http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jews-and-jewish-birthrate/Jews and Jewish Birthrate
If there is debate over absolute numbers, there is far wider agreement on the patterns of behavior within the Jewish population—behavior confirmed by dozens of community studies and separate opinion polls. Two trends are particularly telling. First, in terms of median age, Jews are seven years older than other Americans. Second, even by the most cautious figures, at least half of all marriages involving a Jew are to non-Jews. Neither trend suggests demographic vitality.
A new report by Tom W. Smith documents the first of these tendencies. Entitled Jewish Distinctiveness in America: A Statistical Portrait,(1) it marshals considerable evidence for the relatively advanced age of the American Jewish population. Among religious groups, only liberal Protestants exceed Jews in this regard; among ethnic groups, only Americans of British ancestry do. Among Americans of all kinds, moreover, Jews have the fewest number of siblings, the smallest household size, and the second lowest number of children under eighteen at home.
Smith’s study also makes plain why the Jewish age structure has become so skewed. For one thing, as the 2000-01 NJPS confirms, Jews marry later than other Americans, with the greatest disparities occurring in the age group between twenty-five and thirty-four. For Jewish women in particular, late marriage means lower rates of fertility compared with other Caucasian women—who themselves are barely producing babies at replacement level (figured at 2.1 children). The fertility gap is especially enormous among Jewish women under the age of thirty-five; even though the gap narrows considerably over the course of the next ten years, at no point do Jewish women attain the fertility levels of their non-Jewish peers or bear children in numbers sufficient to offset population losses from natural causes.
It is true that low fertility rates among Jewish women are not a new phenomenon. Economic advancement, the availability of birth control, and rising educational achievement caused Jewish fertility to start dropping as long ago as the middle of the 19th century in Europe and later in other modernizing societies like the United States. Nor, as is well known, is the phenomenon limited to Jews, or to the U.S.; in contemporary Europe and Japan, it has reached proportions that threaten catastrophe.
Still, Jewish women in the United States are significantly less fertile than their white, Gentile counterparts. To explain this fact, the demographer Frank Mott has pointed to the extraordinary rates of educational achievement among Jewish women, who spend significantly more time than their Gentile peers in programs of higher learning. For many of them, still more childless years follow as they work to advance their careers.
Add to all this the losses sustained through the high rate of intermarriage. Once upon a time, it was thought by at least some sociologists that intermarriage could prove to be a demographic boon. In the aggregate, said the optimists, it would take fewer intermarried Jews producing children identifying themselves as Jews to result in a net gain. But nothing of the sort has happened.(2)
Not only does the birth rate among intermarried Jews tend to be even lower than among in-married ones, but nearly three-quarters of children raised in intermarried families go on to marry non-Jews themselves, and only 4 percent of these raise their own children as Jews. As for their links with Jewish life, only a minority of children raised by dual-religion parents identify themselves with Judaism or with the institutions of the Jewish community. Although a number of adult children of intermarriage do express “somewhat” of a connection with the Jewish component of their identity, such feelings are rarely translated into behavior. Like their parents, most tend not to join synagogues, contribute to Jewish causes, visit Israel, or participate in Jewish rituals nearly as much as do the adult children of in-married families.
The cumulative effect of these demographic trends is now being felt and will only become amplified as time goes by. In a community that has long since ceased to replace its natural losses, continued low fertility rates mean that the number of children in the communal pipeline will soon drop sharply, causing a decline over the next decade in enrollments in Jewish schools and other institutions for the young. This will be further accelerated by the losses through intermarriage. Before long, as Bruce Phillips has concluded, “there will be fewer practitioners of Judaism” in the United States, and “this development will at some point become evident in the number and/or size of synagogues and other Jewish institutions.”
But this brings us to the one major exception to the general rule—namely, Orthodox Jews. Not only do the Orthodox suffer many fewer losses from intermarriage, but their fertility rate is far above the Jewish norm. As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3 children in “modern Orthodox” families to 6.6 in Haredi or “ultra-Orthodox” families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim. These numbers are, of course, difficult to pin down definitively, but anecdotal evidence is compelling. In a single year, according to a nurse at one hospital in the Lakewood, New Jersey area serving a right-wing Orthodox population, 1,700 babies were born to 5,500 local families, yielding a rate of 358 births per thousand women. (The overall American rate is 65 births per thousand women.)
The statistical evidence behind these birthrates is laid out in the 2000-01 NJPS. Orthodox adults are younger on average than other American Jews, with more than half falling between the ages of eighteen and forty-four. As for children eighteen and under, these make up 19 percent of the Orthodox community; the figure for the total American Jewish community (including the Orthodox) is only 12 percent.
