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See how the responses vary by the size, religious family and region of the congregation. Surveys Browse dozens of topics covered by major national surveys. This report classifies approximately 5. This includes 4. An additional 2. These adults all had at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, but most people in this category, 1.
About , have no religion and do not consider themselves Jewish in any way. An additional , identify as Jewish by religion but also identify with another religion, which excludes them from the Jewish population for the purposes of this report.
A further 1. Though they lack a Jewish parent or upbringing and do not identify as Jewish by religion, these adults consider themselves Jewish in some other way.
About two-thirds identify with a religion other than Judaism, usually Christianity. There are an estimated 2. This includes 1. It also includes roughly , who are being raised both as Jewish by religion and in another religion. About , U. Meanwhile, approximately 1 million children live in households without any Jewish adults but with at least one adult of Jewish background, although , of these children are not being raised Jewish in any way.
Combining 5. In this report, as in the study, children are treated differently from adults: Children who are being raised as Jewish and in some other religion are included in the Jewish population estimate, while adults who identify as Jewish and some other religion are not.
This accounts for the uncertainty inherent in projecting how children will identify when they grow up; some children who are raised as Jewish and another religion go on to identify, in adulthood, solely as Jewish.
For example, if adults with a Jewish background who identify religiously both as Jewish and as followers of another religion such as Christianity were included in the Jewish population, it would rise to approximately 7. And if children who are being raised both as Jewish and in another religion were excluded from the Jewish population estimate, it would fall to about 7. DellaPergola includes Jews of no religion in these figures only if they have two Jewish parents.
One other common definition should be mentioned: In traditional Jewish law halakha , Jewish identity is transmitted by matrilineal descent. Additionally, about 1. The share of U. There also has been stability in the broader population that includes adults of Jewish background and of Jewish affinity. An estimated 1. And 0. However, the survey points to a larger population of children living in Jewish households than its predecessor 2. In , the estimated share of U.
In , however, the estimated share of all U. But, since then Yeshivat Maharat—which, as of , had ordained another 23 women and had 30 in the pipeline—permits these future clergy to choose their honorific at ordination. Some continue to take the title maharat; others prefer rabba. Rabbanit, another way of rendering rabbi in the feminine, has also won favor. Historically rabbanit signified the wife of a rabbi. But these women use it to show that they are masters of Jewish law.
For the sectors of the Orthodox world farther to the right, like the Hasidim and the yeshivish, traditionalist affirmations of essentialist male and female difference apparently make the question of women rabbis moot. But, with women being ordained in Orthodox settings in Israel too, no matter the title— rabba, maharat, rabbanit, rabbi—the first generation of women Orthodox rabbis has arrived.
Once women had broken the stereotype of who could be a rabbi, they paved the way for the ordination of gay men, lesbians, and transgendered men and women as well.
Rabbis were traditionally expected to be married and the fathers of children. Surely gay men became rabbis in the Jewish past, but their history is invisible. By the mids, gay and lesbian rabbis and rabbinical students—the former remaining in the closet to keep their jobs, the latter to receive ordination—began meeting secretly to support each other and strategize.
On the one hand, they had very public roles as clergy and clergy-in-training. On the other hand, they had to be private in order to protect themselves. In , the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College became the first denomination of American Judaism to admit openly gay students. While the rabbis of Reform Judaism had called for an end to a discrimination against gay people in , not until —after Rabbi Stacy Offner, who remained closeted in rabbinical school, had come out to her congregation and had her contract renewed—did the movement ordain openly gay students.
Once again, the clash over the issue was particularly contentious within the Conservative movement. Unlike Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, Conservative Judaism remains bound by Jewish law as interpreted by its rabbis. Five years later, Rabbi Carie Carter of the Park Slope Jewish Center, by then open as a lesbian after having remained closeted during rabbinical school, participated in the ordination of Rachel Isaacs, the first openly gay student ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Rabbi Steven Greenberg, a graduate of Yeshiva University, is considered the firstly openly gay Orthodox rabbi. The prehistory of women rabbis closed with the decision to ordain the first women.
Since then, hundreds, if not already more than thousand, women have become rabbis. Just as Mary M. Not content with simply replicating what they found in synagogue life, they self-consciously perceived themselves as trailblazers. But before the very first female rabbis could begin to raise their concerns, they had to win approval from a wide swathe of American Jewry.
The very first women in the rabbinate discovered that ordination was just the first hurdle. Those ordained in the s and early s, before a significant cohort of women rabbis emerged, found themselves struggling for acceptance. Congregations refused to interview them for jobs. Community boards of rabbis opposed their participation. At the same time, the new rabbis found themselves struggling to overcome the conviction that this was one job women could not possibly do.
Congregants worried that women rabbis could not carry heavy Torah scrolls. They feared that the women would be too soft-spoken for the job, or alternatively that they would always preach on feminism. Unaccustomed to seeing women in the male ritual garb of kippa skullcap and tallit , congregants displayed their sense that women rabbis disturbed the traditions they knew.
Drawing upon the strategies pioneered by the feminist movement, the first female rabbis organized to challenge these objections. Yet, inequities remain today. Studies prove that male rabbis earn more than their comparable female counterparts and that women are less likely to become senior rabbis at large congregations. Some of the women who became rabbis continue to point discriminatory assumptions about their limitations and roles.
As more and more women entered the ranks of the rabbinate, some of the initial difficulties waned and new questions emerged. Among them was whether or not women rabbis perform their roles differently than their male colleagues, and, if so, what that bodes for the future of American Judaism. Extensive interviews revealed that the first generation of women rabbis contended—although their male peers by and large denied this then—that, as women, they offered a different model for the rabbinate.
Self-consciously reflecting the influential work of psychologist Carol Gilligan , the female rabbis described themselves as more approachable, more prone to involve their congregants, and more likely to speak sermons in a different voice. Some female rabbis became leaders in the new Jewish healing movement, others in Jewish environmentalism.
The women who became rabbis wrote female-inclusive and gender-neutral liturgies, poetry, and songs. Others have crafted new midrashim, using their imaginations to re-read ancient texts and infuse them with female and feminist perspectives. In so doing, these leaders of American Judaism have pioneered and challenged not only the institution of the rabbinate but also American Jews and American Judaism to listen, at long last, to the voices of women.
Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation. Central Conference of American Rabbis. Yearbook, Vol. Cardin, Nina Beth. Nashville, TN: Jewish Lights, Clar, Reva, and William M. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. Frank, Ray. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, Greenberg, Simon, ed. Himmelstein, Drew. Nadell, Pamela S. New York: Carlson Publishing, Boston: Beacon, Portnoy, Mindy Avra. Steffi Karen Rubin, illustrator. Minneapolis: Kar-Ben Publishing,
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