Beyond the Synagogue Walls 263
considered to have stronger identities have higher incomes on the average; 41 percent
live in the North East; and 43 percent of Jews who are religiously identified are politically
liberal compared to 57 percent of those considered “secular.” In terms of denomina-
tional affiliation, 6.6 percent are Orthodox, 37.8 percent are Conservative, 42.4 percent
are Reform, 5.4 percent are “Just Jewish” and the remaining 7.8 percent were split be-
tween Reconstructionist, nonparticipating, something else, and don’t know. Although
these numbers tell us something about overall patterns and trends, they reveal noth-
ing about themeaningof religious practices and identifications for the individuals who
claim them. Nor do they inform us about the alternative ways that contemporary Jews
in the United States, a minority (7.8 percent) of whom do not affiliate with any ma-
jor Jewish institutions, might construct Jewish practices and identities outside of the
boundaries of organized Judaism. The focus on institutionalized Jewish religious prac-
tice has, perhaps unintentionally, rendered invisible other forms of expression of Jewish
identity and practice.
The majority of studies of American Jews in the past twenty years have highlighted
the issue of Jewish continuity. Questions of survival dominate the field in the wake of
the Holocaust and the destruction of a third of world Jewry. Sociologists of American
Jewry are haunted by the question of whether modernization weakens the Jewish com-
munity, threatening its survival, or whether the changes brought about by modern-
ization simply mean that new, vital forms of Jewish cohesion and expression have
emerged.^3 These studies have generally been oriented toward setting policy goals for
Jewish leaders and Federations. Within this focus on continuity, Jews who do not be-
long to synagogues are seen as powerfully threatening to survival and as such become
a residual category in studies of contemporary Jewish life.
A significant subset of the sociological research on American Jews has focused on
particular denominations. While these works reveal new understandings of the mean-
ing of religious practices and identities, the denominational focus maintains and re-
inforces the dominant institutional and traditional locus of research. One such study
(Heilman and Cohen 1989), which examined how Orthodox Jews live in the mod-
ern American context, ranked respondents by levels of observance and analyzed them
based on these rankings. In another study with a strong institutional component, based
on interviews with Conservative Jews, Heilman argued that there was often a syner-
gistic relationship between the individual’s connection to the synagogue and to the
Conservative movement as a whole (Wertheimer 2000: 183). By focusing both on in-
stitutionalized forms of practice and on the relationship between synagogues and their
members, the individual paths of the people interviewed were often left out.
In the past five years, some scholars of the American Jewish community have begun
to recognize the need to understand the pathways to Jewish identity of the marginally
affiliated and even the unaffiliated. For example, Bethamie Horowitz has analyzed the
indicators of Jewish identity in existing research, pointing out that indicators such as
denomination, affiliation, exposure to Jewish education, and generation in America do
not address the subjective experience of Jewish identity (1998: 2–10). Horowitz uses the
narratives of individuals to rethink some of the dominant paradigms in communal pol-
icy discussions about American Jewish identity and Jewish continuity, suggesting the
(^3) This emphasis on modernization and survival has been criticized by several sociologists, in-
cluding Davidman and Tenenbaum (1994), Horowitz (1999), and Tenenbaum (2000).