Noam
Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam.
Mijal
I’m Mijal
And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked in the world today about Israel, about Judaism, and about the Jewish experience.
Mijal
This episode is sponsored in memory of Leo Bernstein.
Noam
We are in the process of having this amazing series of denominations and we’re learning a lot right now. And here to talk with us about Orthodox Judaism in the United States of America, as well as other denominations in the U.S., is none other than Zev Eleff. Zev Eleff, in addition to being my childhood friend growing up in Baltimore together,
Zev Eleff is also the 12th president of Gratz College. He’s the author or editor of 14 books and more than 120 articles in the fields of Jewish studies and American religion, which makes him perhaps the most successful graduate of Yeshivat Rambam Elementary School from the early 90s.
Mijal
Well, that’s tough competition for you now. But Zev, welcome to Wondering Jews
Zev Eleff
Thanks for having me.
Noam
Zev, before we get started, just want to say, I want to go back to our childhood growing up together.
Zev
That’s not what the debate was, and I knew you were going there.
Noam
You and I have had a feud that we had, and I want to settle it after 30 years. Okay, so we went to elementary school together, first through eighth grade. We were in first or eighth grade together, right?
Zev Eleff
Rodney Hampton was not a good running back.
Mijal
Wait, no, first just tell us how do you know each other?
Zev Eleff
Noam’s parents and my parents were part of this group of 30-somethings in Baltimore that dared to start a new modern Orthodox day school.
Mijal
Mmm.
Noam
Wow, by the way, he just made it historical. I was personal there. Well done. Zev, so we’ve had a feud for, it was all of eight years that we were in school together. And I want to settle it once and for all right now. Do you know what the feud was?
Zev Eleff
I could drive to my left? answer is no.
Noam
No, no, that wasn’t no one was debating that the few the feud was what the feud was Barry Sanders or Emmett Smith. That’s what the feud was
Zev Eleff
Right, and I argue that you cannot consider somebody who never played goal line or third down the greatest running back of all time.
Noam
Right. I just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s too much.
Mijal
Okay, I’m sorry. Wait, wait, wait. Just sorry. Sorry. In the same way that sometimes you’re like define terms. Which sport is this? Just for those of us who don’t know. Okay.
Zev Eleff
In football in football one was drafted in 1989 the other one in 1990 won 3 Super Bowls the other one won a playoff game maybe
Noam
Wow, but so serious, so this has been the debate, but Barry Sanders ended up averaging five yards per carry when Smith averaged 4.2.
Zev Eleff
Right, because Barry Sanders would get 10 yards, 1 carry, and then 0 yards the next day.
Noam
Okay, but Barry Sanders didn’t have the offensive line that Emmett Smith had. And Barry Sanders…
Zev Eleff
Let’s just agree that Lamar Jackson, if he played running back, would have been the greatest running back.
Noam
Alright fine, alright, that’s how we’ll settle this feud. That’s how we’ll settle this feud.
Mijal
Zev, didn’t you write a book about baseball? It was about football? I thought you wrote about baseball. Sorry. So I’m just going to say I think Zev is right, which whatever feud this is, because he wrote a book about it. A peer-reviewed book.
Zev Eleff
Football, and the greatest of all time. I wrote about football, Harvard, and anti-Semitism before that was a thing.
Noam
Okay, fine, fine. That is it. Once you write a book about something, yeah.
Zev Eleff
I can tell you I can tell you so many instances in which that is not the case
Noam
That’s amazing. Zev, what I remember and that no one knows this about you is that during recess in football, you created a system to create a first yard methodology to get first down methodology for recess during like fifth grade. You figured out a way to make it clear what a first down was because it was such a debate in recess all the time, what is a first down? And you figured out this system of measuring.
Zev Eleff
Mijal, in layman’s terms, what Noam is suggesting is that in fifth grade I was a little bit ahead in division and multiplication. I could divide the field by ten.
Noam
Ha ha ha.
Mijal
Got it. Thank you. You know, this is why we invited you Zev. I was just trying to speak about football, the great American tradition.
Noam
Okay.
