The importance of residence: goldscheider’s contribution to explaining orthodoxy’s vitality

Abstract

In Jewish Continuity and Change, the book that perhaps best articulated what, among sociologists of American Jewry, has come to be called "the transformation hypothesis," the proposition that argues that over the years Jewish life in America has not became better or worse but simply gone through a "transformation," Calvin Goldscheider suggested that, despite all other their changes, American Jews were still profoundly affected by their residential decisions. Those preferences, he argued, perhaps even more so than choices made about the character of their faith or dimensions of their ritual practice, about the extent of their Jewish education or about marriage, played a determining role in the matter of Jewish continuity and change. Specifically, Goldscheider wrote:1