My Narratives: Discipline, Profession, Ideology, and Policy

In the first part of his article, by tracing the different stages of his academic training, the author outlines the analytic and methodological premises and goals of his work of many tens of years. Of particular significance was his exposure to the different disciplinary assumptions and institutional set-ups of universities in Europe, in Israel, and in the United States. The second part of the article develops a discussion of different narrative assumptions and expressions in the context of the recent debate about Jewish population trends in the United States. The claim is submitted that in the assessment of recent population data insufficient attention has generally been paid to two essential frameworks: the general context provided by American societal trends at large and the international context provided by other Jewish populations and communities globally. The final comments raise the question of whether or not an agreed dichotomy of what is Jewish and what is not will be possible in the more distant future.