1 replacement level), non-Orthodox Jews’ fertility rates fall between 1.4 and 1.8 (Pew Research Center 2013: 40).Footnote ⁸ As the prominent historian Jonathan Sarna ironically summarized the issue, “The Orthodox are having children and everybody else forgot how to do it” (quoted in Markoe Reference Markoe2015). Because these sectors also differ considerably in their religiosity and politics (the first align with Evangelical Christians more than with their liberal, non-Orthodox fellow Jews), the concerns that non-Orthodox leaders often articulate about the decreased rates of non-Orthodox fertility serve as a double proxy, for their concern about not only the numerical future of American-Jewry writ large but also the demographic, and possibly political, ascendance of non-liberal Judaism (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2018b; relatedly, see Boyarin Reference Boyarin2013: 150).Footnote ⁹

Decreasing Jewish fertility among the non-Orthodox in the United States mirrors broader demographic trends there and elsewhere; that is, the correlation between higher education, the availability of birth control, and ideologies of self-realization on one hand, and extended singlehood, decreasing marriage, and belated parenthood on the other. Excluding Orthodox Jews, American Jews resemble and even outpace their compatriots in these trends. To the extent that American Jews have become distinctively well-educated, relatively prosperous, and increasingly secularized, falling fertility rates are to be expected.

Worried over these trends, Jack Wertheimer—a notable public intellectual of American Jewry and a Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) professor of history known for his rather strident public voice about American-Jewish demography—responded with a portentous form of communal calculation. Commenting programmatically about the topic in the Jewish magazine Commentary, he stated: “The cumulative effect of these demographic trends is now being felt and will only become amplified as time goes by. In a community that has long since ceased to replace its natural losses, continued low fertility rates mean that the number of children in the communal pipeline will soon drop sharply, causing a decline over the next decade in enrollments in Jewish schools and other institutions for the young” (Wertheimer Reference Wertheimer2005). His words illuminate Siegal's vague statement about the communal future price of not having enough (non-Orthodox) babies; that is, enough babies to fill and animate communal institutions. Sharing Wertheimer's concerns, Elliott Dorff, a Conservative rabbi and professor of Jewish theology, wrote not long after: “If we are serious as a community in our attempt to replenish our numbers, we must develop policies and programs to encourage large families who are also deeply Jewish” (Reference Dorff2006: 102).

Attempts by Jewish organizations and leaders to craft and advocate such policies have not been straightforward. Circumscribed by Western liberal understandings regarding the private nature of family planning, and in the absence of a centralized decision from Jewish Federations concerning pronatalist policy, the communal response to low fertility rates has amounted to occasional brainstorming meetings, concerned public discussions and statements, and a few locally based initiatives. This hesitant and inconsistent communal response stands in marked contrast to the Israeli state's approach over the years to its population's reproduction.

Pronatalist ideology in Israel, eloquently captured by Hazelton's concept of “the cult of fertility” (Reference Hazelton1977), is both institutional and popular (Remennick Reference Remennick2000). Policy-wise, it embraces a wide and shifting array of mechanisms—legislative, executive, professional-medical, discursive, and governmental—with various degrees of state regulation (e.g., Kahn Reference Kahn2000; Portugese Reference Portugese1998; Berkovitch Reference Berkovitch1997). David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first and renowned prime minister, framed Jewish childbirth as a moral and national imperative: “Any Jewish woman who, as far as it depends on her, does not bring into the world at least four healthy children is shirking her duty to the nation, like a soldier who evades military service” (1971, in King Reference King2002: 362). This explicit norm-setting rhetoric is a governmental mechanism. It fashions an idealized Jewish woman who conducts her reproductive conduct in line with perceived quantified national responsibilities. A pronatalist logic has also been endorsed by other state mechanisms ranging from lawmaking (e.g., the Security Service Law, Sex Equality Law, and Children's Stipend), to public health initiatives (subsidies for reproductive technologies and bureaucratic restrictions on publicly funded abortions), to welfare programs (like subsidies for young couples’ housing and children's education) (see Bachi Reference Bachi, Pergola and Cohen1992: 28; Berkovitch Reference Berkovitch1997).

