Narrating Jewish Identity: A Response to Bruce Phillips

Abstract

In this response to Bruce Phillips on the delivery of his Sklare lecture, I revisit the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research arguing that qualitative work provides important responses, meanings and challenges to issues raised by social demographers. Such responses have the potential to move us, as in the case of the erosion/survival debates, beyond concerns about growth to a new level of conversation about the meaning and measure of Jewish continuity and its related research corollaries: secularity, ethnicity, authenticity and religiosity. Since all social science research is limited by the kinds of narrative discourse we bring to it, demographic trends in exogamy and “assimilation”, for instance, not only reflect an “erosion” or “growth” of population size and composition, but tensions about the measure and meaning of Jewish identity and the development and maintenance of consensus on core Jewish values. Therefore, whether we see erosion or resilience in our research depends on how a study is designed, what categories are used, how the data are collected and what interpretive framework is presented for its analyses. In this sense, it matters not if we are qualitative and/or quantitative in our approach but rather where we enter the conversation, why we see it as important, and to what end we will tell our research stories.