Why Canada’s Jews Are Better [than American Jews]

2019/05/07 Leave a comment

Interesting take on the recent study of Canadian Jews and the comparison with American Jews, and the greater cohesiveness of the Canadian Jewish community:

It is fitting that a landmark study of Canadian Jews, modeled along the famous 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews, has been met with deafening silence south of the border. Major American outlets including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency(JTA) and The Forward failed to mark the publication of the seminal report with even a single column of commentary. This disregard for the goings on up north is unfortunately common but it is not without costs. If the American Jewish community showed more interest in the “2018 Survey of Jews in Canada,” they could  have learned why Canadian Jews are thriving at a time when their own communities are dividing.

Contrary to the traditional narrative that American Jews are the exemplary diaspora, the study’s authors, Keith Neuman (executive director of the Environics Institute), Rhonda Lenton (president and vice chancellor of York University, and Robert Brym (professor at the University of Toronto), argue that Canadian Jews, in fact, are the model group. “Since World War II, the story of the Jewish diaspora has been dominated by historical events and social processes taking place in the United States and the former Soviet Union. In both cases, community cohesiveness is on the decline. Lost in the dominant narrative is the story of Canadian exceptionalism.” More importantly, Lenton points to findings that in spite of global trends of stagnating nonreligious, secular community members, Canadian Jews are “bucking the trend.”

The resilience of Canadian Jews in sustaining their identity, upbringing, and practice in comparison with their American counterparts, is largely due to their significantly lower intermarriage rates. The study reports that while nearly 50% of American Jews intermarry, the rate in Canada is less than half that, at 23%. Correspondingly, Pew’s 2013 survey found intermarried couples showed lower levels of religiosity and were less likely to keep a Jewish household, and that their offspring were more likely to intermarry.

Downstream from higher intermarriage rates, the study demonstrates that American Jews are half as likely to attend community day school, yeshiva, overnight summer camp, and Sunday or Hebrew school compared with Canadians. While participation rates at communal institutions have dwindled among non-Orthodox American Jews, the same has not been true for Reform and Conservative Jews in Canada. Accordingly, while American and Canadian Jewish youth exhibit similar bar and bat mitzvah levels (50% to 60%, respectively) as well as rates of nonaffiliation (roughly 33%), Canadians are significantly more active in their religious communities. As the survey’s executive summary states, “American Jews are half as likely as Canadian Jews to belong to a synagogue, and even less likely to belong to other types of Jewish organizations. Only one-half have made a financial donation to Jewish organizations and causes (compared with 80% of Canadian Jews), and comparatively few have a preponderance of Jewish friends.” Similar results are seen when it comes to Israel between the two communities. “American Jews have a much weaker connection to Israel than do Canadian Jews,” the report states.

Explaining the relative success Canadian Jews have had withstanding the pressures of assimilation is difficult to pinpoint. An article published in the Canadian Jewish News by the study’s authors argue “Canadian exceptionalism” arose as a consequence of larger historical and social forces. “The United States was settled earlier and has therefore had more time for a national identity to crystallize. Moreover, American national identity was forged in an anti-colonial war–always a great unifier–while Canadian national identity emerged gradually, in tandem with the peaceful evolution of independence from Great Britain.” As a result, American Jews have developed a far stronger national identity and consciousness than Canadians. The authors also point to Zionism’s contentious reception among American Jews in the 20th century, particularly in the Reform movement where Jewish self-determination was seen to be in conflict with American patriotism. In Canada, by comparison, British efforts to accommodate French-speaking elements fostered the growth of ethnic institutions within the country. Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the current prime minister’s father) promoted a tradition of multiculturalism and courted Canadian Jews through political appointment of community members. Elevating multiculturalism as official policy of the Canadian government came with explicit instructions to nurture one’s identity and take pride in ancestry.

It’s not all bad news for American Jews. The Canadian study actually provides some cause for encouragement since it shows that policy can make a difference. American Jewish leaders may not be able to replicate Canadian cultural attitudes and national traditions within their own communities but they can certainly draw lessons from the distinctive experiences of their northern neighbors. Finally, there is the contentious but unavoidable fact that intermarriage plays a critical role in determining whether Jewish communities will flourish into the future. This point may be repeated often but that does not make it any less true: A Jewish upbringing is the fount from which identity flows. New technologies (yes, even, JSwipe) may help foster more Jewish marriages in less-observant communities, but algorithms will never solve the fundamental question of how to build a Jewish communal life that endures—for those answers, perhaps it’s time that American Jews turned to the example set here in Canada.

