The Cost of Immersion

Nearly three decades ago, Elliott Abrams published Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, a fiercely argued book warning about the dangers of declining Jewish ethnicity and rising intermarriage. Writing a few years after the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey reported an intermarriage rate of over 50 percent for the first time, Abrams cited demographers who counted 5.7 million Jews in the United States in the late 1980s and estimated that the number would drop by another million before 2020. In the face of this looming “demographic disaster,” Abrams argued against continuity strategies based on outreach to intermarried families or predicated on shared culture and ethnic solidarity. The only path forward for American Jews would be the path of religious revival. “As an ethnic, cultural, or political entity they are doomed . . . American Jewry will survive as a religious community or not at all.”

Ignoring the advice of Abrams and others, many synagogues and Jewish organizations responded to the rising rate of intermarriage by opening their doors to intermarried families. The Reform movement embraced a policy of “audacious hospitality,” allowing Reform rabbis to officiate at intermarriages, and Conservative synagogues welcomed intermarried families into their congregations. Big philanthropy invested heavily in outreach initiatives, such as Birthright Israel, Moishe House, and OneTable, to name a few. As a result, as my research with colleagues at Brandeis has shown, the children of intermarried parents who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s were more likely than prior cohorts to receive Jewish education and more likely to identify as Jews in adulthood.

Overall, the improved retention of the offspring of intermarriage has led to an unexpected outcome: Jewish demographic growth. According to the Pew Research Center (and several other estimates), the Jewish population in the United States climbed throughout the 2000s and 2010s to reach 7.5 million in 2020. The math is quite straightforward: Intermarriage creates twice the number of households as inmarriage and consequently twice the potential number of Jewish children, all things being equal. Of course, they are not equal, but when retention of the children of intermarriage crossed the 50 percent threshold, as it did in the 2000s, the net impact was an increase in Jewish population.

In his new book, If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century, Abrams describes these numbers as “mathematically accurate” but “largely meaningless.” As he points out, the Pew estimate includes 1.5 million adults classified as Jews of no religion—people who say their religion is “atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular” but identify as Jewish by culture, ethnicity, or family background and who tend to have weak ties to the Jewish community. It also includes six hundred thousand children who are being raised without religion or with a combination of religious experiences. “Today’s Jewish community is an intentional community, made up of individuals and families that mindfully choose to stay within it.” And the number of such individuals and families is declining, Abrams believes. Despite nominal growth, the demographic story is a “tale of loss, not of vitality.”

By doubling down on the narrative of demographic decline, I think Abrams undervalues what the Jewish establishment’s strategies of outreach and inclusion have achieved. Those efforts certainly contributed to population growth, however measured (for example, the number of “Jews by religion” increased from 5.1 million in 2013 to 5.4 million in 2020, according to the Pew estimates). Nonetheless, Abrams is right that a large and increasing share of Jewish children are growing up in loosely affiliated families and with limited Jewish education. How to reach those children is a critical question for American Jewish leaders, educators, and philanthropists.

Abrams is best known for his day job as a foreign policy expert who played key roles in the Reagan, Bush, and first Trump administrations. But he’s always been deeply involved in Jewish communal affairs, and he is presently chairman of the Tikvah Fund, an influential Jewish educational foundation, so his thoughts on these matters have added salience. (Editor’s Note: The Tikvah Fund launched the Jewish Review of Books in 2010 and underwrote its operations for the next decade, but it has not had an institutional relationship with the magazine since then.)

As the Herzlian title suggests, If You Will It sets out an ambitious vision for reaching a younger generation of American Jews coming of age in mostly secular and largely assimilated households. Abrams argues that the religion-based approaches that he championed in Faith or Fear are no longer viable. The wave of secularization that has swept through American society has carried along the Jews too. Rather than a pathway to continuity, “Jewish religion became a barrier to entry” for younger Jews. People who care about Jewish continuity need a strategy for reaching “non-religious Jews, and those who say their religion is Judaism but do not actively practice the religion.” Abrams recommends a new Jewish continuity strategy focused on cultivating Jewish peoplehood:

If young Jews—even those not practicing the religion in any traditional way—believe themselves part of the Jewish people, a “collective” that extends backwards for millennia and forward forever and extends globally to the Jewish state and to all Jewish communities around the world, their own identities as Jews may be deeply and permanently strengthened.