It does not take a prophet to discern the eventual impact of these trends. The Orthodox are the smallest of the three major denominations; in numbers, the Conservative and Reform movements far outstrip them. But among synagogue-affiliated Jews, the Orthodox sector contains more children than either of the other two. If the Orthodox continue to retain the loyalties of their young people, as they have mostly done over the past 30 or 40 years, they will become an ever larger, more visible, and better represented part of the total community, and will be in a position to insist on a larger share of communal expenditures—as some Orthodox leaders are already doing.
But what accounts for the high fertility rates of Orthodox Jews? It is certainly true that they marry much earlier than other Jews. Almost two-thirds of Orthodox women are wed by the age of twenty-five, and 90 percent by thirty-five. (For Conservative women, the comparable figure at age twenty-five is 9 percent, for Reform women 3 percent, and for women who identify themselves as “just Jewish” 14 percent; by age thirty-five, only slightly over half of Reform women are married.)(3) These Orthodox women go on to bear children at a younger age, and to have larger families.
But this just begs the question of causation; something is at work to produce those figures. It is hardly enough to say, as some do, that the Orthodox lag behind the rest of the Jewish population in levels of educational attainment. That is emphatically not the case with the modern Orthodox, and it is less and less the case in the Haredi community. Nor has the fact that Orthodox women are pursuing higher education and entering the labor force in large numbers impeded their determination to marry young and bear children.
A recent class exercise at an academically-oriented, modern-Orthodox day school in Manhattan may offer some insight here. The assembled fifteen-year-olds, boys and girls alike, were asked how many children they themselves hoped to have. Only two gave two as their ideal number, and none wanted fewer than that. A large majority named four. Whether all of these young people will actually follow through on their stated aspirations is not the point; the point is the aspirations themselves. It is unlikely that a similar exercise would yield the same results in Jewish schools of other denominations.
In brief, we are in the realm of norms and values. Orthodox communal culture encourages child-bearing, and has more thoroughly insulated itself from the “substantial downward pressures” that, in the reasonable judgment of Frank Mott, are currently depressing the overall size of the Jewish population—and that may themselves be the results of a rather different value system.
Remarkably, there has been little inquiry into any of these matters—that is, into why so many in the Jewish community are remaining single, or are having smaller families, or are intermarrying. In light of the pain expressed by many Jews about what has happened within their own families, this willed ignorance is in itself shocking. Thirty- and forty-year-old singles speak freely of their loneliness, and their inability to meet eligible Jewish mates. Because of late marriages, huge numbers of Jewish couples are struggling with infertility or with the difficulties of finding babies to adopt. Parents of adult children cannot fathom why their offspring are still living alone or moving from one transitory relationship to the next. Tens of thousands of families are trying to cope with the consequences of intermarriage or find themselves at a loss to explain to their children why, even though an uncle or aunt is married to a Gentile, it is not all right to consider “interdating.”
No doubt, many feel there is not much to be said about any of this—that the twin trends of low fertility and high intermarriage are forces of nature, not to be questioned but merely endured. Besides, one can always point to the larger social forces at work, from the sexual revolution, to the felt economic need to maintain dual-career marriages, to the obsessive quest for success, to a predisposition among the best-educated to regard family itself as a suspect category and child-rearing as a chore best left to others, to the triumph of the cult of individualism and freedom of personal choice, and so forth.
The litany is well-known, and its constituent elements have surely affected Jews as much as anyone else. In fact, to judge by the figures cited above, they have affected Jews more than others. But, precisely because that is so, it is useful to consider the particular beliefs and social values embraced by the majority of American Jewish families.
Tom Smith’s study of distinctiveness is a good place to start. His surveys demonstrate, for example, that American Jews are exceptional in the emphasis they place on raising independent-minded children. Asked to rank the relative importance of five values to be passed on to the next generation, overwhelming numbers identify their highest priority as the ability to “think for himself or herself,” far more than those naming “working hard” or “obedience.”
That no other ethnic group shows results like these is a finding in which many Jews would undoubtedly express pride. But there is surely a price to be paid for this unmodulated emphasis on independent-mindedness. At least in part, it has been paid in the coin of group allegiance and even of fidelity to one’s own parents when it comes to things like marriage and family. The same can be said for the value that Jews place upon education. Although this certainly accounts for their disproportionate presence at top-tier colleges and universities, it, too, is pursued at the cost of other values.
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I felt the need to bring this topic up because, there is Radical-Heretical Feminist that is commenting on the JTF forum that is trying hard to convince, Jews to adopt the distorted "Reform" and "Con" Judaism ideologies that have already brought so much damage to the Jewish people.
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