Most of the conversation surrounding that new survey of New York’s Jewish population, released in early June by UJA-Federation of New York, has been focused on its two big, gee-whiz numbers: the one-third of Jews in the region (40% in New York City proper) who are Orthodox and the 20% who are poor. It’s understandable that those findings would capture our imagination, since they fly in the face of our usual image of the affluent, urbane, freethinking New York Jew. But that’s only part of the story.
The Orthodox numbers are hard to ignore, of course, because they’re rising fast and reshaping the face of New York Jewry. Among children under 18 in area Jewish households, 61% are Orthodox. In turn, 61% of those Orthodox children are Hasidic; their families tend to be huge, poor and relatively uneducated in secular terms. In contrast, declining numbers of Jews in the region call themselves Reform or Conservative, while a growing proportion don’t identify with any denomination — in most cases because they’re not interested. Around 40% of non-Orthodox Jewish households are of mixed faith, and fewer than one-third of intermarrieds report that their children are being raised Jewish.
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