All right, Mijal, Mijal, bring us in, make us serious. We’re ready.
Mijal
Make okay, not football is serious. Apparently, as my son tells me now, I have an American son. It’s very weird. You know what I mean? Like, like it’s not soccer. It’s American football. It’s it’s it’s yeah, it’s Anyways, but this is not going to be therapy for that or for your memories of each other between first and eighth grade. Don’t come on. Yeah.
Zev Eleff
That’ll come out in other ways,
Mijal
But Zev, we invited you. Well, first of all, both Noam and I know you. met when we were both in grad school and have been in touch, trading emails about American Jews and other fun things like that. Not as fun as you, Noam, with football. But we wanted to invite you because we are having an exploration of different contours of a conversation around denominations.
So we have so many questions for you. We are going to try to tell you which hat we are asking you these questions under so that, you know, I’ll just say that sometimes I get questions as like a Sephardic Jew and sometimes as a scholar of Sephardic Jews. And I like to like divide those two because they’re not always the same. So let me start my first question by asking you to wear the hat of a scholar of American religion. So I want to offer you the following hypothetical. Let’s say that any one of our ancestors.
whether they lived somewhere in Europe, I’m going to guess, or in North Africa or in the Middle East, came to us from 400, let’s say, years ago or so. And they know Judaism, they’re traditional Jews, they know what Torah is and observance and all of that. But then they hear this thing called denominations and they hear someone talk about orthodoxy, about reform, about conservative reconstruction. They hear these terms. They have never heard them before.
And they turn to you as a historian and they ask you in lay terms for normies, no academic jargon, to give a brief historical explanation of what this thing denominations are and how they came into being.
Zev Eleff
Great question. So, so what I would say is that there’s this thing called denominations. It’s not really a Jewish thing. It’s actually a Protestant thing.
What does mean? So Sidney Mead, a great scholar of American religion, suggested that among American Protestantism, you have different, well think about denominations for a moment. Back in the day, when Noah was little kid in Baltimore and his parents needed to run an errand to the bank, they would go to the teller and they’d press the button, they would ask for a hundred bucks, and the teller would immediately respond, well, in which denomination would you like
that hundred dollars? It could be one one hundred dollar bill, it be two fifty dollar bills, see, do a multiplication division, or five twenty dollar bills, or whatever, could be pennies. What is the meaning of denomination? It means that you get to the same outcome, a hundred dollars. There are different ways to get there. What Mead argued was that for Methodism, Protestantism, Unitarianism to some degree, there are different ways to get to heaven.
They may not… Christian groups. Some people like to the scenic route, some people like to get there through the superhighway. Either way, you get to the destination. American Judaism has adopted that because this is a, not a Christian country, but it’s a country certainly informed. It’s largely Christian. And so we’ve adopted the term denomination to describe Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, but actually it’s not so.
Mijal
It’s all Christian groups, just to remind everybody.
Zev Eleff
These three groups, and that’s why my teacher Jonathan Sarna, I’ve done it, we talk about movements. In fact, we’re talking about American Judaisms. Why? Because not every group agrees how to convert a Jew. Not every group agrees about what constitutes a rabbi, a writ of divorce, a marriage ceremony. Not every group agrees that one is valid and one isn’t.
So I immediately respond to this ancestor that the term itself is problematic.
Noam
Zev, there such a thing, you know, Michal’s awesome question about 400 years ago till today, is there such a thing as authentic Judaism now? Does that mean anything? What does that mean?
Zev Eleff
I wrote a book called Authentically Orthodox, and the book is, that word authentic is really interesting. I describe it as a feeling, as a sensation.
Mijal
Zev, it’s so interesting what you said earlier. I didn’t know that before. You expressed that in Christian Protestant denominations in America, that there is a sense, if I understood you correctly, a certain pluralism that they have, they believe we have different ways of doing things, but we’re all making it to heaven.
Noam
Ha ha ha.