Against this backdrop, let me return to the relatively erratic and experimental American-Jewish approach to pronatalism. In October 1983, a coalition of twenty-five Jewish organizations convened in New York for the first “National Conference on Jewish Population Growth.” This was the first nation-wide institutional attempt to deal with what Jewish Press described as “the ‘catastrophic’ decline in the Jewish birth rate” (Zero Population Growth 1983). Jewish professionals, rabbis from leading rabbinical assemblies and synagogue councils, and journalists from the general and Jewish press gathered to brainstorm on possible strategies in response. Robert Gordis, a JTS Bible scholar, opened the gathering by emphasizing that alongside the ongoing threat of assimilation there was also the problem of a plummeting birthrate: “If a Jew assimilates,” he said, “there is always hope that he will return; but the child who is not born is lost forever” (American Jewish Committee 1983). “Even a minimal increase of the Jewish birthrate would more than justify our efforts,” Gordis concluded. The conference proceedings reveal attendees well-versed in demographic studies and motivated to take the steps necessary to mitigate the “catastrophe” the studies revealed.

What tools did these Jewish leaders have at their disposal? Their discussions revolved around possible advocacy strategies. These included an explicit linkage between the Holocaust and the moral responsibility incumbent on young Jews to form large families, so as to “[prevent] Hitler from attaining posthumous victories,” and a public, communal emphasis on marriage, childbearing, and large families as expressions of core Jewish values. There was also a call to counteract the Zero Population Growth movement as a political dogma (emerging in the context of modernization and overpopulation discourses) that simply could not apply to the Jewish situation. Unable to reach agreement about the legitimacy or efficacy of some of these messages, the conference attendees stressed several additional pragmatic arrangements, symbolic benefits, and material incentives that the community could provide. As attendees lamented that the American government did not foster a socio-economic environment conducive to childbearing, they presented suggestions of how Jewish community organizations could fill this policy void at the communal level. These ideas included sponsoring Jewish day care; mortgage assistance and subsidizing synagogue enrolment fees for large families; creating family-friendly Jewish settings; Jewish community agencies adopting liberal and flexible personnel practices to ease the work-life balance for parents; and mobilizing potential grandparents to financially support their children as the prospective parents of several children.

In October 2011, I interviewed Steven Bayme, the American Jewish Committee's director of contemporary Jewish life, in his office, not far from the venue of the conference twenty-eight years earlier. He described the 1983 conference to me as nothing less than a failure. According to Bayme, the battle over Jewish fertility was lost, first, when Jews entered the upper-middle classes, and second, when their leaders, including the conference attendees, refused to publicly stand up for what Bayme described as their Jewish values and intervene in their constituents’ family planning arrangements. Recalling the conference, he said,

Jack Wertheimer, Bayme's close ally in the battle cry of “Jewish continuity” (including by raising the Jewish birthrate), could not agree more. When I interviewed him that same October, he shared similar frustrations, and since the conference he has occasionally advocated publicly for the importance of lucid, unapologetic norm-setting. In 2005, for example, using the platform of the Conservative Commentary magazine, Wertheimer boldly accused the non-Orthodox organized community of being in a futile state of denial and presenting an artificial neutrality. He brought up the example of a daring rabbi in Manhattan, who, to the amazement of his Upper East Side audience, delivered a sermon on the link between what happens in the bedroom and the securing of a Jewish future in the United States. For Wertheimer, the exceptionality of this public voice demonstrated the ills of a Jewish leadership that confuses norm-setting for intrusion: “What is not permissible in polite Jewish company is an allusion to the decisions people make about their own family lives, or to the impact of those decisions on the ability of the Jewish community to sustain itself” (Wertheimer Reference Wertheimer2005).

