Sunday, October 28, 2018

Trends in the Jewish population

The declining religiosity of Americans is discussed a lot, but less attention is given to the shrinking and shifting of non-Christian groups. This graph shows that into the 1980s, Jews were just about the only non-Christian game into town. Jews as a share of non-Christians began to drop precipitously in the 90s, and is now under 50% (General Social Survey data):
















Of course, some of this is due to the immigration of non-Jews, or Jews dropping out of the religion, but the number of offspring for those ages 40-64 has been dropping since the 70s (with an interesting reversal in this decade):
















Orthodox Jews have helped fertility from falling further by having more kids than other Jews, especially in the last couple of decades:
















On the other hand, Orthodox Jews are a fairly small minority within the Jewish community, and those who are some "other type" of Jew are growing, and they tend have few children.


1 comment:

  1. How active were the Orthodox in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? How active were first-generation non-Orthodox?

    ReplyDelete

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