American Jews are eliminating American Jewry
I'm an American Jew with graduate degree in economic statistics, econometrics. I prefer reducing things to numbers.
There are about 5 million Jews in America, roughly 90% of them non-Orthodox. I'm among the 90%. Many in our cohort will be marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls this year on Wednesday, May 1.
Sadly, eleven Jews were killed while worshiping at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and another saintly woman was murdered on Shabbat, the last day of Passover, at Chabad in Poway, Calif.
By the way I count, that totals a dozen deaths.
By comparison, within two generations, non-Orthodox Jewry in North America will have all but disappeared. That's because Jewish families are marrying later, having insufficient numbers of children, and giving up the Jewish faith.
By rates of 50% to 70%, they are marrying spouses of other religions. Presidential candidate Joe Biden, for example, is proudly Catholic. His daughter is married to a Jewish surgeon. What might their household look like at Christmastime?
It doesn't take graduate work to know what happens to neighborhoods mostly populated by single-child households.
According to the New York Times, the average American woman is having 1.7 children in her lifetime. Jewish women who are not Orthodox study longer, marry later, and have fewer children than the averages. We have increasing numbers of female Jewish doctors, lawyers, and securities traders. Just not children. I know of very few young families with more than two children.
If 1,000 Jewish women have 1,300 children, and half of them are girls, they'll have 650 daughters. If 50 to 70 percent of the daughters intermarry, the 650 daughters will have roughly 400 daughters of their own, only a tiny portion of them Jews. Thus, 1,000 Jewish grandmothers will be lucky to have 200 Jewish granddaughters. Not a few of those marking the slaughter of 6 million in Europe will pound a podium to swear, "Never again."
Many of the same folks are failing to have enough children to prevent the demise of Jewry in North America. They should be ashamed.