What underlies Wertheimer's interpretation is not only a realistic understanding of the liberal mores of most American Jews; his critique also takes into consideration the voluntary nature, and hence power, of American-Jewish biopolitics. According to his logic, in their quest to include a wide array of potential members in their voluntary associations and synagogues—members who these organizations depend upon for institutional survival—Jewish leaders become paralyzed. By shying away from burdening individuals with collective demographic considerations, so his argument goes, they in fact hurt the Jewish future.

In fact, rabbis and other Jewish leaders do occasionally speak out about reproduction in morally prescriptive tones. Take, for example, the “Mitzvah Children” responsum (Abelson and Dorff Reference Abelson and Dorff2007), issued and endorsed in 2007 by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), a central forum on Jewish law in the Conservative Movement's Rabbinical Assembly. With the stated goal of “increas[ing] the number of Jews in the world” (ibid.: 2), this publicly circulated document tackles the question of how many children a young Jewish married couple should seek to have, and the duties incumbent on the Jewish community to make it possible for them to have more than two. Drawing on the idea of a mitzvah (a Jewish legal obligation), these rabbis attempted to mobilize Jews to reproduce earlier in life and in greater numbers, all in the name of communal responsibility. They directly asked couples to have, if possible, at least one more child than they had planned to, for the sake of the Jewish people, with a minimum of three (ibid.: 10).

Several years later, Jane Eisner, a prominent journalist and editor of the leading Jewish magazine The Forward, brought attention to the fraught issue of fertility which, she argued, the community generally overlooked (Reference Eisner2014). Under the headline “Be Fruitful and Multiply—Please?” Eisner tied the personal story of her non-replenishing family to the results of the 2013 Pew study in order to present a moral conclusion on behalf of the soon-to-be endangered population of non-Orthodox Jews: there was a need for a “marriage agenda.” Unsure what exactly might work to shift the demographic course, yet “refusing to bow to the inevitable,” she tried to untangle herself from liberal normative imperatives and find the right language to talk about marriage and child-bearing, a language that, she argued, progressive Jews had yet to discover.

Interestingly, most of the professional leaders I interviewed thought that Eisner's “marriage agenda” was pointless. They thought that American Jews procreate as upper-middle-class, white Americans and there is nothing “Jewish” in their reproductive behavior. Thus there is nothing the Jewish community can or should try to do, practically or normatively, to compel non-Orthodox Jews to change their demographic behavior (see also Kurtzer Reference Kurtzer2014; Prell Reference Prell2014).

When trying to figure out what can and should be done to increase childbearing, Jewish leaders often take their cue from “soft” pronatalist policies enacted by nation states, specifically financial subsidization of the education of children. Drawing on the biopolitical justifications that construct the biological life of the individual as a collective resource (Commentary 2006; Vogelstein and Jacobs Reference Vogelstein and Jacobs2003), they turn such interventions into feasible and legitimate policy options.

What is intriguing in the emphasis that many interlocutors place on strengthening communal funding for childhood education is the assumption that the education platform not only helps nurture “the right kind of Jews” (as Goldstein put it), but also serves as an incentive for procreation. Once or twice, I was told a joke about how the high tuition fees for the Hebrew Day School system worked as “Jewish birth control.” I came to appreciate more fully the reality of this joke when I interviewed Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner in his spacious office in Temple Emanu-El, a flourishing Conservative synagogue in an affluent New Jersey suburb. He explained, somewhat apologetically, why he and his spouse have “only” two children. He calculated the aggregating expenses over the years for the children's formal and informal Jewish education to demonstrate the formidable challenge of raising a Jewish child in contemporary America. It is because the Kirshners care deeply about “producing” engaged, committed Jewish children, and understand the economic investment that this voluntary production demands, that they decided to plan their family as they did. For them, at least, a balance was required between the biological and cultural imperatives of strengthening Jewish numbers, and they compromised quantity for the sake of quality.

