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May 21, 1999/6 Sivan 5759, Vol. 51, No.34
Go West, young Jews
National Jewish population survey shows movement away from East Coast strongholds
LAURENCE D. COHEN
Connecticut Jewish Ledger
Las Vegas, a.k.a. "Sin City," has the fastest-growing Jewish population in the United States.
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What is the fastest-growing Jewish community in the nation?
Surprisingly, the answer is Las Vegas.
The American Jewish Committee's annual population survey, a sophisticated cobbling together of best-guess estimates from a number of sources, reports that from 1996 to 1997 the Jewish population in the Las Vegas metropolitan area increased 178 percent, to 55,000 Jews.
Mike Tell, the editor and publisher of the Israelite, the Jewish Newspaper in Las Vegas, says the community had one synagogue in 1973 and now has 17.
American Jews in the desert? Yes, and Jews are showing up in growing numbers in other hinterland locales better known for growing vegetables and Protestants than Jewish communities.
The annual population narrative in the 1998 American Jewish Year Book emphasizes that about one-third of American Jews still are concentrated in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, but also notes that as recently as 45 years ago, more than half of U.S. Jews lived in that relatively small amount of Northeast real estate.
Jews leave urban areas
In many areas of the country, Jews are leaving cities for suburbs and rural locales.
The American Jewish Year Book reports that in the Boston metro area, for instance, the Jewish population grew in the near-western suburbs while decreasing in the city, the northeastern suburbs, and the North Shore.
As a Boston Globe writer, Alan Lupo, wrote in 1995: "I was taking my daily walk in Winthrop (a Boston neighborhood) and passed by what had been the Jewish Community Center during my youth. It is no longer that. The stores are all gone. It is as if there had never been a Jewish presence there."
A substantial drop in Jewish population in the Philadelphia area was, again, attributed to the loss of numbers in Jewish areas of the city and Delaware County, with a small increase in the more rural environs of Bucks and Chester counties.
Meanwhile, aging Jews' East Coast inclination to retire in Dade (Miami) and Broward (Fort Lauderdale) counties apparently is not shared by the younger generation: The Miami-Broward area reported a one-year loss of about 10,000 Jews.
As the percentage of Jews in America has shrunk during the past 50 years from 4 percent to 2.3 percent today, the issue of "critical mass," of whether Jews will tend to disappear if they disperse from traditional Jewish centers, has been widely discussed.
As one writer put it last year in Atlantic Monthly, a "cost" of Jewish success in America was the "dispersion of bustling city neighborhoods into bland, assimilated suburbs."
To some Jewish scholars, the scenario of conformist Protestant suburbs sucking the lifeblood out of city-bred religious Jews is simplistic, if not wrong on the face of it. The Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, in his class "American Judaism," offered a different scenario: The first wave to move out of the urban Jewish enclaves to "Jewish" neighborhoods in nearby suburbs, created a world in which "one could have only Jewish friends, eat Jewish food, follow Jewish mores and cultural patterns, and yet have little consciousness of being a Jew."
It was the Jews who then moved to the true Christian strongholds, the rural suburbs and smaller towns, who found a need to strengthen their religious, rather than their cultural, ties, Glazer argued.
In Connecticut, the Jewish population is estimated to have remained flat throughout the 1990s, reflecting the population trend for Connecticut as a whole. With about 97,500 Jews in the state, Jews represent about 3 percent of the state population.
The decades-old loss of Jewish community life and population in Connecticut neighborhoods such as Blue Hills in Hartford and Dwight in New Haven, and the growth of synagogues in towns without a strong Jewish history, suggest that the dispersal trend in Connecticut is similar to what has been found in other urban areas with concentrations of Jewish population.
Small towns attractive
Of course, not every immigrant Jew followed the pattern of settling initially in large Northeastern cities. Many of those Jews settled initially in smaller towns, away from the urban centers of Jewish life.
In 1997, the Shapiro House, a small museum in Portsmouth, N.H., sponsored an exhibition celebrating the small-town life of Russian-Jewish immigrants of the early 1900s, one-quarter of whom settled away from the big city centers of Jewish life.
But what of modern-day Jews living in areas without the tradition of a strong Jewish community life? Do they feel uncomfortable? Different?
A 1997 survey sponsored by the Jewish Community Centers of America found strong support for the idea that many Jews in the United States feel being Jewish doesn't make them "different" from other Americans.
In his "A History of the Jews in America," Howard Sachar offered up the traditional picture of the Jewish immigrant wave of the early 1900s: the urban networks of synagogues and unions and Democratic political ties that were relatively easy to form in the big cities.
Hidden in long-forgotten corners of the nation's large cities are slices of Jewish life that needed proximity to be sustained. In 1997, Kehila Kedosha Janina, the last Greek synagogue in New York City, celebrated its 70th anniversary with the opening of a small museum designed to capture a bit of Jewish life that had largely dispersed.
Spread-out community causes concern
Concern over the impact of Jewish mobility, over the impact of dispersion on a religious minority that represents a small percentage of the general population, has existed among Jewish community leaders for decades.
As far back as 1974, a report published by the American Jewish Congress and the American Division of the World Jewish Congress noted that "Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark have practically no Jews left in the cities proper," and that an estimated 700,000 suburban New York City Jews had moved there from the city. The study concluded that high mobility among Jews "disrupts communal participation patterns and weakens the loyalties they generate."
The rhetoric of concern about the dispersion of Jews across America has never been as heated or as passionate as the concern expressed about intermarriage, but many researchers have speculated that there is a connection between the two. Brown University professors Calvin Goldscheider and Alan S. Zuckerman, writing in their book, "The Transformation of the Jews," suggested that "Jews living in areas of higher Jewish concentration are more likely to marry within the religion than Jews living in areas of low Jewish population densities. This reflects the fact that the more extensive the interactions between Jews and non-Jews in schools, neighborhoods, organizations, social and business activities, the greater the likelihood of intermarriage."
The long-term impact of American Jews being scattered across wide-open spaces remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that the trend is showing no sign of slowing down.
Laurence Cohen is a senior fellow at the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in West Hartford, Conn. His story was first published in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger and was distributed by Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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