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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Obviously endogamy and in-group solidarity are not the same thing, although it's reasonable to assume a correlation.

But we're having this exact conversation every four-six months. The question always is, what's the baseline for comparison? Jews constitute 2.4% of the US as per your source; even adjusted for SES, they are outnumbered by non-Jewish peers in every stratum. Choosing Jews as marriage partners even 39% of the time suggests some preference for endogamy. This is measured by odds ratios in the relevant literature, as described here by, appropriately, Rosenfeld.

New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States, Phillips 2013 in Contemporary Jewry explains further:

Interracial marriage continues to increase for all groups in America (Passel et al. 2010), and commentators on the Jewish scene commonly speak of high and increasing rates of Jewish intermarriage (Wertheimer 2001) as well. But what does this mean exactly? The implied comparison is with earlier time periods. Another way to think about intermarriage rates is in comparison with other groups. Jewish sociology exclusively uses simple individual rates of intermarriage, but for comparison among groups odds ratios are preferable because they control for group size (Kalmijn 1998). As Rosenfeld (2008) explains, ‘‘The odds ratio for endogamy is simply the odds of endogamy divided by the odds of exogamy (or out- marriage). An odds ratio of 1 would mean that the category in question had no significance in the marriage market, because the odds of marrying within the group would have to be the same as the odds of marrying someone from outside the

And there's the issue of, well, Jews not really constituting a homogenous demographic. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly marry and even befriend each other.

Mixed-ancestry Jews have the lowest odds ratio (50), followed by White Hispanics (329). This means they are less likely to marry endogamously (and more likely to intermarry) than the other groups considered, controlling for group size. Single-ancestry Jews have the second highest odds ratio. [= 2,085].

Religious affiliation, unsurprisingly, interacts with descent.

Endogamy values for [non-Hispanic] Whites are not provided and are a PITA to calculate.

P.S.

The measurement of Jewish intermarriage in the literature on Jewish sociology diverges from the conventions prevalent in demography in significant ways and does not consider Jewish intermarriage in the larger context of American intermarriage. Instead, Jewish sociology tends to focus on interventions that can reduce intermarriage and on the impact of intermarriage on the American Jewish community. […] it combines first with second marriages and does not control for mixed-parentage. When both of these are applied, a different picture emerges from that of the unremitting increase in intermarriage widely portrayed in communal discourse.

  1. As noted in my response to KulakRevolt, the 2% number is not the relevant one; the relevant pct is the pct of Jews among college educated Americans who live in the few metro areas where Jewish people live -- the article you cite notes that "Americans overwhelmingly marry within [their] educational level.

  2. So, mixed-ancestry Jews are more likely to intermarry, while single-ancestry Jews are less likely to intermarry. What does that say about Jews overall? And note that Orthodox Jews are very much a minority

  3. More importantly, They have some preference for edogamy" is a far, far cry from "they exhibit dangerous levels of in-group preference." The bottom line is that most Jewish marriages since 2010 have been to non-Jews. That is evidence that in-group bias is not very strong.

  4. Note also that Pew reports that "U.S. Jews are also less likely than the overall U.S. public to say religion is “very important” to them (21% vs. 41%). Slightly more than half of Jews say religion is “not too” or “not at all important” in their lives, compared with one-third of Americans overall who say the same." and that "bout half of Orthodox Jews in the U.S. say they have “not much” (23%) or “nothing at all” (26%) in common with Reform Jews, and a majority of Reform Jews reciprocate those feelings: 39% say they have “not much” in common with the Orthodox and 21% say they have “nothing at all” in common. Just 9% of Orthodox Jews feel they have “a lot” in common with Reform Jews and vice versa."

So, all the actual evidence presented so far seems to refute the claim

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