One area that has emerged in the last few years as a locus of communal conversations and financial investments is infertility. Although this topic emerged as a grassroots topic from below, the establishment has begun to embrace it (Linde Reference Linde2015). Driven, at least in part, by the overwhelming financial cost of fertility treatments, these conversations are in the main led by Jewish women and couples who had struggled with infertility and are reaching out to other community members in similar vulnerable circumstances. Some women have published opinion pieces in the Jewish press or have spoken on Eli Talk (a digital platform, similar to TED), sharing personal stories and urging the organized Jewish community to prioritize the issue. Others have gone still further and established local foundations to support infertile Jewish couples. “Making Miracle Fertility Fund,” “Jewish Fertility Foundation,” and “Hasidah” (“stork” in Hebrew) are three such foundations, and some of them operate in partnership with local Jewish Federations (Maltz Bovy Reference Maltz Bovy2017).

These initiatives are grounded in the wish to build communal awareness of a silenced topic, one that resonates with biblical myths and Jewish family values. But this message is often “marketed” strategically in biopolitical terms, applying a quantitative logic to the issue of population size. By emphasizing the demographic added-value of communally funded in vitro fertilization and the financial support that the Israeli state invests in addressing similar concerns, Jewish continuity helps concretize the issue of infertility on the communal agenda (Hoffman Reference Hoffman2016). “After all,” as Michelle Ben-Aviv, founder of the “Making Miracle Fertility Fund,” wrote in The Forward, “there can be no ‘Jewish continuity’—nor assimilation or intermarriage to worry about—if we don't have Jewish children in the first place” (Reference Ben2016).Footnote ¹⁰

Naomi Less, a New York Jewish educator who has discussed her struggles with infertility publicly, stretched the irony implied in Ben-Aviv's words by offering a BirthRATE program (ELI Talks Reference Talks2016). Under the suggestive title, “Looking for a Solution for Jewish Continuity?” she playfully, yet critically juxtaposed insufficient communal investment in infertility with the tremendous communal investment in “Birthright Israel.” This costly program introduces young adult diaspora Jews to Israel and is underwritten by a not-so-secret objective: encouraging more Jewish families and babies. Her policy conclusion, both pragmatic and moral, was clear: to take communal responsibility over Jews ready to conceive here and now, rather than investing in speculative reproductive futures.

JEWISH FAMILIES BY CHOICE: THE MATHEMATICS OF INTERMARRIAGE

Under the heading “Is Intermarriage Good for the Jews?” the American-Jewish Moment magazine in November 2017 published a symposium on intermarriage (Cooper Reference Cooper2017). The timing was not coincidental, since that summer two influential New York City-based rabbis associated with the Conservative Movement had publicly expressed remarkably liberal, inclusive views of intermarriage that sparked denunciations on a national scale (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2018a).

In fact, though, the subject of intermarriage requires remarkably little to be ignited. It is one of the most contentious issues to have plagued the American-Jewish public, as well as other diasporic Jewish communities, over the last several decades. The issue is entangled in historical sensibilities, religious laws, communal taboos, and shifting social realities.Footnote ¹¹ In line with massive integration and de-racialization (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; relatedly, see Stratton Reference Stratton2000) and mirroring similarly expanding patterns of inter-ethnic marriage in America (Sarna Reference Sarna2004: 361), Jews have begun to intermarry with non-Jews at remarkably higher rates than did preceding generations. For many, intermarriage had become an indicator of the community's loss of particularity and vitality.

The symposium was a collection of short opinion pieces written by public figures and religious leaders differently positioned within the community, and offered what one would expect: heterogeneous, polyphonic, communal conversation. Also unsurprisingly, the symposium, like many discussions of the topic was defined by a biopolitical perspective on the number of Jews. The symposium as a whole adhered to the dominant idea that a socio-demographic crisis is at hand. In so doing, it demonstrated the extent to which intermarriage is not only a locus of religious deliberations or family counseling, but also an object of mathematical calculation.

