Numbering the Jews: Evaluating and improving surveys of American Jews

merican Jews have long understood the vitality of the Jewish community by its numbers: initially its population size and later its characteristics. Acquiring such data, though, has always been complicated by the exclusion of questions on religion from the U.S. Census of Population and Households. In the absence of official counts of the Jewish population, American Jews have sought other ways of counting themselves. The methods used to this end have, however, varied considerably across the decades, as have the quality of the methods used. Initial attempts to count the Jewish population relied on institutional censuses of Jewish congregations supplemented, and ultimately supplanted, by guesstimates of dubious quality from local reporters. From the beginning of the twentieth century, these efforts were joined by proxy methods that relied on readily ascertainable statistics with some type of relationship with Jewish identity, which also failed to generate accurate estimates. More accurate counts were finally arrived initially in censuses based primarily on organizational lists and later via various forms of geographically based samples. List-based methods were no longer sufficient as the number of Jews not found on lists grew due to assimilation. Costs for these methods, though, were too great and the 1980s saw a move to random digit dialing methods. Costs, however, continued to increase, driving studies to become more economically efficient. The late 1990s saw a decline in response rates to surveys of all types, further raising costs and increasing methodological concerns. The long-awaited National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-01 was the culmination of these trends, with a vast cost of...