Is It Too Late to Save American Jewry?

Exactly two years ago today, the Pew Research Center published a blockbuster study, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” that provided the most detailed research about Jewish identity in this country in more than 20 years. The results were not unexpected, but they were nonetheless shocking. Non-Orthodox Jewry is undergoing what amounts to a demographic collapse. The end of the barriers to Jewish acceptance in society is, as I wrote at the time in COMMENTARY, a tribute to American exceptionalism and freedom. But this has also contributed to the breakdown of Jewish communal life as intermarriage rates and assimilation rates soared and affiliation and belief in Judaism as a religion and a sense of Jewish peoplehood declined. The key question since the release of the Pew Survey has been what, if anything, was the organized Jewish world prepared to do to counter these trends. But the answer from the umbrella philanthropies and major groups that dominate communal life and speak for most Jews has, for the most part, been silence. Yet it is still not too late for a vigorous response and into that breached has stepped a group of Jewish thinkers, scholars and religious figures who have endorsed a “Strategic Directions For Jewish Life: A Call to Action” with recommendations in this paper for a change in priorities and specific proposals that can help stem the tide of collapse. Every Jew, no matter where they fit in on the religious or political spectrum ought to read it and to reach out to their community to encourage both individuals and institutions to implement its suggestions.