This framing of intermarriage is not new. Historian Lila Corwin Berman shows how post-World War II rabbis, by that time well-versed in the vocabulary of American sociology, debated the link between Jewish survival and a communal policy on intermarriage (Reference Corwin Berman2009: 70). Enjoying the fruits of their status as full-fledged Americans, yet fearful of the erosion of a distinct Jewish identity, many rabbis struggled to reconcile what they perceived as a zero-sum game between liberal politics and communal survival (ibid.: 158).

The 1960s, the decade of “the first continuity crisis” (Sanua Reference Sanua2007), witnessed institutional and public panic over what Look magazine famously dubbed the “vanishing American Jew.” As the American Jewish Committee's executive vice president, speaking about intermarriage during the Committee's 1964 annual conference, concluded: “we should be concerned about Jewish population policy, which has not occurred to anyone in the Jewish group up to this time” (ibid.: 115). Advocacy for in-marriage, conversion to Judaism, and even the mass immigration of American Jews to Israel (where they would, predictably, marry fellow Jews), featured in the flurry of policy suggestions raised during that decade as solutions for the menace of intermarriage. These policy ideas conveyed a simple mathematic formula: an intermarried Jew equals the loss of a Jew. Together with his or her offspring, the intermarried Jew, so the logic went, unavoidably leads to a net loss for the Jewish people. Alternative calculations, showing how intermarriage might in fact lead to potential demographic gains (i.e., the conversion of non-Jewish spouses, raising children of interfaith families as Jewish), did not gain currency. The 1971 NJPS Survey reported a 30 percent population of intermarried Jews, and in 1975 two notable Harvard University professors offered a dire population projection for the twenty-first century, based mainly on a calculation of possible intermarriage rates (Gordis Reference Gordis1982; National Jewish Population Survey [NJPS] 1971).

These mathematic exercises became particularly acute and pervasive in the aftermath of NJPS 1990. The survey created a watershed moment, rendering intermarriage into the bogeyman of identity erosion and eventual demographic decline (for a critical view, see Thompson Reference Thompson2014). Under the dominant assumption that intermarriage both portends and precipitates a rejection of Jewish identity and inertia, the iconized number 52 percent became a symbol of the affectively loaded yet pervasive term, the “silent Holocaust.” In the 1990s, this number served as a springboard for policy statements (e.g., American Jewish Committee 1997) and led to a spurt of Jewish identity and continuity commissions and task forces across the country, and numerous initiatives promoting the cultivation of Jewish identity and sociability.

Taking various forms and scales, these initiatives targeted several cohorts whose exposure to Jewish education and experiences seemed the most beneficial from a communal perspective: children, youth, and young adults. The specification of these cohorts is telling because they entail, and entangle, the biological and cultural intergenerational transmission of Jewishness. “High-quality” Jewish identity at these particular life stages enhances communal functioning by contributing to the numerical growth of the population, in particular of “the kind of Jews” who will fill synagogue pews, Jewish Community Centers, and Jewish summer camps. The idea and goal behind this identity industry was that a boosted Jewish identity among these demographics would ultimately lead to the choice to build a life with a Jewish partner. Given the equation between intermarriage and demographic losses, the numerical, accumulated implications of this enterprise seemed clear.

Nowhere has this logic been actualized more evidently than in the ambitious “Jewish continuity” project of “Taglit—Birthright Israel.” Considered by some to be emblematic of what “productive anxiety” can create (Kurtzer Reference Kurtzer2014), Birthright Israel is a collaborative brainchild of family charitable foundations, the Jewish Federation movement, and the Israeli government. It provides a ten-day educational “homeland” tour of Israel, free of charge, for youths and young adults (18–32) of Jewish descent. Initially an entrepreneurial experiment catering to American Jewry, it has grown since its establishment in 1999 into a world-wide endeavor. Even if Birthright thrives on the image of a “free gift” from the Jewish people, the moral economies of exchange configured between individual Jews and the collective are far more complicated. As the sociologist Shaul Kelner has demonstrated convincingly, Birthright is a “strategic investment in the Jewish future” (Reference Kelner2010: 45), the currency of which is highly measurable in quantifiable terms. Its “returns” are quite clear. The flood of evaluation and policy studies on Birthright disclose that the “impact” of the program is refracted through a range of favorable results for the making of more Jews, of the right kind. These results include placing higher value on in-marriage, higher rates of in-marriage, and increased rates of conversion among the non-Jewish spouses of birthright alumni (Saxe et al. Reference Saxe2010). Although Birthright never pinpointed in-marriage as an explicit goal, this social scientific data has joined anecdotal data, jokes, and rumors to altogether solidify the common wisdom associating Birthright with in-marriage. As one Orthodox Jewish author put it, Birthright is an “intermarriage preventer” (Sacket Reference Sacket2017).

