New poll: Young U.S. Jews becoming more Orthodox as American Judaism splits between devout and secular

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/05/11/orthodox-jews-poll-secular-trump-republican/

Pew Research Center’s “Jewish Americans in 2020,” the biggest national study of Jews since 2013, said 17 percent of Jews under 30 are Orthodox, compared with 3 percent of Jews 65 and over and 7 percent of Jews aged 50 to 64. They are the product of high birthrates and, experts say, a more engaging and somewhat less isolated culture.

 In Pew’s 2013 study, 11 percent of Jews under the age of 30 were Orthodox. Nine percent of all Jews in the new study identify as Orthodox, essentially unchanged from 10 percent in 2013.

 While the Orthodox appear to be proportionally growing, Pew found even more Jews becoming more secular and unaffiliated. “Jews of no religion” — Pew’s term for people who identify as Jews and do things they see as Jewish but do not identify with the religious parts — in 2020 made up 27 percent of all U.S. Jews, up from 22 percent in 2013. These Jews are not leaving Judaism, not letting go of their identity, are increasingly welcoming and retaining interfaith Jews, and are strengthening the idea of Judaism as a civilization as much as a religion.

 What is changing, religiously, is the moderately religious Jewish population, the liberal Jewish center, “is starting to vanish,” said Michelle Shain, assistant director of the Center for Communal Research at the Orthodox Union, a major group representing Orthodox Jews. Shain advised Pew. “To me the question becomes, what does that growing gap [between the very religious and the secular] mean? Who speaks for the interests of American Jews?”