Monitoring the American Orthodox: Expectations and Reality

This chapter focuses on the influence of religiosity on Jewish population growth and composition, with particular attention to the differences between the Orthodox and other denominational and non-denominational groups. For the purpose of demographic analysis, the Orthodox in the US are a population category which actually includes very different strands – from the more segregated Hassidic and Haredi streams, to the highly educated and more integrated modern Orthodox. These different groups are difficult to separate in most studies because they constitute relatively small percentages of the total Jewish population. The higher fertility levels of the Orthodox are bound to generate a significant increase in their share of total Jewish population in the course of the twenty-first century. Population projections based on the 1990 NJPS, and updated as of the 2020 Pew survey, indicate a significant ulterior potential of growth of the Orthodox. This occurs also thanks to an enhanced ability to retain the Orthodox younger generation unlike the passages from the more to the less traditional sectors of US Jewry which characterized most of the twentieth century.