Mijal
I actually didn’t know that. I assumed they had the same fights that we do. And then you contrasted that with Jewish denominations and you brought up some examples how we disagree on major questions of Jewish status, how to become a Jew, how we disagree on domestic matters. I would add there like theological questions, Jewish law. So let me ask you another big, big question that I am taking advantage of your expertise to ask you to answer it to us in a summary.
But if you had to explain to, again, that same ancestor, what are the main differences between denominations? And I do want to acknowledge that it’s a hard question because you’re a historian.
I’ll tell you what I’ve heard, and you can tell me if you think it’s too simplified, but some of the ways that I’ve heard things described is that, say that, and I’m gonna just talk about reform, conservative, and orthodox, but the reform movement believes in individual choice above all. you, it’s almost like informed
Mijal
choice, you know Jewish law, you know Jewish tradition, but as an individual, you get to choose using, I guess, your modern sensibilities, what you want to adapt in your life. Conservative Judaism believes in the obligatory nature of traditional law, but they also believe that they have a group of rabbis within the conservative movement that can continue to change said law. And increasingly sociologically, there is a gap between
the leadership that sees itself as observing it and the lay public that might not observe it. And orthodoxy has evolved to a place where people feel bound to traditional Jewish law as they understood it reflecting the Talmud and rabbinic tradition. Sorry, that was a little bit like a lot.
Zev Eleff
No, no, I think there’s truth to it. Of course, that’s that’s focusing specifically on in religious practice, right? There’s something to be said about certain expect communal expectations in the reform movement about voting practices, a stance towards Israel, for example. So. The vast majority of self-identified reform Jews strongly identify as part of the Democratic Party.
Mijal
Right. Right.
Noam
What do you mean by that? What does that mean? What do those two examples mean?
Mijal
I think what Zev is saying is expanding our understanding of expectation and ritual and saying it’s not just…
Noam
Meaning, meaning, meaning, because I guess that here’s the laziest, I’m going to describe the laziest distinction between Orthodox, conservative and reform to this person. The laziest would be Orthodox is the most strict as it relates to Jewish law. Conservative is a little bit less strict and reform is the least strict. That is like the, to the average person, if they say, hey, what’s Reform, Conservative, Orthodox? They would say something like that. And your point is that’s, that is incredibly
incomplete and inaccurate distinction between the three, would you say?
Zev Eleff
I think it’s a deep oversimplification of it. It’s just sort of like, let’s just map out on sort of an x-axis and plot. Okay, so here’s from radical reform to Sattler. I don’t think we can do that. I you’re really good at that, Michael. I think that’s really, really critical to understand that it’s too simple.
Noam
Right.
Zev Eleff
And I think communally, for example, how people do Shabbat, for example. In the Reform movement, there is an increasing expectation to unplug, for example, or to not answer your phone or to not write an email on Yom Kippur. That’s the tenth day of the Jewish New Year.
If we oversimplify, we’re not doing justice to the variety of ways that people practice. know, Michal and I are both alumni of the Wexner Foundation. And in the graduate fellowship, there was one student, was one rabbinical student in the reform movement who described, he said to me, you know, Zev, you’re more religious than I. I forget exactly why he said it. I said no.
You do religion your way, I do religion my way, but my religion doesn’t mediate yours.
Mijal
You’re saying my standard shouldn’t determine what yours looks like or how you evaluate yours. That’s very American. And I would even say a little bit Protestants of you.
Zev Eleff
Correct, correct.
Zev Eleff
To some extent, it’s a little bit pluralistic.
Zev Eleff
and no, I’m to your point, even in Reform, rabbinical student circles, there’s this expectation of from Satmar to radical Reform, to Reconstructionist, whatever, whatever that spectrum is. I don’t think it’s so. a Reform, tikkun olam, right? The idea of repairing the world. I’m getting the hang of it. If they, if that is part of your Jewishness,
then
Noam
By the way, the definition of tikkun olam is tikkun olam.
Zev Eleff
Yes, it is. I think that we have to take every type of Jew and every religious practice at its own depth and every community builds its own expectations. I think that’s really important.
Mijal
That’s a whole other conversation.