Source: Why Canada’s Jews Are Better

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Young, Canadian and Jewish: The shift from religious to cultural identity

2019/03/21 Leave a comment

Some interesting insights from the survey in terms of generation, Canada/US comparisons, and the experience of discrimination:

Jewish” used to be considered a religious category. However, for many Jews, that is changing. Increasingly, people who live outside of Israel and identify as Jewish think of themselves as members of an ethnic or cultural group.

For years, researchers have expressed concern that Jewish communities would assimilate and dissipate as religious identification waned. They pointed to intermarriage as an indicator of declining community cohesiveness. For example, they found that in the U.S., half of Jews who are married or in a common law relationship are partnered with non-Jews.

….A recent survey reveals that something different is happening in Canada.

A shift from religious identification toward ethnic and cultural identification is taking place. However, the expected assimilation and dissipation of the community is less evident. The intermarriage rate in Canada is less than half that in the United States.

Last year we conducted a survey based on a representative sample of 2,335 Canadian Jewish adults in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver — home to 84 per cent of the Canadian Jewish population of about 392,000. Several surprises awaited us.

A strong community

The biggest news coming out of the survey is that the Canadian Jewish community remains highly cohesive. A much higher percentage of Canadian Jews than American Jews make financial donations to the Jewish community, send their children to full-time Jewish school, belong to a synagogue or other type of Jewish organisation and are strongly emotionally attached to Israel. Yet a smaller percentage of Canadian Jews than American Jews believes in God or a higher spirit and thinks that Jewishness is solely a matter of religion.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/KounG/3/It is especially among young adults that the religious basis of Jewishness seems to be weakening.

When asked to report whether being Jewish is, for them, mainly a matter of religion, culture or ancestry, young adults are less likely than older adults to choose religion alone.

For these young people, Jewishness is often expressed in their community involvement. Younger Jews are about as active as older Jews on most indicators of community involvement. They are more likely to belong to a Jewish organisation other than a synagogue, light Sabbath candles weekly and donate to Jewish causes.

However, for them, such practices seem to be chiefly a means of achieving conviviality in the family and, beyond that, solidarity with the larger Jewish community.

One interpretation of these findings is that Canadian Jews, particularly young adults, are finding ways of remaining Jewish that are not principally religious. A shift away from religious identification is taking place in other Jewish diaspora communities too, but its replacement by community involvement does not seem to be happening to the same extent.

Canadian exceptionalism?

There are three main reasons why community involvement is substantially stronger in Canada than in the United States.

First, immigration has been proportionately stronger in Canada than in the U.S. since the Second World War. Consequently, 30 per cent of Canadian Jews are immigrants compared to just 14 per cent of American Jews. Canadians therefore tend to have stronger ties to “old country” traditions and languages than do American Jews.

Second, Americans Jews developed a stronger national identity than Canadians did, partly because the U.S. was settled earlier and therefore had more time for a national identity to crystallize. In addition, American national identity was forged in an anti-colonial war (always a great unifier), while Canadian national identity emerged gradually with the peaceful evolution of independence from Great Britain.

Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland, appeared on the scene in the late 19th century. It conflicted with American patriotism, particularly for Reform Jews, members of the country’s largest Jewish denomination. Most Reform Jews thought Jewishness should be based on religion, not a national movement.

Not so in Canada, where the Reform movement was weak. By the beginning of the First World War, Zionism was a core element of Jewish identity for the great majority of Canadian Jews. It thus helped to keep the forces of assimilation at bay. It did so by providing a new basis for Jewish identification that became even more compelling after the Holocaust.

The third main reason for Canadian-Jewish exceptionalism is that, out of political necessity, fostering the growth of ethnic institutions has been Canadian public policy since the British conquest of New France in 1760.

Part of the British strategy for dominating the French population was not to quash French Catholic culture, but to help the conservative Catholic Church maintain religious, educational and cultural control.

Two centuries later, shortly after Canada was proclaimed a bilingual and bicultural country, numerous ethnic groups objected that they, too, deserve official recognition and funding. The era of multiculturalism had arrived. For the past half century, strong state support for ethnic institutions has helped all Canadians, Jews among them, to ward off assimilation.

American and Canadian Jews do not differ in all respects. One similarity is the tendency for older Jews in both countries to be more likely than younger Jews to say that caring for Israel is an essential part of being Jewish.

A similar difference between young and old shows up in both countries when Jews are asked about the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Younger Jews are more likely to regard them as illegal by international law. If younger North American Jews are less emotionally attached to Israel than are older members of the community, that may be because they are more likely to disagree with Israel’s policy on the construction of West Bank settlements.

