Editor’s Introduction for the Special Issue on Jewish Demography in the United States

Abstract

This special issue on Jewish population and demography, part of our regular dedication of one issue every couple of years on these questions, has been a long time in coming. It began as a conference at Brandeis University in 2011 in which scholars and thinkers in the field, largely at the urging of this journal, convened to share ideas on the questions of how many Jews there were, how we would explore that question, what the problems were that confronted researchers, and how sense could be made out of what was learned. Those who gathered at Brandeis also included people who are not commonly engaged in demographic or population studies but are convinced that there is a need to make this research accessible and relevant to a wider audience than simply those who toil in this field. Some of the ideas and matters discussed at that conference as well as others generated by it are available in the papers that make up this volume, guest edited by Professors Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Leonard Saxe of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. The effort to transform conference papers and to take ideas they have generated and make them into an integrated whole of a special issue of Contemporary Jewry was not an easy one and, as those involved in the process will attest, more complicated and time consuming than anyone expected at the outset. The results of the effort, for a time online, are now joined in a single volume that we all hope will serve as an important resource for students, scholars, and the informed and interested public—at least until our next issue on the subject in a couple of years. Jews have been counting themselves since the exodus from Egypt, and just as long there have been questions about the accuracy and completeness of those counts. In that sense, not a lot has changed in the long course of Jewish history. But we have always understood that while the question of what constitutes Jewish