Study: U.S. Jews drift from faith

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By Julia Duin

The rate of religious observance among American Jews has dropped precipitously over the past two decades, to the point where more than one out of every three Jews is thoroughly secularized, according to a new survey.

The 2008 American Jewish Identification Survey (AJIS), part of a broader survey of U.S. religious identification, also showed that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Jews - regardless of their religious practice - decreased slightly from 5.5 million in 1990 to 5.2 million to 5.4 million today.

The composition of that group also has changed dramatically since 1990, the survey showed. Where just 20 percent of Jewish adults - about 1.12 million people - described themselves as nonreligious or cultural Jews 19 years ago, that total has risen to about 35 percent or 1.88 million people.

The survey, released by Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., was a follow-up from two earlier AJIS surveys in 1990 and 2001. The 2001 survey showed the declining religiosity among Jews that continued in the 2008 study.

"I attribute the shift to a combination of disaffection from Judaism and intermarriage," said Barry Kosmin, who co-directed the 2008 AJIS survey. "Since 1990, half of all marrying American Jews have married non-Jews, with the result that there are two new mixed households for every homogeneous Jewish one."

His survey of 1,000 self-identified Jews raises profound questions about the future viability of one of the world's oldest religions. It was part of a larger American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 54,000 Americans conducted from February to November 2008.

The survey will raise alarm bells among American Jews, but it shouldn't, said Orthodox Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

"This gives our leaders the opportunity to respond to where Jewish people are," he said. "They should resist the urge to bemoan where they are not."

The study, he added, "doesn't say the Jewish people or Judaism is dying. What it is saying is the way religiously identified Jews are practicing their Judaism is not working for a lot of people. It's an opportunity - the kind of opportunity that paved the way for the Protestant Reformation."

But Ariela Keysar, a survey co-researcher, said the findings showed a "huge" disconnect between Jews and other sectors of American society.