As Fewer Americans Marry, Jewish Marriage Rates Prove Surprisingly Resilient

Since the 1960s, the proportion of Americans who marry has declined precipitously, while those who marry tend to do so later, and divorce rates have risen. Jews are by no means immune to these trends, but have been less affected that the overall population, marrying more than Catholics, Protestants, or Muslims, although less than Mormons and Hindus. More surprisingly, these trends hold true even when the Orthodox are removed from the picture. Charles Fain Lehman seeks an explanation.

The data point in several directions. Almost certainly, [the Jewish marriage rate] is linked to Jews’ socioeconomic advantages. . . . The more educated and wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be married. But at the same time, it appears that Jewish religious identity and communal bonds play a role as well.

Orthodox respondents [to a 2013 Pew survey] were, unsurprisingly, far more likely to be married—about 70 percent, in total. But respondents who identified as “Reform” or “Conservative” were also substantially more likely to be married than non-religious Jews—approximately 55 percent married for both, compared with 41 percent married for Jews of no religion.

Even after excluding Orthodox respondents, giving to a Jewish cause, being involved in a Jewish organization, having most or all of your friends be Jewish, and attending services at least monthly are all associated with a substantially higher probability of being married. In other words, there is a correlation between being involved with Jewish community and being married. . . . While the available data are not dispositive, there is at least a plausible argument that being involved in a religious and ethnic community promotes marriage.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewry, American Judaism, Jewish marriage, Marriage

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society