This kind of Jewish consciousness was once nurtured in the ordinary frameworks of everyday life. Abrams recalls his own childhood as an example:

A strong Jewish identity was natural for the children or grandchildren of immigrants living in dense Jewish neighborhoods and social networks; Jewishness was pervasive. When I was a child, we had dinner with my immigrant grandparents and all my aunts, uncles and cousins every Sunday. Everyone lived in the same city, everyone had a kosher home, and there was plenty of Yiddish spoken. My own children and grandchildren—and their cousins and Jewish friends—have had a very different upbringing in America.

In a postethnic United States, in which Jews are dispersed throughout the larger overwhelmingly non-Jewish society, how can Jewish children and teenagers experience the life of the Jewish collective? The answer, Abrams argues, is through immersive Jewish experiences that reproduce the rhythms of Jewish time and place, which most young Jews no longer encounter organically. Such intentional communities include those established through Jewish day schools, overnight camps, and Israel-based programs, and Abrams devotes much of his book to examining ways to make these experiences available to more children and young adults.

Across all of these settings, Abrams encourages a strong focus on Israel, “the center of world Jewish life,” and an increasingly important resource for American Jewish identity. In Abrams’s view, American Jewry is on its way to becoming a satellite of Israel, and it will need strong ties to the Jewish state to survive and flourish in the future.

Of course, the immersive Jewish experiences that Abrams now champions, including day schools, overnight camps, and gap-year programs in Israel,  have been a focus of significant philanthropic and communal investment for some time. Making such experiences more widely available and scaling them up should be a communal priority, but there are also serious challenges to this strategy.

The first is cost. Immersive experiences are, by definition, expensive. Tuition for day schools runs in the $30,000 to $40,000 range annually (the Emet Classical Academy, recently founded by the Tikvah Fund in Manhattan, costs over $40,000). Although schools provide scholarships and try mightily to remain affordable, most day school families run on an endless financial treadmill from kindergarten through high school and then college.

Abrams describes a range of strategies to lower day school costs, including middle income scholarship funds, “penetration pricing” for the first year of schooling, and family caps linked to household income. He also makes a strong argument that liberal American Jews should reconsider their longstanding opposition to taxpayer funding of parochial education. These are valuable ideas, but they are unlikely to bring costs down enough to break through to the over 90 percent of non-Orthodox families that do not enroll their children in day school.

Overnight summer camps, described by Abrams as a cheaper alternative to day schools, are also increasingly priced beyond the capacity of middle-class families. Depending on the length of the session, summer camp tuition runs anywhere from $6,000 to $13,000. The scholarship offset that Abrams mentions covers just $1,500, and only for a camper’s first year. The high cost of Jewish living is a source of alienation for many people from full participation in the Jewish community. As Abrams knows, there are no easy solutions.

The other challenge is Israel itself, which is a source of division among American Jews in ways that Abrams seems to minimize. Although the current Gaza War has caused many American Jews to rally to Israel’s cause, it has also catalyzed anti-Zionism on the political left and, as the war drags on, growing discomfort among centrists. These divisions are likely to deepen during the Trump years, complicating efforts to harness Israel as a resource for American Jewish life.

The central role Abrams proposes for Israel in renewing the commitment to Jewish peoplehood raises a deeper concern. To the extent that the American Jewish community becomes a mere satellite of Israel, it will have little to offer beyond diplomacy and philanthropy. And yet, Israel has in the past drawn on a vibrant liberal American Jewish community to help strengthen its own liberal political institutions and enrich its religious and cultural life. Arguably, it needs such support more than ever.

American Jews are increasingly anxious and unmoored. Their strongholds in the Democratic Party and in academia and the arts are now tenuous, to say the least. Religious denominations, supplementary schools, and the federation system, built for an earlier era, are showing their age. And the pro-Israel consensus is fraying. Yet, the American Jewish community still has numbers, wealth, and creativity. How it will harness its assets for renewal, and to what extent it will succeed, is an open question.