Reviewing Robert Wuthnow’s Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith, Alan Brill examines the ways that surveys about the state of religious life can mislead and the specific implications for the Jewish community of drawing false conclusions from them:

When in 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in the polls (and in the actual election), people did not go around saying that the future is Republican or that the Democratic party is dying. . . . However, when it comes to polls about religion, we find pundits . . . and ordinary people assuming that any given trend will continue without accounting for changing times. . . . Almost all of the discussions [within the American Jewish community about] the future of Orthodox or Conservative Judaism, the Pew study, the Jewish renewal movement, or assimilation are predicated on assuming that the answers to [survey] questions at a given point in time can be predictive. . . .

[A]lways remember that polls have a very low response rate. Most of them, whether about religion or politics, have an 8-percent response rate now. . . . [According to] Wuthnow, even when we are reassured that a poll is trustworthy—for example, it claims to have a margin of error of 3 percent—the margin of error is likely closer to 20 percent. Even then most of [the results are skewed by poorly formulated questions and the like].

[Moreover], whereas political polls face occasional reality checks—elections actually happen, and pollsters can [subsequently] adjust weighting factors so that the data are closer next time—polls about religion have no such checks. So if we hear that a certain percentage of the public is not really Catholic even though they say they are, . . . we can only ask ourselves, “Well, does that make sense with what we know from other sources, and from talking with our neighbors?”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.