Mijal
I’m just saying you almost sound like the way you describe the original Christian Protestants that say we all make it to heaven in our own places, which is fine. I’m just noting that.
Zev Eleff
Correct, correct. now where I run, right, and look, where that runs into a challenge for me, this is where you were very kind about my own personal professional schizophrenia, which is, what do you do when religious practices converge on one another? I certainly…
I to non-Orthodox Jews as the non-Orthodox, but I refer to mentors and friends as rabbis so-and-so. don’t defrock anybody. would be great job. Gratz College is wonderful. I’m very happy to be there. My board chairs are listening. I want to be there for a very long time. But if I had a second job, it would be in charge of defrocking the American rabbinate. Not all of them, just deciding.
Noam
How do you get paid for that?
Zev Eleff
Funder driven completely.
Noam
That’s fine. You gotta pitch some foundations.
Mijal
Noam wants to be the first investor.
Mijal
But just for our listeners, so Gratz College, from what I understand, is a pluralistic institution.
Zev Eleff
which makes us a dinosaur.
Mijal
And you are somebody who studies all forms of Jewish religious denominations, movements, practices, and history. And you’re also, like many of us, within a particular community. I believe in your case, an Orthodox community. So you’re saying there can be some schizophrenia. But what do you mean by saying that pluralistic institutions are dinosaurs?
Zev Eleff
Pluralism has given way-
Mijal
First, define it. What does it mean for folks when they hear a pluralistic constitution?
Zev Eleff
A pluralistic institution, a divinity it was, is a certain level of, it goes beyond tolerance. It’s an idea for me to hold my values and to be in conversation with you, have an open, to me, this is my definition, this is Eleff’s definition, to hold onto my values in conversation and engagement with other people, to allow my ideas to,
mediate as part of this conversation, but certainly to understand and accept and embrace the fact that other people have different values, different ideas, different ideas of wisdom, Jewish wisdom.
That has changed, I think, in last 10, 15 years in which we are embracing inclusivism. This goes to raging conversations about is there such a thing as post-denominationalism? Do we need, do the Reform and Conservative movements need to coalesce? Is there such a thing as just liberal, capital L, Judaism? Where that’s coming from is the belief that religion shouldn’t be, your point, Noam,
should not be limiting. We should take everybody in their whole self and let them do themselves. You do you.
Mijal
Right. So we’re talking about like this shift towards, it’s funny, again, if we’re talking with that ancestor, just going to the beginning of our conversation, we’re introducing them to the denominations and we’re also telling them, if you come back in 50 years or in hundred years, this might look a little different. So let me, I want to shift a little bit those just because I want to take advantage of like all your areas of expertise. There’s so many, I know I’m like, you wrote like 14 books. I’m sorry. can’t.
Mijal
And I can’t do the sports bit. can try, but I will fail. Even the fact that I got the sports that you wrote about wrong. I’m a little bit embarrassed by that, but it’s okay. But I want to ask you a little bit about Orthodox Judaism, because you’ve written about orthodoxy in America. So again, for people who are not inside an Orthodox community or who don’t really get it, if you had to give a bit of like a description,
like it encompasses, let’s say like Joe Lieberman, right? He identified as a modern Orthodox German. Am I getting that right? Was, that accurate? Right. So keeps Shabbat and kosher dietary laws to some extent. It encompasses like Hasidic Jews who live in enclaves where
Mijal
they have separate streets for men and women to walk in, right? It encompasses like Yeshivish Jews in Lakewood that, you know, created huge centers of Torah study and have very devout practices, but still different than Hasidic. Like there’s just like such a spectrum. So could you demystify this?
Zev Eleff
Right. So it’s a great issue. Let’s talk about how this happened for a moment. I don’t want oversimplify too much, but…
Mijal
You know what Zev, we give you full permission to oversimplify. Okay. Now you have our blessing. You gave a disclaimer.
