Eli Lederhendler and Uzi Rebhun (eds.), Research in Jewish Demography and Identity. Boston: Academic Press, 2015. 410 pp.

This chapter reviews the book Research in Jewish Demography and Identity (2015), edited by Eli Lederhendler and Uzi Rebhun. Research in Jewish Demography and Identity is a collection of original social scientific essays that pays tribute to Sergio Della Pergola, a distinguished demographer from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book covers many of the areas of inquiry to which Della Pergola has contributed over the last half century, including historical demography, international and internal migration, culture and politics, socio-demographic variations and mobility, and Jewish identity and culture. Topics include Jewish migration to Palestine and the United States in the early twentieth century; the Jews of Greece between the World Wars; Italian Jewry’s diverse and complex interaction with Israel, Zionism, and the Italian Left in the 1960s; and the mobility of Jewish immigrants in the Former Soviet Union to Israel in the period 1990–2010.

Group Size, Social Class, Religion, and Politics

This chapter focuses on determining the size of the Orthodox Jewish population in the United States and difficulties related to the problem of estimating the Jewish population as a whole. It analyses the acceptance of the notion of the 'core Jewish population' among social scientists and Jewish communal professionals. It also looks at major debates relating to significantly different estimates of population size among those specializing in Jewish demography. The chapter addresses questions as to whether belonging to an Orthodox synagogue makes one Orthodox, or whether being Orthodox entails matters of faith and behaviour. It cites the UJA-Federation of New York, which estimated the total Orthodox population in New York City at 493,000 in 2013.