Do we need a new nationwide count of America’s Jews?<\/p>\n
It has been 10 years since anyone conducted a census of American Jewry\u201d\u201dand no major organization has plans to conduct another one soon. (The official U.S. Census can’t ask questions about religion.) This means that the Jewish community may indefinitely lack the kind of data required for communal planning\u201d\u201dhow many Jews there are, where they live, whom they are marrying, what Jewish religious movements they adhere to and so forth.<\/p>\n
Gathering such data is no easy task. Whereas many Christian churches calculate membership as the sum of all those they have baptized or who have made public declarations of their faith, Jews see themselves as a people embracing religious and nonreligious members alike. Thus life-cycle ceremonies and synagogue membership are insufficient proxies for membership in the Jewish community….<\/p>\n