T he General Assembly of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism voted overwhelmingly on March 1st to permit its congregations to grant membership to non-Jews.
The impetus for the vote is no secret: The Conservative movement has been hemorrhaging membership for decades. In 1971 41 percent of American Jewry identified as Conservative. By 2000 that figure had dropped to 26 percent. And today only 18 percent identify as Conservative. Among those under 30 the figure is 11 percent.
But the implosion of the Conservative movement is writes Daniel Gordis in the Jewish Review of Books the most evident sign of the “rapid collapse” of non-Orthodox American Jewry. As I wrote in a 2016 Commentary symposium on world Jewry:
American Jewry has entered into a demographic death spiral. American Jews marry later if at all and have fewer children than the general population. More than four out of five marriages involving non-Orthodox Jews today are intermarriages. The offspring of those marriages will be even less likely to seek a Jewish partner.