Alongside Birthright, there are numerous local, communal and grassroots initiatives (revolving around learning, spirituality, political activism, social justice and virtually any other shared activity) that facilitate kinship between single Jewish young adults. There are also market-based Jewish dating enterprises, such as Jdate and the recent JCrush App, which indirectly serve communal agendas (Handwerker Reference Handwerker2018). That one of my interviewees, a Conservative rabbi, told me that his synagogue purchases Jdate subscriptions for single congregants attests to such unintended collaborations between the organized Jewish community and the market. Pro-conversion agendas, which render intermarriage into in-marriage, have also been proposed by organizations and experts (Barack-Fishman Reference Barack-Fishman2004).

Notwithstanding all these pro-in-marriage and pro-conversion initiatives, Jewish organizations have by and large accustomed themselves to the presence of interfaith families. All my interviewees shared how their non-Orthodox synagogues, as well as secular institutions such as Federations and family agencies, are eager to serve interfaith families. While there are variations and nuances in terms of particular affiliation, locality, and community, this inclusive spirit is generally on the rise. Whether informed by an enthusiastic ideology of “opening the gates” (Tobin Reference Tobin1999), or simply adopting a realistic, marketing-oriented approach toward potential clientele, many Jewish organizations, wanting to remain relevant, try their best to attract interfaith people.

While attending panels on intermarriage during two General Assembly conferences (in 2010 and 2011), I learned that, for many liberal Jewish leaders, whether the non-Jewish spouse actually converts or simply becomes communally engaged (becoming what Shaul Magid [Reference Magid2014] astutely dubbed as “Jewish non-Jews”) remains immaterial. Unlike the Israeli state, which cares a great deal about the formal, bureaucratic Jewish status of its citizens in order to count them in (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2017), these formalities do not necessarily make a difference in the voluntary communities of American Jewry (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2018a).

Furthermore, during the General Assembly panels I learned again and again that intermarriage has been normalized to the extent that some experience exposure to advocacy of in-marriage or conversion of non-Jewish spouses as a parochial and even racial affront. Moreover, it seemed that many Jewish professionals take such messages to be counterproductive and irresponsible, demographically speaking. The idea of choice, so central for the understanding of the “in-marriage” policies I have described, is equally central to this outreach arithmetic. The idea I heard repeatedly is that these couples, if treated well, might choose to remain, and raise their children, within the Jewish community. And just as the Jewishness of in-married couples is not guaranteed—choosing to marry a Jew is not enough, since biological reproduction alone does not suffice—neither are intermarried couples doomed to opt out. To the extent that there is choice, there is also hope.

Many of the non-Orthodox Jewish professionals interviewed for this study reiterated this “language of volition” (Corwin Berman Reference Corwin Berman2009) while placing the responsibility on communal organizations to engage the young (see also Friedman and Kornfeld Reference Friedman and Kornfeld2018). One spoke about the need to be strategic in turning the non-Jewish spouse into an “asset,” while another angrily denounced the accumulative, demographic damage wrought by the communities and organizations that fail to welcome non-Jewish spouses. This logic of volition fuels the educational programs many Jewish outreach organizations have designed for interfaith families (e.g., Thompson Reference Thompson2014), for example, the mission of “Honeymoon Israel,” a Birthright-like immersive tour of Israel designed for young couples with at least one Jewish partner.

