American Jews:
How the 2000 Los Angeles Jewish
Federation Census Was Calculated to
Undercount Torah-Observant Jews
The Jewish Federation's census
of Los Angeles Jewry
remains controversial. Even as the United States continues striving to
count historically less visible demographic communities, the kinds of
people whom Ralph Ellison might have called "Invisible People," our
local Jewish census-takers fail to acknowledge that Torah-observant Jews
were
dramatically undercounted. The census alleges that Observant households
have dwindled in the past two decades from 5.2 to 4.3 percent of Los
Angeles Jewry. I refuse to be an Invisible Man in the Age of Lieberman.
The "census" numbers are false. They are stuff and non-census.
First, the census was conducted by telephone interviews, demanding a
documented average of twenty-six minutes per
interview. Questionnaires bore as many as 291 questions, including
branching and modular components. As the Los Angeles Times often has
appended to its published poll results, "Poll results can be influenced
by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are
presented." Of more than 70,000 people called, only 2,640 were tallied.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those reached by phone refused
to sit for the half-hour interview. Population subgroups particularly
disinclined to participate inexorably would have been undercounted.
Orthodox Jews with young children at home would be less inclined to sit
for half an hour with a faceless phone interviewer from the Federation
than would be, say, a Reform convert eager to be counted as a Jew.
Similarly,
senior citizens would have more time to schmooze for half an hour;
younger people would have job and familial responsibilities, skewing the
generational numbers and census age median. Who Knew?
Calls were made by Interviewing Service of America, a company that
prominently advertises its specialty in polling the Asian-American
community. The company represents commercially that it has a unique
ability to count Chinese-, Korean-, Japanese- and other Asian-American
communities because it has cultivated an expertise in that subgroup's
demographic nuances, sensitivities, and in overcoming suspicious of
interviewees. By contrast, when the same company polled citizens of
western Tennessee in evening calls, the October 23, 1998 issue of the
Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted the county transportation manager as
acknowledging that "[w]e have had people call the hotline and say it is
a scam and someone is just trying to find out where they live and where
their children are, and similar things." Thus, we know from a documented
1998 census taken by the same interviewers around the same time that
they were
calling Jews in Los Angeles that, when they are not practicing their
Asian-American expertise, they actually can scare large numbers of
potential interviewees away from the phone. Who Knew?
In the Federation census, calls were made during day
and night hours. I assume that calls were not made on any weekday
Jewish holy days because, otherwise, the census would be skewed ab
initio. Even so, members of Sabbath-observant households do not sit on
the phone twenty-six
minutes with census-takers on Thursday evenings. Every
Sabbath-observant Jewish woman I know is busy on Thursday evening, and
no Sabbath-observant Jewish man is going to sit on the phone half an
hour on Thursday night with a Federation census taker. Just as
Interview Service of America knows
Asian-Americans, a different polling company more sensitive to Jewish
sensitivities would have known that about Sabbath observers. Who Knew?
In addition, Sabbath-observant families average more
children per household than do non-observant families. Parents in
households with several young children are less inclined to sit half an
hour on a phone being interviewed by a Federation census-taker. By
contrast, Reform converts, for example, are more inclined to be counted.
It's fun -- they
get to be Jewish. Similarly, retired people have more time to talk.
Thus, different groups have different motivations as to whether to
participate,and motivation skews the demographic base polled by phone.
Who Knew?
The census counted households, not individuals, further skewing
results. The United States census does not count
households. Household-counting is a methodology that structurally
underreports the Torah-observant community because Observant Jews (1)
number
more people per household, but (2) comprise fewer households per capita.
More people per household: (1) there are more children in
Torah-observant homes; (2) Torah-observant Jews suffer a lower divorce
rate (so there are more adults and children in the same one household);
(3) more young Torah-observant adults remain with their parents longer.
Fewer households
per capita: (1) the lower divorce rate makes two adults more likely to
comprise one household rather than two; (2) by discouraging our singles,
especially daughters, from living away from parents, there necessarily
are fewer Torah-observant households (because every single living alone
in an
apartment is a household); and (3) more conservative social practices
among the Torah-observant encourage our singles to marry and unite
households. Who Knew?
The census misleads further by attempting to compare
today's gerrymandered numbers with those of twenty years ago. The new
census polled exurbia, places way out in the sticks where
Torah-observant Jews do not roam. Therefore, it is flawed when its
analysts compare 1998 demographics with the 1977 numbers that polled
only Jews in urban and
suburban communities. Of course the numbers will seem to dilute Orthodox
Jews. And if the Los Angeles Jewish census this time were to include
Idaho and Montana, it would appear that all Jewish groups are declining
in numbers. Who Knew?
The census absurdly "finds" more than 5,000 African-American Jews in Los
Angeles, a group that we are told is nearly one-quarter the population
size of the Torah-observant. I lived among and celebrated Judaism with
hundreds of Black Jews from Ethiopia in the Hadera absorption center in
Israel in 1986. Since 1988, I have been speaking at
synagogues, temples, and Jewish organizations throughout the city.
There are not 5,000 Black Jews in Los Angeles. Who Knew?
