Introduction

I GREW UP IN A TIME AND PLACE WHERE Americans looked askance at anyone who was "different." Never mind that everyone around us might be considered "different" by others; our family belonged to a very small Jewish minority in a sea of middle-American Christians. We did not attend the nearby Methodist church; we did not decorate our house with colored lights at Christmastime; and we stayed home from work and school during our religious holidays in the fall. Our neighbors were polite, and I never saw anything like outright anti-Semitism, but there was a clear social distance between us. My parents countered this by developing friendships with other Jewish families, enrolling me in a Jewish after-school program, celebrating Jewish holidays at home, and instilling in me a strong pride in our Jewish heritage. They believed, and I believe with them, that America's diversity makes it great, and that even people who practice a small minority religion like ours can be equal participants in every other aspect of American life.

Judaism is one of the world's great religions, enduring and evolving for thousands of years. It spun off two other great religions, Christianity after the first 1,200 years (approximately) of Judaism and Islam more than half a millennium later. Yet the people practicing this ancient religion have always been a minuscule fraction of the world's population. Today's Jewish population numbers only about 13 million in a world of over 7 billion people, fewer than two Jews for every thousand people in the world. The only country in which Jews are numerically important today is Israel, where about 40 percent of the world's Jews constitute about 80 percent of the population. About the same number live in the United States, a bit less than 2 percent of the U.S. population. The remaining 20 percent of world Jewry is scattered among many countries in small communities, each a tiny fraction of the total population in their respective countries.

In part because they are such a small minority, Jews typically prefer to live in places where they can join other Jews to form a community. The chart in Figure 1.1 indicates that nearly two-thirds of the American Jewish population live in and around nine large cities, mostly in the Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington (40 percent), in Florida and California (20 percent), and in Chicago (4 percent). Within the urban Northeast, three-fourths of all Jews live in the New York metropolitan area or nearby New Jersey. Yet because Jews are such a small proportion of the U.S. population, not even the largest Jewish community makes up more than a small fraction of the local population.

Jews share with other small religious minorities a concern with preserving their way of life amid the seductions of a very attractive larger society. No wonder, then, that American Jews have pioneered new forms of Jewish observance, clearly influenced by the democracy and religious pluralism that lie at the foundation of the American experience. Despite their minority status in the United States, however, American Jews are one of the two largest Jewish communities in the world, rivaled only by Israel itself. This means that Americans play a dominant role within world Jewry, especially in the Diaspora (that is, outside of Israel). The religious observance of Jews in the United States is thus an important factor in the evolution of modern Judaism, and American Judaism is a crucial determinant of the shape in which Jewish civilization will be passed on to future generations.

Economics, Religion, and American Judaism

Economics is one of the social sciences, all of which are disciplines that use the scientific method—involving observation, theorizing, and empirical testing of hypotheses—to study some aspect of human behavior. The aspect of human behavior that is the subject of economic inquiry is how we act when we can't afford to have everything that we want. The technical term for this is scarcity. Some people are so wealthy that they seem to be able to buy anything, but most of us are not, and we have to learn to live within our income. We can raise that income by working longer or harder, by investing wisely, or by receiving a lucky windfall, but for the most part we are limited in these opportunities. Our income is an important determinant of our lifestyle, and our lifestyle choices affect our spending patterns, behavior that is at the heart of the study of economics.

Although the behavior of the very rich may seem to be free of the problems of scarcity, this applies only to their ability to purchase goods and services in the market. Like the rest of us, their time is limited to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (mostly), and a finite life span. In addition, they share with us a desire for the many things that money can't buy, love being the most popular example. Other examples are family life and religious faith. These are what economists call self-produced (or sometimes home-produced) goods because each individual has to direct his or her own time and effort into the process of "making" such a good. Money can be used to buy things that enrich this process or make it easier, but love, family relationships, and religious expression cannot be bought with money alone, no matter how much they are desired.

This book on the economics of Judaism is about how scarcity affects the religious behavior of ordinary American Jews and their families. By "ordinary," I mean the majority of Jews who view religion as one aspect of life but not necessarily their main interest. My primary concern is with people whose lifestyle choices do not make religion a central focus and who choose occupations outside of the religious community, effectively excluding the clergy and members of various ultra-Orthodox sectlike groups. Most of us "ordinary" Americans spend both money and time on our religious observance, but many of us also wish we had more time and/or money to spend. By viewing religion as one of the self-produced goods that must compete with other items in a larger consumption pattern, economics provides important insights into many aspects of religious observance at the grassroots level.

My own research on the economics of religious observance has focused on American Judaism, in part because it is the religious community to which I belong and with which I am most familiar. Understanding the economic context for decision making has helped me understand myself, my family, and my community. Although Judaism is well studied by many historians and other social scientists, it has...