The idea that interfaith families can choose to be Jewish or “Jewish and something else” has opened up a range of communal opportunities, and arithmetic exercises. The latter frame the “usefulness” of individuals as valuable resources for the communal body politics all the more explicitly. “Some observers of the Jewish community,” writes the sociologist Sylvia Barack-Fishman in her book on intermarriage (entitled, tellingly, Double or Nothing?), “…note that when two Jews marry, only one married household is created, whereas when a Jew marries a non-Jew, two ‘Jewish’ households can be counted, one for each Jew involved. Were all the children raised in these mixed-married households to identify as Jews and grow up to create new Jewish homes of their own, the reasoning goes, the American Jewish community would actually experience a communal and population increase…” (Barack-Fishman Reference Barack-Fishman2004: 7).

In theory, “the arithmetic is straightforward: when a Jew marries a Jew, we ‘use up’ two Jews. But when a Jew marries a non-Jew, we ‘use up’ only one Jew. If half of the resulting couples succeed in producing Jewish children, the effect of intermarriage for the next generation will be population-neutral. If more than half do, intermarriage can actually help enlarge Jewish numbers” (Cohen Reference Cohen2015). But in practice, the mathematics of what can be called the “Jewish family by choice” is quite contentious and indeterminate. The religious stream one affiliates with, or the lack of any affiliation thereof, whether the non-Jewish spouse formally converted to Judaism or not, and whether the Jewish partner is male or a female—these, and other variables are all factored in when calculating the intergenerational transmission of Jewishness in interfaith families.Footnote ¹² Will the offspring of intermarried Jews identify as Jews? Will they themselves chose to intermarry, and how engaged will they become? Do Jewish converts “count more” than Jewishly engaged non-Jewish parents, and are they more likely to raise Jewish offspring? And how thin and nominal will the Jewishness of those with less-anchored Jewish connections be, such as the grandchildren of intermarried families?

The 2013 Pew study pushed these frantic questions to the very edge. Foregrounding certain concepts as elevated categories to think through (e.g., the “nones”—Jews of no religion—and the “non-Orthodox”), and offering new data for social scientists to sink their teeth into, the study launched endless arithmetic exercises and policy discussions (Sasson Reference Sasson2013; Wertheimer and Cohen Reference Wertheimer and Cohen2014b), exacerbating already extant disagreements about whether intermarriage is “good for the Jews” (Cohen Reference Cohen2015).

MAKING JEWS: THE CALL FOR A JEWISH PUBLIC HEALTH EDUCATION

In October 2015, two years after the release of the Pew's Portrait of Jewish Americans, a group of more than seventy Jewish leaders, of various positionings, published a “statement on Jewish vitality.” Published in eJewish Philanthropy—a key digital forum for policy makers and philanthropists—the statement was framed as a call for strategic action (eJewish Philanthropy Reference Philanthropy2015). Remarkably, it captures key features of the American-Jewish policy world regarding the Jewish future and foregrounds the voluntary nature of its biopolitical engagements with the population.

Speaking the idiom of crisis, the statement generally draws on what I describe elsewhere as discourses of “wet numbers”: “dry data” soaked in candid, dramatic, and affect-laden depictions (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi, Kravel-Tovi and Dash-Moore2016). The intersections and conversations between social science and policy-making are expressed throughout the statement, as well as through the collection of signatories, who are prominent scholars, social scientists, rabbis, educators, and policy professionals.

The statement diagnoses the ills of both the endangered population and the oblivious leadership, and advocates for nothing less than a “Jewish Public Health Education,” a medicalized language that scarcely masks its biopolitical overtones (see, comparatively, Urla and Burdick Reference Urla and Burdick2018). The statement takes its cue from the extensive public-health education initiatives to extend life expectancy and calls on the Jewish community to “teach concerned Jewish grandparents and parents how to improve the lives of their family members and make their progeny stronger, more engaged Jews.” This interventionist, top-down prescription to strengthen the population by bettering their Jewish identity resonates to some extent with the suggestion made a year earlier by Jerry Silverman, the Jewish Federation of North America's CEO, to regard “areas in our country where our population is concentrated yet, ironically, suffers more tenuous ties to Jewish life” as “Jewish Development Zones” (Reference Silverman2014).

