Tongue Ties or Fragments Transformed: Making Sense of Similarities and Differences between the Five Largest English-Speaking Jewish Communities

Contemporary Jewry https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09477-y Tongue Ties or Fragments Transformed: Making Sense of Similarities and Differences between the Five Largest English‑Speaking Jewish Communities Adina L. Bankier‑Karp1 Received: 7 August 2022 / Accepted: 10 January 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities. This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities’ levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research. Extended author information available on the last page of the article 13 Vol.:(0123456789) A. L. Bankier‑Karp Keywords Jewish community research · Diaspora Jewry · Hierarchical regression · Research methods Introduction This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States (US) (pop. 6,000,000), Canada (pop. 393,500), United Kingdom (UK) (pop. 292,000), Australia (pop. 118,000), and South Africa (pop. 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities’ levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping any differences, are the main objectives of this paper, as realized in the following sections. The first section outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modelling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for the analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. The next section presents a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between the five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. In order to further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions which are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research. Literature Review Conceptual and Methodological Issues Beyond the lively debates about how contemporary Jewish identity should be defined (DellaPergola 2015; 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022) are discussions about the meaning of terminology employed to articulate Jewish identification, the most common being cultural, secular, ethnic, or religious (Mayer et al. 2001; Schnoor 2002). Scholars also ponder how to conceptualize and measure personal, familial, and communal engagement, together with how these might illuminate questions regarding Jewish communal vitality. With an increasing dismissal of the relevance of denominational affiliation (Klaff 2006), there is a greater preference for forms of engagement (Aronson et al. 2022). Analysis of Jewish communal engagement is complicated, however, by a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of Jewish communal research focuses on discrete communities. Lack 13 Tongue Ties or Fragments Transformed: Making Sense of… of coordination between communities means that a rich array of common variables for comparative analysis is not guaranteed. That being said, scholars of communal research articulate their stances on these issues by the definitions they employ, the populations they include, and the ways they measure engagement. There are many methods that might be utilized for presenting the differences between these Jewish communities, including similarity structure analysis (DellaPergola et al. 2019) and latent class analysis (Aronson et al. 2019). These approaches attempt visually and conceptually to present commonalities in the ways that a group or subgroups respond to a series of questions. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression technique, which may be used to examine variance in a dependent variable when independent variables have varying hierarchical levels (Garson 2013). Moreover, when independent variables are introduced successively in a series of models, it is possible to evaluate whether the effects of certain independent variables are sustained or attenuated with the introduction of others. HLM was therefore deemed suitable for this analysis, since it is not only possible to compare the five Jewish communities on various measures of engagement, but it is also possible to assess theories about which factors might underlie these differences. Jewish Ethnocultural and Religious Capital Several forms of capital are usef (...truncated)