How Many Jews in the United States? The Demographic Perspective

This article reconstructs the size of US Jewry between 1945 and 2010, looking ahead to 2020, not as a goal as such but as a sensitive indicator of a deeper and broader configuration of demographic, social, and cultural patterns-using the disciplinary concepts and tools of demography. It reviews (a) the types of documentation available, (b) the boundaries of the investigated population, and (c) the nature of demographic processes at stake. It then reviews the main demographic trends that have affected American Jewry over the past decades, summarizing the main competing estimates on Jewish population size, offering a new critical reading and consistency check of some of the better known among these sources, and finally suggesting one or more scenarios for US Jewish population size in the present and in the short-term future. From demography's perspective, definitional and analytic rules in the study of American Jewry cannot elude two basic constraints: (a) Jews in the United States integrally pertain to American society, and consequently significantly share and respond to changing socio-economic, cultural, and political stimuli in their country; (b) American Jews, inasmuch as they are part of an historical and cultural global Jewish collective, belong to a transnational entity significantly sharing and affected by unique and crucially important commonalities and processes.