The voluntary nature of this Jewish biopolitics is also revealed in the document. The statement itself embodies this volutarism: it is a document written by leaders who care tremendously and invest free time and effort to both describe a social reality and prescribe a social policy for audiences who care to listen. In trying to mobilize for concerted communal action across a variety of fronts, these leaders draw on the power of social scientific knowledge, their own public clout, and the strength of the communal institutional infrastructure, particularly through venues of Jewish education. The list of signatories, who are associated with various academic and Jewish institutions, reflects American-Jewry's decentered structure of power. And their policy suggestions are all “soft” instruments (Hertin et al. Reference Hertin2004): voluntary, educational, and informative. The statement was intended to stir thought and deliberation, with the hope that some of its ideas would be picked up and further developed by other concerned Jewish leaders. The statement also demonstrates how the community is mobilizing to take over responsibility for Jewish socialization as Jewish families become less capable of doing so in an age of choice (see Boyarin Reference Boyarin2013: 149; Wertheimer Reference Wertheimer2007).

Furthermore, because the population the statement speaks to and about constitutes voluntarily as an identity-based community, the solutions offered for the specter of dwindling numbers include, and are inseparable from, the cultivation and educational reproduction of quality, effective Jewish identity. In a community that draws on the voluntary choices, commitments, and identity-formations of its constituents, biopolitical engagements with quantity are not linked only to the body; as Frank Mott, a senior researcher of NJPS 2000–2001 astutely remarked, “The way children are raised [becomes] a significant demographic force” (Reference Mott2006).

His statement pinpoints variables linked to biological reproduction, such as late marriage, non-marriage, increasing intermarriage, and low birthrates, together with others related to cultural reproduction, including the disaffiliation and “disappearance” of two million assimilated Jews, weak social connections, and declines in the number of engaged Jews. They are all on the same list. Unborn Jewish children (due to belated marriage and extended singlehood) are put aside with offspring of Jews who no longer identify as Jewish. This is why the “Jewish Public Health Education” is in essence an attempt to not only call attention to endangering, decreasing rates of biological reproduction, but also to suggest educational interventions to optimize the population: to “keep Jewish people Jewish” (Markoe Reference Markoe2015) and create what one population study described as “effectively Jewish children” (see, critically, Boyarin Reference Boyarin2013: 149). Again, caring and catering for the young (children, teenagers, and young adults) exemplifies this biopolitical logic, since it is intended to shape Jews when they have, potentially, a lifelong contribution to make to both the population and the community, when they are at critical stages of identity construction and in phases most likely synchronized with biological reproduction. Indeed, the Jewish Public Health Education proposal underscores “the value of day schools, education through the high school years, Jewish camps, Israel trips, youth groups, and attending universities with strong Jewish campus communities.”

Jewish education has demographic force because American Jewry cannot count on nominal Jews—often called, sarcastically, “Jew-ish,” those who would only identify themselves or identified by others as such, in surveys for examples, mostly on grounds of descent. It needs from its constituents, and a sufficient number of them (Bitton and Cohen Reference Bitton and Cohen2015; Dashefsky and Sheskin Reference Dashefsky and Sheskin2017), a thicker and more substantial set of binders and affinities, however defined and practiced. This is why “engagement” carries so much by way of numerical and institutional uncertainty, but also promise, in contemporary American life. It is why Jewish identity itself is intensively measured and quantified, and why the “industry” surrounding the cultivation of Jewish identity has been increasingly marked by professionalized standards of accountability, measurement, and audit culture, and quantifying assessments of the “return on investment.” Jewish education and engagement enmeshes quantity with quality and population with community. And as a potential compensation for decreasing biological reproduction, it has become an object of sociodemographic intervention.Footnote ¹³