The headline is unsettling: in its new Global Religious Landscape report, the Pew Research Center says the United States is home to 5.7 million Jews by religion—1.8 million fewer than the 7.5 million Jews of “religion, culture, or family background” tallied in Pew’s 2020 portrait of American Jewry. At first blush it looks like demographic free-fall. In truth it is an accounting pivot, not a population collapse. To compare religious communities across 201 countries, Pew counted only those Americans who tick the “Judaism” box under religion and excluded those who call themselves Jewish for ethnic or cultural reasons. The “missing” 1.8 million have not vanished; they simply inhabit a different column on the spreadsheet.(forward.com)
That technical choice matters because the fastest-growing slice of U.S. Jewry is the cohort that embraces Jewish identity while declining any religious label—roughly 27 percent of Jewish adults overall and about 40 percent under thirty, according to Pew’s earlier study. By narrowing its lens, the new report undercounts precisely the people most likely to inherit tomorrow’s synagogues, schools, and birth announcements. If communal planners treat “Jews by religion” as the only Jews worth counting, we will invest in the shrinking middle while the periphery, vibrant but under-resourced, drifts further from the center.
Viewed globally, however, the Jewish story is one of modest expansion. Pew finds that the worldwide Jewish population grew 6 percent from 2010 to 2020, reaching roughly 14.8 million souls. Even so, Jews remain a mere 0.2 percent of humanity, exactly where we stood a decade ago, because the planet’s total population surged twice as fast.(pewresearch.org) Almost all net Jewish growth occurred in Israel, where the Jewish population climbed by one million—to 6.8 million—thanks to a high national birth rate and continued immigration.(timesofisrael.com)
Outside Israel the picture is mixed. Pew registers only a 30,000-person increase in American Jews by religion during the 2010s, effectively a plateau.(pewresearch.org) Europe fell 8 percent, Latin America 12 percent, and sub-Saharan Africa a staggering 37 percent, reflecting economic upheaval and steady emigration to Israel and North America.(pewresearch.org) For the first time in history, 85 percent of world Jewry now lives in just two countries—Israel and the United States—creating demographic dependence on the stability of both nations.(pewresearch.org)
Why does Israel surge while the American line flat-lines? Fertility, mobility, and identity each pulls a thread. Israel’s Haredi and religious-Zionist families average between three and seven children, lifting the national birth rate above replacement. North American Jews hover near the general U.S. average of 1.6 children, and only the Orthodox substantially exceed it. Migration, meanwhile, continues to concentrate Jews in larger hubs. French émigrés settle in Netanya and Miami; Latin Americans stream to Mexico City and Los Angeles; South Africans land in Sydney and Ra’anana. Yet the subtlest factor is not births or planes but labels: the widening gap between feeling Jewish and calling that feeling a religion.
The Torah knew the danger of census myopia. When God orders Moses, “S’u et rosh kol adat B’nei Yisrael—lift the head of the whole community of Israel” (Num. 1:2), the text implies an act of dignifying each face, not merely tallying bodies. Later, King David’s needless head-count sparks a plague, and only an altar of repentance halts the damage. Chazal distill the paradox: “Blessing rests on that which is hidden from the eye, and counting diminishes the counted” (Yoma 22b). Numbers guide policy, but they can also wound the soul when we confuse arithmetic with worth.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel warned in 1966 that “the supreme issue of religious life is not how many believers exist, but whether faith is alive.” The new Pew tables present exactly that tension. A people can expand numerically yet shrink spiritually; conversely, a smaller community ablaze with covenantal passion may illuminate nations. Rav Kook framed it starkly: “The vitality of Israel is measured not only by the number of its bearers, but by the fire that burns within them.” Counting heads without stoking that inner fire is like measuring a menorah without kindling its lamps.
Still, numbers diagnose real vulnerabilities. The first is statistical myopia. If philanthropic priorities follow the “5.7 million” headline, programs aimed at cultural Jews—JCC arts festivals, campus fellowships, digital Hebrew learning—will look extravagant precisely when they are indispensable. The second is narratives of decline. Jewish teenagers scrolling alarmist tweets about a vanished 1.8 million may conclude that Jewish history is an eroding cliff, not a living covenant. Despair breeds disengagement; hope nurtures continuity.
A third worry is geographic fragility. Should antisemitic pressure intensify in the United States—as it did on campus after October 7—or regional conflict erupt in Israel, the demographic eggs of the Jewish future sit in an unnervingly narrow basket. Diversifying Diaspora strongholds and reinforcing Israel-Diaspora interdependence are not luxuries; they are hedges against geopolitical turbulence.
Finally, there is the gnawing question of spiritual anemia. Sociologists can chart synagogue dues and day-school enrollment, but they cannot map a Jew’s trembling before the Divine. Will the grandchildren of today’s “cultural Jews” inherit more than last names and latkes? That outcome hinges not on demographers but on educators, rabbis, parents, and friends who make Torah compelling and community magnetic.
What, then, should a rabbi say to a congregation scanning these figures with furrowed brows? First, count broadly and engage deeply. Honor every avenue by which a soul enters Jewish life—religious, cultural, ancestral—but ensure that broad entryways lead into corridors of serious learning, ritual practice, and moral responsibility. Second, invest in Jewish literacy. A Jew of no religion is often a Jew of no schooling; adult-education scholarships and online beit midrash networks can turn curiosity into commitment. Third, support families. Synagogues that subsidize preschool, organize Shabbat-meal trains for new parents, and normalize larger families outside Orthodoxy quietly tilt the fertility curve upward. Fourth, prepare for mobility. When Venezuelan Jews arrive in Brooklyn or Johannesburg, they deserve a soft landing of housing help, Hebrew classes, and social networks. Fifth, strengthen Israel-Diaspora synergy. Twin-school exchanges, reverse Birthright trips, and shared study of Tanach remind both poles of world Jewry that they are limbs of one body.
All of those strategies, however, rest on a deeper spiritual stance: hopeful realism. Sergio DellaPergola, the dean of Jewish demography, calls every Jewish census “permanently provisional” because identity itself is fluid. One can enter or exit Jewish life without a passport. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “Demography is the social science of hope.” The task is to turn spreadsheets into springboards—evidence not of doom but of opportunity.
When we recite Mi She-beirach for those in need of healing, we name each loved one aloud. The act does not cure disease, yet it summons covenantal memory that no soul is lost in the divine ledger. Pew’s new data invite a similar ritual writ large: to lift every Jewish head, even the ones outside synagogue doors, and to kindle anew the fire that makes counting worthwhile. Let us read the numbers with clear eyes and courageous hearts, determined that the next census—however it defines us—will find not only more Jews, but Jews more alive to the holy task of being a “light to the nations.” May we turn demographic anxiety into covenantal action, and may the One who counts the stars grant that our children and grandchildren, too, are numbered among them.
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