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When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘spirituality’
JEWISH SOCIOLOGY: PEW’S IMPRECISE AND MISLEADING CONSTRUCT OF “JEWS OF NO RELIGION”
Credit: Pew Research Center
Of the many interesting aspects of the recently released survey of Jewish Americans by the Pew Research Center (the “Pew Portrait”), perhaps none is more troubling than the distorted bisection of American Jews into two primary sub-groups, one labeled “Jews by religion” and the other “Jews of no religion.” Once those designations were established, Pew, among other things, then sought to determine whether members of the two sub-groups had different attitudes or characteristics, whether, for instance, a person assigned to one sub-group was more likely or less likely to believe or behave differently than a person assigned to the other.
How large is the group of “Jews of no religion?” Pew found that about one fifth of adult American Jews (totaling approximately 1.2 million individuals) were Jews of “no religion” and that among Jews born after 1980 (“Jewish Millennials”) the fraction increases to one in every three. (See Portrait, at 7, 23, 32/214.) Pew’s survey director reportedly said that the rise in the number of Jews “of no religion” was the most significant finding of the study.
Just as one might expect, as soon as the Pew Portrait was published, the commentary class waxed wise on Pew’s findings about the Jews of no religion. Much of the concern expressed was about related findings that Jews of no religion were less connected to the Jewish community, less likely to be involved in Jewish organizations and less likely to raise their children as Jewish. (See Portrait, 60-62, 67-69/214.)
In all the hubbub, an important fact seems to have been overlooked: not only is the label “Jews of no religion” awkward, nowhere in the more than two hundred pages of the Pew Portrait does Pew precisely define what it means by “religion.” Pew’s failure to do so has created unnecessary ambiguity and confusion and muddled its survey results. At one point Pew says that Jews of no religion are “also commonly called secular or cultural Jews.” (See Portrait, at 8/214.) But those characterizations were not offered as primary choices in Pew’s survey questionnaire. (See Portrait, at 177, 186/214.) A look at the survey, beyond the executive summary, reveals some of the problems of Pew’s binary construct which is, perhaps, more provocative than probative. read more
Jewish Spirituality: When Defining Something is Harder than Discussing It
You know, or should know, there is a problem, when you cannot define the subject that you want to discuss or analyze. Potter Stewart famously faced such a situation when he acknowledged that he could not say what hard core pornography was. That inability did not, however, preclude Justice Stewart from also declaring that he knew it when he saw it. (See, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964). Not only that, despite his lack of a definition, Justice Stewart was able to express his opinion about an allegedly obscene film and concur in a Supreme Court decision reversing the criminal conviction of a manager of a motion picture theatre.
Not to equate the two situations in any way, but the same sort of problem attaches to Jewish Spirituality. What is that exactly? And if we cannot define it, will we at least, like Justice Stewart, know it when we see it? And be able to talk sensibly about it, measure it, and do something concerning it?
Whatever Jewish Spirituality is, it seems to be drawing a fair amount of attention. We can measure attention drawing fairly easily these days. All one needs to do is run a few Google searches. If you did that one night in early April, 2012, within less than a second, you would have learned that there are over 33,800,000 sites that Google has identified as relating to Jewish Spirituality. Is that a lot? Well, similar search results in only 2,030,000 sites for Reform Judaism, the largest of the Jewish denominations in North America, and Reform Judaism appears to elicit about twice as much interest, as measured by the Google search count, as does Orthodox Judaism, for instance, which generates only 1,070,000 sites. Searches for Conservative Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism yielded 738,000 and 459,000 sites respectively. And for perspective, consider that the results for Justin Bieber exceeded 640,000,000, thankfully less than the number for President Barack Obama at 943,000,000. read more