Barry A. Kosmin

• Professor at Trinity College

In the current volume of the Year Book, the editors follow up on the optimistic vs. pessimistic assessment of American Jewish life, which was discussed in the 2017 Year Book. A summary of the original arguments formulated by Cohen and Liebman in regard to the characteristics of American Jews as viewed originally in 1987 is examined. The 19 particip...

Clearly, there is more to the Jewish experience in America than religion. The idea that the Jews are a “people” and not just a faith is ancient. It also means that Jewish identity and identification are very different from that of other religious traditions in the U.S. with which Jews are often compared. The contemporary survey evidence refutes the...

Dov Waxman . Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 328 pp. - Volume 41 Issue 2 - Barry A. Kosmin

Most Christian denominations in the United States have more female than male adherents. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no exception. However, the sex ratio imbalance within Mormonism is not uniform across the nation. The imbalance is more pronounced in Utah, a traditional Mormon stronghold and site of the church’s headquarters....

The medium is often the message. Powerful messages highlighting the current condition of both organized American Jewry and American Jewish society are revealed by the sponsorship and methodology of the Pew Survey of the US Jewish population. Unlike past national surveys, no national Jewish organizations were involved in the project. Yet the communi...

The National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students, which covered a variety of topics, was conducted in spring 2014 by a research team from Trinity College. Of the 1,157 students in the sample, 54 percent reported instances of anti-Semitism on campus during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year. The data provide a sna...

Comparison of findings on worldviews - from Trinity College's National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 (n=1,157 on 55 campuses) and National College Student Survey 2013 (n= 1,873 on 33 campuses)

The national online Demographic Survey of American College Students interviewed 1,157 self-identified Jewish students on 55 campuses in March-April, 2014. The Wordle illustration below presents the top 25 responses named by students when asked in an open-ended question to specify the concerns of young Jews like themselves.

One’s position on the debate over the nature of the Jewish collectivity and its social boundaries profoundly affects how a scholar will approach the study of Jewish demography. I take an inclusive, comparative, and global approach founded on a deep appreciation of the Jewish historical experience. This stand reflects my professional and personal ex...

Catholic dialogue with other Christian churches is primarily a theologically and religiously driven policy of ecumenism. However, the timing and nature of the Roman Catholic Church’s dialogues with other faiths and ideologies is of a different nature and is not solely guided by theological or moral considerations. These dialogues also must be expla...

Research Report: Secular Students Today a Joint CFI-ISSSC Study

In order to fully appreciate the current condition of secularism in the United States, we have to widen the arena of analysis beyond jurisprudence, constitutional history, and politics, and consider societal change. In my introduction to the volume Secularism & Secularity,1 I argue that changes in individual states of consciousness impact national...

This chapter goes beyond asking whether a Jewish identity can exist independently of religion in the contemporary United States. American Jews have already answered that question in the affirmative. The chapter documents and illustrates the richness of today’s secular Jewish culture and expressions of Jewishness beyond religion by exploring how a m...

The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have repo...

This paper deals with an emerging issue that confronts most American religious groups and the younger generation of Americans – the rise of the Nones. The literature on intermarriage in the sociology of religion in the U.S. has focused mainly on Jews and Catholics. Historically, these groups have exhibited the most concern about this phenomenon whi...

There has been a vigorous academic and political debate about the merits and political influence of the US Israel lobby during the past 7-8 years. However, less attention has been given to the underlying trend in public opinion and its relationship to the sociological make-up and composition of the pro-Israel constituency – within and without the J...

Delivered at SSSR Annual Conference 2010, Baltimore, MD The relationship between educational attainment and religious identity and behavior is contested in the academic literature.Both education and religion have been identified as independent variables.However, in general society, exposure to higher education is commonly regarded as a key explana...

The rate of religious switching in the U.S. is open to interpretation but the rate of “churning:” has definitely increased in recent years. According to the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 and the Pew Religious landscape Survey 2007, 28-29% adults have switched to another religion or no religion. These surveys also agree that the rate...

The rate of religious switching in the U.S. is in dispute. According to the American Religious Identification Survey 2001 about 16% of U.S. adults reported in that at some point in their lives they had changed their religious preference or identification. However, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in 2007 reported that 28% adults have switche...

mbedded in modernity is the idea that science is a major building block of the secular worldview, and that the progress of science is, de facto, the triumph of the secular worldview. This outlook arises from the close historical, philosophical, and intellectual relationship between the natural sciences and secular ideas and values. Both secular and...

The 1990s was the decade when the The 1990s was the decade when the The 1990s was the decade when the The 1990s was the decade when the "secular boom" occurred "secular boom" occurred "secular boom" occurred "secular boom" occurred ----each year 1.3 each year 1.3 each year 1.3 each year 1.3 million more adult Americans joined the million more adult...

World events and demographic trends among American Jews suggest changes in giving patterns and some structural problems for Jewish philanthropy. A renewed focus on Jewish identity will be a prerequisite to continued raising of funds for Jewish causes.

