Steven M. Cohen
By Steven M. Cohen
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Opinion Looking For Answer To Intermarriage? Try Imagination And Experimentation
Responding to the 72 percent intermarriage rate among Conservative, Reform and other non-Orthodox-raised Jews; how can rabbis – and more broadly, “The Jewish World” – convey two seemingly contradictory messages? First, we (rabbis, parents, institutions, friends, etc.) want to say that whoever you marry, we want you to be deeply engaged in Jewish life. Not…
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Opinion Dramatic Orthodox Growth Is Transforming the American Jewish Community
The overall American Jewish population size is stable and growing, but its character is shifting dramatically. The Orthodox population (Haredi, centrist, and modern) is exploding. The non-Orthodox are in sharp decline. We can chart the rapid growth of the Orthodox by looking at their numbers in the Pew Research Center data over three generations, each…
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Opinion Which of Our Grandchildren Will Be Jewish in This Age of Intermarriage?
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the announcement of stunningly high rates of intermarriage among American Jews. In 1991, analyzing the National Jewish Population Survey, distinguished researchers Barry Kosmin and Sidney Goldstein reported a rate of 52%. Although I estimated the intermarriage rate at around 40%, there was no questioning indisputably high rates. The…
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News As Reform Jews Gather, Some Good News in the Numbers
(JTA) — While the 2013 Pew survey uncovered some disturbing evidence of lower levels of Jewish engagement among young people, the same survey contains several pieces of good news for Reform Jews — 5,000 of whom are gathering this week in Orlando, Florida, for the movement’s biennial conference organized by the Union for Reform Judaism. Since…
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Opinion How To Stabilize the Declining Jewish Middle — Or Even Reverse It
In 2013, the Pew Research Center completed a landmark national study of American Jews. “Portrait of Jewish Americans” found evidence that the number of Orthodox Jews in America is rapidly increasing, and the number of active, Conservative, Reform and other engaged Jews is rapidly declining, with far fewer age 30-49 than among those age 50-69….
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Opinion Start Birthright With Younger Teens
Taglit-Birthright Israel is a truly remarkable invention of contemporary Jewry. The offer of a cost-free 10-day trip to Israel — conceived of as the “birthright” of every Jewish young person — has brought hundreds of thousands of college-aged Jews to Israel. Research by Len Saxe and his colleagues at Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern…
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News Leonard Fein Took Us Beyond False Dichotomies
“There are two kinds of Jews in the world. “There is the kind of Jew who detests war and violence, who believes that fighting is not ‘the Jewish way,’ who willingly accepts that Jews have their own and higher standards of behavior. And not just that we have them, but that those standards are our…
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Opinion American Jewry Loses Middle as Orthodox and Unaffiliated Grow
The past few decades have witnessed the “polarization” of American Christianity. Evangelicals have grown, but so have the religiously unaffiliated. Meanwhile, mainstream Protestant Church members have declined sharply, along with non-Hispanic Catholics. We now find parallel trends among American Jews. From a demographic perspective, the Orthodox are incredibly healthy. Their birthrates are far more than…
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