Posted in Israel, Statistics on May 8th, 2008
Today’s New York Times has an article by Ethan Bronner on Israel’s 60th anniversary, and how the country is celebrating by inviting a collection of the world’s top political, scientific and business thinkers to discuss major world challenges–with a uniquely Jewish and Israeli spin, of course.
Of course the article can’t avoid mentioning Middle Eastern politics, […]
Posted in Statistics on May 2nd, 2008
Yesterday, I explored the study It’s Not Just Who Stands Under the Chuppah: Intermarriage and Engagement, co-authored by demographer Leonard Saxe, as well as the response that sociologist Steven Cohen offered at the Reform rabbinical convention in March.
After writing the post, I exchanged emails with Saxe. He responded to my concern that the study appeared […]
Posted in Statistics on Apr 30th, 2008
At the Reform rabbinical convention in late March, the two leading academics in the debate over intermarriage squared off. In one corner was Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. In the other corner was Steven Cohen, research professor of Jewish social […]
Posted in Interfaith identity, Parenting/raising children, Statistics on Apr 1st, 2008
InterfaithFamily.com has been in the press lately, and I just wanted to share some of the articles and some quotes with you.
Julie Wiener wrote a column this past week on why her interfaith family is committed to lighting Shabbat candles. She found out she’s not unusual:
Interestingly, there are quite a few of us die-hard candle-lighting […]
Posted in Statistics on Mar 11th, 2008
One of our central messages has always been that interfaith couples can offer their children just as strong a sense of Jewish identity as their inmarried brethren. But besides our own research, almost no studies have focused on the population of interfaith families raising Jewish children. Until now.
A new report from the Boston Jewish federation analyzing […]
Posted in Statistics on Feb 25th, 2008
I’m taking a look at the preliminary findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life US Religious Landscape survey. (You can download it as a .pdf file here.) This survey showed that 69% of Jews were in-married and 31% reported being married to a person of a different religious background. The Pew Forum […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Statistics, Intermarriage on Dec 26th, 2007
In the sciences all experiments require controls as well as subjects. Controls allow scientists to see if the expected results from an altered environment are any different than what would occur in an unaltered environment.
Typically, research on intermarriage in the Jewish community has looked at the effect of intermarriage on Jewish behavior as a binary […]
Posted in Statistics, Intermarriage on Dec 11th, 2007
A recent story in The Forward reported that Portland, Maine, has the highest rate of intermarriage in the country.
While true, the number cited in the story–61%–is a little different than the number typically used when citing intermarriage rates. The most commonly cited intermarriage rate is the percentage of married Jews who are married to non-Jews […]
Posted in Passover, IFF in the news, Statistics on Apr 9th, 2007
I was going to write about some other things today–namely, a new JTA article on the conversion of patrilineal Jews–but when your organization gets mentioned in the New York Times, everything else becomes a second priority.
Sam Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew, wrote a column about an interfaith couple where both partners are committed […]
Posted in Statistics on Feb 19th, 2007
Shmuel Rosner, Ha’aretz’s American correspondent, continues his ongoing series of interviews with American experts on Jewish demography and intermarriage with the start of a Q&A with Len Saxe, the co-author of the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study and the just-published “Reconsidering the Size and Characteristics of the American Jewish Population.” Saxe’s appearance on Rosner’s […]