The census invited interviewees to self-define their and their
progenitors' Judaism. Thus, it reports that, among respondents who
affiliate differently from their parents, 42% of children from Orthodox
homes switched, and 10.8% switched to Reform. The census inherently
fails to recognize that lesser educated, non-observant interviewees
often erroneously characterize their progenitors' practice as "Orthodox"
when it was not.
During ten years as a practicing pulpit rabbi in New York, New Jersey,
and California, I often encountered young people who told me about their
"Orthodox" parents or grandparents - describing people who had one set
of dishes and flatware at home, ate shellfish, drove on Shabbat but who
attended an Orthodox synagogue two hours on Yom Kippur and perhaps sent
their children to an afternoon Talmud Torah Hebrew school run by an
Orthodox shul. When such interviewees tell Interviewing Service of
America -- specialists in the Asian-American community -- that they are
Reform children of Orthodox progenitors, the statements are
sociologically interesting but demographically irrelevant. Who Knew?
The census reports that twenty percent of the Los Angeles population is
over 65. Many of our senior population arrived in Los Angeles as
pioneers before Torah observance established institutional roots and a
critical mass in the late 1970s and 1980s. The pioneers primarily were
non-Orthodox. They arrived before mechitzah partitions were demanded
and installed in several prominent Orthodox synagogues. Before the
establishment of dozens of yeshivas that now dot Los Angeles. Before
the
explosion of a plethora of mikvahs, kosher restaurants, pizza stores.
Think "Frisco Kid." Certainly, many of those abandoning Orthodoxy a
century ago descended from Torah-observant grandparents from the "Old
Country." Think "Hester Street." That twenty percent includes a
disproportionate number of Reform residents who indeed come from
Orthodox households. They are
sociologically important, the era of Irving Howe's "World of our
Fathers." However, such numbers utterly are irrelevant for charting
demographic trends, and they mask the burgeoning impact of youthful
Orthodoxy's birthrate in Los Angeles. Moreover, the Orthodox of twenty
years ago qualitatively were less educated Jewishly, less pious, more
willing to
worship without a partition and to eat in halakhically challenged
establishments. Today's Torah-observant community, educated at any of
the booming yeshivas that burst at their seams and that continually
expand into
newer, bigger buildings -- Emek, Yavneh, Hillel, Toras Emes, West
Valley, YUHSLA, Valley Torah, Shalhevet, etc. - will not compromise on
seating partitions, and they demand and patronize rabbinically
supervised establishments. Who Knew?
If the quantitative number of Reform homes is lower now than twenty
years ago, any effort to project denominational shifts from Orthodoxy to
Reform necessarily is skewed because a perceived proportional increase
of Reform Jews coming from observant homes more logically reflects the
quantitative decrease through assimilation in the Reform population base
of those coming from non-Orthodox homes. Do you see why?
The fewer quantitatively left from one group, the proportionally
greater the presence of the other. Thus, if there used to be 100 Reform
Jews, five from
"Orthodox homes" and 95 from Reform homes, those from "Orthodox homes"
would comprise 5% of the Reform group. If 50 of those from Reform homes
have disappeared, marrying out and assimilating away, the same group
hailing from "Orthodox homes" suddenly becomes 10% of the Reform group.
But it is not that there are more Reform Jews coming from "Orthodox
homes" -- just fewer people from reform homes staying in the fold. Who
Knew?
Census calls were made as many as six times each to nearly 70,000
households. Of the 2,640 respondents who sat half an hour to answer
their share of the 291 questions, 41% (1,080) were identified by
random-digit dialing. Wealthier homes with more phone numbers available
for modem, cellular, and multi-line communications would have been
numerically overcounted beyond those with more modest spending on phone
lines; Torah-observant Jews typically have tighter access to
discretionary income. The other 1,560 respondents (comprising
three-fifths of the poll database - 59%) were obtained from Federation
lists. Under this "dual-frame sampling" process, the census numbers
undercount discrete communities that participate less heavily in
Federation-list organizations. By comparison, if 59% of the United
States census were projected through dual-frame sampling from lists
culled from those maintained by the United Way, the numbers would
undercount certain discrete and insular minority groups who do not
participate as cohesively in those charities. Who Knew?
And for explicit religious reasons, Orthodox Jews abhor being counted
and consciously evade people-counters, whose efforts
they deem repugnant to halakha, much as certain American population
groups
evade census-takers in mistaken fear that information as to their
whereabouts will be shared with the Immigration and Naturalization
Service. Who Knew?
The census grossly undercounted Torah-observant Jews, demonstratively
so, but its camouflaged flaws nevertheless offered an intellectually
interesting opportunity to pinpoint. Sort of a "Where's Waldo" for the
statistically curious. The same problems, in one form or another, have
marred census efforts undertaken by other Federation counters in other
cities. Until the Torah-observant community evolves the sophistication
to recognize that the numbers consistently are skewed, that the
methodologies inherently are faulty, that the skewing is part of a
subtle agenda to steer away Federation funding from services and
programs that serve the Torah-observant community, and that the solution
for Orthodoxy is not rhetoric but statistical analysis and input not
from Orthodox political scientists and medical doctors but from trained
statisticians, the non-census will continue for another millennium.