One in three often experience discrimination

Finally, we note a discontinuity of outlook between Canadian Jews and non-Jews.

One in three Canadian Jews believe that Jews often experience discrimination in Canada. In contrast, just one in eight members of the Canadian population at large shares that opinion.

This difference may be due largely to the tendency of non-Jewish Canadians to think of discrimination as mainly a socio-economic phenomenon, while Jewish Canadians tend to think of anti-Jewish discrimination as an ideological matter.

Canadian Jews are not underprivileged. About 80 per cent of Jewish adults between the ages of 25 and 64 have at least a bachelor’s degree. That compares to about 30 per cent of people in that age cohort in the population at large.

However, when Jews think of anti-Jewish discrimination, they have in mind being called offensive names, being snubbed in social settings or being criticised for supporting the existence of a Jewish state.

Of course, we cannot be completely certain of the validity of our findings.

For example, although our generalizations about the relationship between age and community involvement apply across the entire age range, we found it comparatively difficult to recruit 18-to-29-year-old respondents.

It is therefore possible that the youngest cohort in our sample overrepresents highly involved individuals. In that case, the most important relationship we discovered may be a bit weaker than we report. Only more research can discover whether that is the case.

Source: Young, Canadian and Jewish: The shift from religious to cultural identity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

More than half of Canada’s Jews are missing: Robert Brym

2017/11/04 Leave a comment

My understanding of the Census methodology is that the examples chosen for ethnic origin reflect the top 20 single responses in the previous census with the exception of  specific groups being used instead of “North American Indian.” Moreover, new groups are added that represent representing recent immigrants (e.g., Iranian). So Jewish dropped off the examples, explaining the drop in responses (in general, people respond to a specific prompt more than an open-ended one).

Arguably, the religious affiliation question, rather than being asked ever 10 years at present, should become part of regular Census given the increased importance of religious diversity in Canada:

Many Canadians recall what happened when the former Harper government cancelled the compulsory 2011 census and replaced it with the voluntary 2011 National Household Survey (NHS). The head of Statistics Canada resigned in protest. Ethnic, business, health, social service, academic and other organizations protested. As feared, low-income and Indigenous Canadians were underrepresented in the NHS. Data from some census districts in Saskatchewan were never reported because the response rate was so low it rendered the data unreliable.

All was supposed to return to normal when the Trudeau government came to power. Just one day after taking office, it announced that the 2016 census would revert to its traditional, compulsory form, once again providing Canadians with reliable data about their economic, demographic, housing and ethnic status. But at least one category of the population – Canada’s Jews – may be miffed to learn that more than half their number went missing between 2011 and 2016. Statistics Canada reported this “fact” in a recent 2016 census release.

The 2011 NHS reported 309,650 Canadian Jews by ethnic ancestry, which is believable because it is in line with 2006 census data. In contrast, the 2016 census reports just 143,665 Jews by ethnic ancestry – a decline of nearly 54 per cent in five years. That number defies reason.

The problem is that Statistics Canada mucked around with the wording of its ethnic question in a way that renders at least one of its findings highly suspect. In 2011 and 2016, respondents were asked about the “ethnic or cultural origins” of their ancestors. On both occasions they were asked to “specify as many origins as applicable.” On both occasions they were presented with 28 examples of ethnic or cultural origins. But only in 2011 was one of the examples “Jewish.”

In the 2016 census, all of the suggested responses are national or Indigenous groups. But Jews are neither. They are a cultural group, members of which come from many nations. Accordingly, it seems that the responses suggested by Statistics Canada in 2016 led many Canadian Jews to indicate their ethnic or cultural origin as Canadian or Polish or Tunisian or French, not Jewish. And so more than half the Jewish population was not counted.

Of course, no survey is perfect. The purveyors of the Canadian census may be excused for reporting that in 1971 the language most often spoken at home by 25 members of the “Indian and Eskimo” group was Yiddish. (Another 25 reported Chinese and fully 125 reported Gaelic and Welsh.) But it is unacceptable when more than half of a sizable cultural group suddenly disappears because of poorly thought-through question-wording.

No one could reasonably suggest that more than half of Canada’s Jews were removed from the census intentionally. However, the Jewish community has every right to be upset that its educational and social-service planning will be imperilled by the vagaries of Statistics Canada’s work and that the community is less likely to be recognized for its contribution to Canadian society now that its numbers have dropped so precipitously in the official population count.

Source: More than half of Canada’s Jews are missing – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,