Carmel Chiswick is the rare example of an academic economist who has devoted a substantial portion of her career to the study of contemporary Jewish life and its recent past. Her work addresses the crucial topic of Jews’ religious adaptations as a function of economic choice.

As a rule, historians dealing with Jewish economies have focused on such topics as their distribution in the labor force, occupational profile, commercial orientations, networks, and contributions. Chiswick covers some of this ground but her principal analytical framework is refreshingly different. In place of the typical preoccupation with Jews as economically anomalous, or as comprising a “middleman minority” of service and commercial specialists, Chiswick asks what religious trade-offs and adaptations American Jews chose to make in light of the shifting value of their time. This emphasis on “time allocation” reflects the labor economist's concern with the concept of “full price,” namely, “the sum of the money price of an item plus the value of time spent in its consumption.” As Chiswick notes, despite their initial poverty, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe (her study of American Jewry concentrates largely on the twentieth century) began their working lives in the United States with significantly higher earnings than they experienced in the old country. As earnings rose steadily (even phenomenally) in the following century the cost of being Jewish—or rather of Jewish religious practice—increased proportionately. When thinking of the American Jewish experience we might replace the old Yiddish saying, “siz shver tzu zayn a yid” (it's hard to be a Jew) with another: “siz tayer tzu zayn a yid” (it's expensive to be a Jew). This is because time devoted to the acquisition of Jewish education, skills, religious rituals, and practices constituted opportunity costs subtracting from what might otherwise have been earned at work. As Jews prospered over time the costs of investing in Jewish as opposed to secular human capital rose consistently and acted as a powerful disincentive to the maintenance of old-world Jewish tradition.

But Chiswick's analysis is neither linear nor reductive. Economics provides a set of incentives and constraints that may be predictive but are not necessarily determinative. Immigrants invested in acculturation, and invested heavily in their children. Those human capital investments that were compatible with Americanization became optimal, while those that acted as a break on assimilation were eschewed by most. Membership in a Jewish community generally proved necessary, initially in the form of an “ethnic enclave” that transitionally preserved some of the utility of old-world knowledge, but later via institutions that essentially complemented or even facilitated the acquisition of the skills necessary to advance in American life. Among the latter were “parareligious” organizations, typically philanthropic, that embodied within a Jewish protective shell the liberal values of the larger culture. Jews economized by creating a distinctive Jewish institutional culture that projected and asserted the qualities they associated with American life. At times Chiswick conflates this emphasis on liberal and democratic values with traditional Jewish ideals, but on the whole her analysis clearly differentiates between the transhistorical Jewish “great tradition” and the sequence of “little traditions” (here employing the terminology of anthropologist Robert Redfield) of which American Judaism is but a recent iteration. The great value of her book is to show how economic choice—particularly with regard to time allocation—has been key to the development of the American Jewish “little tradition.”

This framework works well for understanding mid-twentieth-century denominational Judaism, where income can be roughly correlated with membership in Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox congregations. It is somewhat less coherent when applied to the last quarter of the twentieth century, which sees Jews achieving high income parity across the denominational spectrum. In this situation the law of diminishing returns suggests that little more will be gained through further investment in secular human capital. Consequently, a fraction of well-off Jews now chooses to invest in the time-intensive activity of Judaism. This leads to what Chiswick labels “the paradox of ‘apathy and renewal,’” a situation of increasingly widespread disaffiliation among the majority of American Jews, occurring side by side with an expansion of Jewish literacy among a minority. Chiswick further argues that the features that characterized assimilating Jews in the mid-twentieth century (disproportionately high economic and educational achievement) are now increasingly characteristic of non-Jews as well, rendering secular Jews less and less distinctive. Since secular Jewish and non-Jewish Americans now share much the same culture and values, leading to ever-higher rates of intermarriage, the Jewish community of the future, Chiswick forecasts, is less likely to be defined by ethnicity and secular cultural markers and more by religion. “Even as the Jewish community of the future shrinks to a fraction of its present size, the remainder—still, mostly non-Orthodox—will have a higher commitment to religious Judaism,” she predicts (190). If she is right, the secular Jewish model advanced by organizations like the Posen Foundation will have diminished prospects.

These and other stimulating insights, relatively abundant in Judaism in Transition, must nevertheless be plucked by the reader from a narrative encumbered by bland descriptions and definitions of Jewish history and its major rituals and practices. Despite its brevity, the book lacks adequate documentation, detail, and historical specificity. Unsure whether it wants to be a summa or a basic primer, anecdotal and autobiographical or analytic and empirical, the book fails to build its argument systematically or flesh out its conclusions adequately. That is a shame, for in it Chiswick presents a set of analytical tools that can be usefully applied not just to the study of Jews in the twentieth-century United States but for all periods of history.