JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

education a couple has completed, the less likely it is to produce
more than one or two children. It is understandable then,
that Jewish couples, who in comparison with the rest of the
population complete more years of education and also marry
late, often raise smaller families. This tendency was observed
among Jewish families by Seligman and Antonovsky, even in
the midst of America’s baby boom. Orthodox Jews are the exception.
Seligman and Antonovsku cautioned that “[t]he high
proportion of two-person and three-person [Jewish] families
may be indicative of a declining reproductive rate…” (in
Sklare, 1958, p. 66). The impact of this trend was noted over
a decade later. “[I]n the second generation,” says Sklare, “the
birth rate dropped so precipitously as to have serious implications
for Jewish population size as well as for group continuity”
(1971, p. 79).
A low birth rate has continued into the third and fourth
generations. In 1990, 93 percent of Jewish women ages 18 to 24
and 55 percent of those ages 25 to 34 had not yet had children
(Fishman, ibid., p. 31). As a result, with the exception of the
Orthodox community, the Jewish birth rate in America presently
stands at significant less than replacement level of 2.1.
Averting the presumed consequences of what appears to be a
looming demographic crisis currently occupies a high position
on the organized Jewish community’s national agenda. A
significantly attenuated Jewish population would weaken the
Jewish community’s standing at large, including its ability to
act on behalf of its own interests. It would jeopardize the existence
of a range of local Jewish institutions, from family services
to community centers and schools, as well as the Jewish
community’s fundraising efforts on behalf of Israel and distressed
Jews in other countries. Finally, some have presumed
that it would sap the vitality of American Jewish culture and
creativity. Others who study American Judaism believe that
the intensity of Jewish life and the freedom of Jews to create
as Jews, to act publicly as Jews and feel free even in their
seemingly secular pursuits to act as Jews will offset the loss of
numbers. Many who point to the problem of intermarriage
are slow to acknowledge the tremendous contribution, energy
and vitality brought to all institutions and all denominations
of Judaism by Jews by choice, those not born as Jews.
The significance of this low birth rate is compounded by
the high outmarriage rate – the rate is subject to dispute ranging
between 45–52%. Just as the intermarriage [rate] has increased
dramatically among younger American Jews, rates of
conversion have fallen, especially after the introduction by Reform
Judaism’s acceptance of patrilineal descent. Mixed marriage
is five times higher among Jews 18 to 34 than it is among
those over age 55” (Fishman in Bayme and Rosen, p. 26). Ironically,
the rise in intermarriage is not unrelated to a decline in
antisemitism. Jews are now regarded as acceptable partners
for non-Jews and the opposition from the non-Jewish family
has declined markedly. Intermarriage also has less to do with
one’s Jewish identity and allegiance to the Jewish people than it
did a generation or two ago. During the mid-1950s, according
to Rosenthal (1963), the overall community intermarriage rate
family, american jewish
for the Greater Washington, D.C., area, a mid-sized yet highly
cosmopolitan Jewish community, was 13 percent. In larger
Jewish communities, the rate was between 6–10 percent. By
the 1970s, intermarriage rates in many American communities
had risen to approximately 30 percent. Whereas, according to
Medding, et al. (1992), Jewish identification tends to be passed
on to the next generation in conversionary marriages, especially
Orthodox and Conservative conversionary marriages,
this is not true of mixed marriages. “Jewish identification in
mixed marriages is accompanied by the presence of symbols
of Christian identification, resulting in dual-identity households
at all levels of Jewish identification” (p. 39). Daniel Elazar
called this the permeability of contemporary boundaries. So
long as mixed marriages constitute the great majority of outmarriages,
intermarriage poses a major challenge to transmission
of Judaism through Jewish family life in America.
Divorce, like outmarriage, was once relatively rare among
American Jews. This is no longer the case. Divorce, especially
that which results in long-term single parent households, has
increased over the last three decades. Data from the CJF 1990
NJPS reveals “18 divorces for every 100 ever-married men and
19 for every 100 ever-married women [indicating that] divorce
has become relatively common among American Jews.” “Rising
rates of divorce,” says Fishman, “have created a situation
in which one-third of Jewish children live in homes which
have been touched by divorce: about ten percent of Jewish
children live in single parent homes and twenty percent live
in households in which at least one spouse has been divorced”
(1994, p. 34). Clearly, the traditional notion of a two parent
family with mother and father raising their own children together
is not the only form that contemporary Jewish family
life has taken.
Active extended kin relations continued to characterize
American Jewish family life until the 1970s. Yet there too the
picture may be a bit overdone. Children left for college and left
for jobs; grandparents migrated to the South and also to the
West. It was presumed that grandparents would be the major
repository of Jewish values and yet in the contemporary family
it is often the grandparents who are most removed from
Jewish education. And because of immigration, because of the
Holocaust, many grandparents grew up without grandparents
and do not have an image of what grandparenting involved.
And American culture, which does not revere the elderly, certainly
offers few models to teach them.
On the other hand, the increase in geographic mobility
during the last quarter century has enhanced extended
family ties. Greater family resources, the ease of travel, the
lowering of long distance phone rates, and ubiquity of the internet
have increased the involvement of grandparents with
their grandchildren. At the same time divorce and intermarriage
pose unique challenges. Especially perplexing is the relationship
of grandparents to their grandchildren when the
custodial parent is not their child. According to the CJF 1990
NJPS, between the years 1985–1990, 25 percent of adults surveyed
changed residence, at least once, between cities within
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 703