The Challenges Facing American Jews

Last May, the Pew Research Center issued a report on "Jewish Americans in 2020" based upon a wide-ranging survey. Anticipating the report's imminent release, one journalist predicted: "If history is any guide, the results will launch a thousand internal Jewish debates about who is a Jew, who gets to decide, and what's the future for a diverse, splintered, assimilated, and persistent community of communities." Yet nothing of the sort has happened, as a simple Google search makes plain: In quantitative terms there are four times as many web entries for the previous national survey of American Jews as compared to the new one. Rather than stimulate debates, "Jewish Americans in 2020" has received only muted attention from communal policymakers.