The European Jewish reality today confounds predictions of decline with demographic decline. We can see that predictions of Jewish decline don't mean that the data was wrong, but rather the interpretation of the data on Jewish life was wrong. To look at the inevitably flawed data and not see trends that cannot be altered is just bad futurology. The...

“Eight Up” Abstract This report on Jewish college students represents the third stage in a longitudinal study of young Conservative Jews. Launched in the mid-1990s as an unprecedented opportunity to track young Jews as they made their way from one educational milestone to the next, this project has focused on the bar/bat mitzvah class of 1995-96....

“Four Up” Abstract This report presents the highlights of a new survey of Jewish teenagers who celebrated their bar or bat mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue during the mid-1990s. It represents the second phase of longitudinal research designed to monitor the Jewish behavior and attitudes of a cohort of youngsters at different developmental stage...

Le probleme d'une question religieuse dans le recensement de la population anglaise comporte en son sein un jugement sur l'importance de la religion dans la societe. Dans certains cas, la religion represente de maniere evidente un marqueur puissant de l'identite des individus. Dans tous les pays, le recensement constitue un document essentiellement...

The focus of this article is the pattern of party political preferences among the fast‐growing and increasingly politically significant Hispanic population. The source of our data is the 1990 City University of New York [CUNY] National Survey of Religious Identification, a nationally representative sample that includes 4,868 Hispanic adult responde...

This study demonstrates that religion is significantly associated with the acquisition of postsecondary education by white women in the contemporary United States. Religion has both direct and indirect effects on educational attainment. Religious traditions differ in the degree to which they emphasize the importance of the family, marriage, and chi...

American Jewry has a unique historical trajectory. Its current position as an elite group in the United States contrasts with its roots as a pariah people in Europe. Adapting to this historical discontinuity and adjusting the traditional Jewish communitarian model to the new reality of a constituency composed of successful and sophisticated individ...

This paper deals with the relationships among social status, race, and religion in the contemporary United States. The religious data came from the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification and a sub-sample of 84,469 non-Hispanic white and 8,859 non-Hispanic black adult respondents distributed across 14 religious groups. Educational attainme...

"In 1989-90, a three-stage national survey was conducted [in the United States]...to identify those households in which the respondents did not report their religion as Jewish but which contained any persons (including the respondent) who 'considered' themselves Jewish, who were raised Jewish, or who had a Jewish parent.... This paper evaluates the...

What factors account for the decision to marry exogamously in second marriages in a community with a long history of valuing endogamous marriage? That question is addressed by an analysis of a subsample of remarried Jewish respondents drawn from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. While several demographic and family background factors: sex...

The 187 area based Jewish Federations are the major focus of contemporary Jewish communal philanthropy in the United States and Canada. In 1986 there were 816,747 individual contributions to the annual campaign and 1,500,000 people received services from the more than 1,300 social agencies these gifts support. The aggregate cost of services in the...

This paper examines the concentration and separation of ethnic groups using the contemporary example of Jews in the three Greater London boroughs of Hackney, Redbridge, and Barnet. The high Index of Dissimilarity, measured at the borough scale, of this well-established population, compared with the general population, raises issues concerning the s...

This chapter discusses the Judaism religion. The problem of definition is a fundamental issue in the collection of statistics relating to Jews and the practice of Judaism. This basic problem of definition that is often raised as an obstacle to work in this field concerns who or who is not to be counted as a Jew. According to Jewish religious law, h...

Complex social issues such as integration and segregation are often inadequately researched because of terminological and methodological deficiencies and inappropriate scales of study. A recent paper on British Jewry (Newman, 1985) suffers from such failings by discussing these issues but neglecting to relate to them directly in the analysis.

Discusses the problems of welfare provision that arise from the spatial concentration of London's Jewish population. Concentration is a spatial strategy that allows the Jews to maintain a strong institutional base of ethnic organizations while avoiding the stigma of segregation. Concentration without segregation provides the Jews with a range of ho...

Use of statistics of Jewish war dead from the Great War throws some light on the Jewish community in Great Britain at a time when the mass immigration from Eastern Europe had more or less run its course. The statistics show some discrepancies with commonly quoted figures from the ‘Jewish Year Book’, as Year Book data outside the smaller immigrant c...

Because accurate numbers are difficult to obtain attention is directed to trends in the distribution of Jews. The community is in decline, but its relative strength is indicated by figures on synagogue membership despite their limitations. A ratio of 2:1 between Jews in London and those in the provinces has been fairly constant over time. A brief d...

PIP An attempt is made to analyze demographic trends among British Jews, with emphasis on fertility, using data on recognized ritual circumcisions for the period 1965-1982. Consideration is also given to the quality of the data analyzed.

Mortality statistics for the Jewish population of Great Britain for the period 1975-79 are described. Using these data, which are available for the deceased subdivided by age and sex, and information collected from surveys of various Jewish communities, indirect estimates of the population of British Jews are obtained. The results are described in...

A more complex pressure‐group model is a more accurate explanation of Anglo‐Jewish political behaviour at the constituency level than any ethnic bloc vote thesis, the evidence for which does not exist. The alleged ethnic bias of Jews towards the Conservatives after 1970 is questionable when allowance is made for the socio‐economic profile. However,...