Dead Serious

Most of us would probably not be shocked by a recent article in Tablet entitled “The Challenges Facing Us: The Horrendous State of the American Jewish Community,” in which, based on a Pew Research Center study called “Jewish Americans in 2020,” American Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer describes a secular American Jewry in religious freefall and a communal leadership that’s doing nothing about it.

But in fact, another article could have been written, this one about Pew’s findings in that same report about the Orthodox community, and it too could well have been titled in much the same way. And it, too, could have bemoaned the fact that the Pew report hasn’t stimulated greater discussion and galvanized action within the Orthodox community. To its credit, however, the current issue of OU’s Jewish Action magazine does devote significant attention to these findings.

The most troubling of Pew’s Orthodox-related findings is that 33 percent of Jews raised Orthodox do not continue to identify with Orthodoxy as adults. As Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, who has spent his entire adult life working to introduce nonreligious Jews to Torah, observed in Jewish Action:

I wish we had better news, but unfortunately the Orthodox Jewish community has a crisis on its hands that hasn’t really been seriously acknowledged. The recent Pew study, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” reports that about 30 percent of young Jews who said they grew up Orthodox are no longer Orthodox. It seems obvious that the fall-out rate of Modern Orthodox Jews is higher than the losses of the chareidi/yeshivish communities, but even those losses are not insignificant… the number-one issue facing American Jewish life is keeping the already committed Jews committed.