Leonard Saxe is an American social psychologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion, American Jews and the American Jewish Community. He is currently the director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University.
Leonard Saxe
By Leonard Saxe
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Opinion Why a post-pandemic world needs Birthright more than ever
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the suspension of a host of in-person programs, in and outside the Jewish world, including Birthright Israel’s iconic ten-day peer educational trips. With the prospect of an effective vaccine on the horizon, programs like Birthright that give primacy to intensive peer-to-peer interaction will no doubt be relaunched. But given…
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Community Online services serve the already committed, our research shows
This season of the High Holy Days or Yamim Noraim, like much of life in the past months, can be characterized in a single word: disruption. Faced with the inability to gather in person, many synagogues launched unprecedented experiments to maintain their communities. Some created online services, some provided outdoor services, and others disseminated guides…
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Opinion Among Jews, the young and highly educated bear COVID’s emotional and economic toll
The Yamim Noraim, the days of awe bracketed by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are a call to reflection about the past year and our fate in the coming year. The past year has been unlike any other. Whether or not we suffered illness, loss of a family member, or financial and emotional distress, the…
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Community Has Birthright Been Successful?
Launched in 1999, Birthright Israel was a “disruptive innovation” designed to arrest the assimilation of the next generation of Diaspora Jews by seeking to universalize an Israel educational experience. The program had many skeptics who, though committed to Jewish education focused on children and teenagers, believed that Birthright was too brief, too superficial, and too…
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Opinion After This Election, Americans Have Lost Faith in Polling. Should Jews?
One casualty of the election: people’s faith in surveys. We relied on polls to help us understand the election and they seemingly failed us. Although pre-election polls came within 1-2% of predicting the national popular vote, state polls that were the basis for Electoral College predictions were far less accurate. Whether and how to use…
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Opinion Pew Findings Reject Bleak Narrative of Jewish Decline
The results of the Pew survey are not at all surprising, and the basic findings align near-perfectly with estimates that my colleagues and I at the Steinhardt Social Research Institute have reported. Pew’s estimate that there are 6.7 million American Jews — including more than 4 million adults who consider Judaism their religion — confirms…
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Opinion Create Tax for Jewish Education
Although the salary gap in the Jewish communal world is not as disparate as that between other workers and corporate CEOs or money managers, it remains substantial. Some of our teachers and social service workers — on the front lines of Jewish continuity and caring — receive poverty-level wages, while some executives receive salaries in…
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Opinion Who Are American Jews?
As Jewish traditions go, conducting a decennial National Jewish Population Study under the auspices of the federation movement has a very short history, and it was broken when the Jewish Federations of North America decided not to support a 2010 study. For researchers, the absence of support for a study reflects the weakened state of…
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