Zev Eleff
No, no, okay. I thought you telling me don’t hear over something like that. in the the in the if in the not if in the if in finally in the in the 1880s the Reform rabbis descended on Pittsburgh was the very first time Pittsburgh beat Baltimore They wanted to host it in Baltimore, but people complained that was a football reference Mijal. In 1885 a cadre of Reform rabbis meet and they have their Declaration of Independence, Isaac Mary Wise called it, to finally separate from Orthodox Judaism once and for all. They break away. And at that moment, the Reform movement had Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which is their rabbinical school. They had the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, their congregational body. They would in a few years form the Central Conference of American Rabbis, their rabbinical guild.
They had a rabbinical school, a congregational body, and a rabbi guild. So they had the equipment, the institutions, and everything flowed out of these. If you wanted to do reform, contra, kind of what we’re talking about of do-it-yourself Judaism, you had to go through these systems. They formed it on their own.
Fast forward decades later, we were kind of talking about this with denominations and movements, is that finally once and for all in a similar style, the Jewish Theological Seminary.
which was founded by Sabato Moraes and others that called it an enlightened Orthodox institution. But then after Solomon Schechter, who was the president, passed away, so now we’re talking about in the first two decades of the 20th century, the conservative movement once again has its rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, you have the United Synagogue, their congregational body, and you have the rabbinical assembly. And you know what they wake up and they say?
I guess we’re something different. We’ve been struggling over it for decades, but these other people, mostly European trained and born rabbis, don’t want any part of us. They don’t like English sermons. They don’t like how we do mayor. I guess we are conservative Jews. Nothing like that really happened in the Orthodox. There was no breakaway into a different stream of Judaism. There have been attempts, maybe, but
Zev Eleff
Orthodox are this 10 % 12 % whatever it is are all the people that weren’t a part of this Movement away from an orthodoxy over the last 150 years. So sure have there been infighting? Yes, there has. But at the end of the day from Satmar to
modern Orthodox to the Yeshiva world to Lubavitch. And there have been real, real fights between them. Still, there still is a general atmosphere of cohesiveness together.
Mijal
What do they have in common?
Noam
So what, yeah, what does it mean to be a self-identified Orthodox Jew then? What is the through line?
Zev Eleff
The through line is that sensibility that we’re talking about. Whether it’s how Noam suggested it, there’s certainly a baseline of practices. To be an orthodox, it’s the messiness of all of these things. The answer is yes to all of the following. Does it mean that you do not drive on Shabbat? Yeah. Does it mean that you likely…
Mijal
That’s very abstract, Zeff. Can’t you give something-
Noam
But Zev, I didn’t interrupt, but you and I are from Baltimore. There’s a synagogue called Beth Tfiloh where I went to high school where 90 % maybe of the people who go to that congregation self-identify as Orthodox and drive to the synagogue. And they’re not Sephardic, Mijal. how do we make sense of that then? What does it mean that they’re self-identified as? Okay. Yeah.
Zev Eleff
Beth Tfiloh might be its own model. I’m serious, were an orthodox synagogue with a trained JTS rabbi for many, many years. So you may be giving the exception that proves the will, of course.
Mijal
And that might also reflect something from 60 years ago that was more common in orthodoxy. Today, it’s less common.
Noam
Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, got it.
Mijal
I’m going to add something to your practice, Zev, and it’s always something that triggers me. So you mentioned not driving on Shabbat, baseline of practice, non-egalitarianism, I would say continues to be a through line. Even open orthodoxy is not egalitarian.
Zev Eleff
And but I’ll say, but Mijal, complicate this, even in certain rightward center sections, excuse me, of the conservative movement.
Mijal
No, that’s becoming, I don’t want to take the edge cases. want to take like the 80%, let’s Yeah, let’s use 80 % to make our life easier. So 80 % of Orthodox Jews would have a baseline practice that doesn’t, let’s say does not drive on Shabbat, keep certain dietary laws kosher at home, has a non-egalitarian understanding of Judaism, refers to the Talmud as their source of Jewish law, even if they are interpreted differently from each other, right?
Mijal
and has a certain consensus, again, a little bit tricky around Jewish status. It’s matrilineal descent. Judaism goes by the mother, let’s say, a certain shared legal understanding of what a marriage is, what a divorce is, conversion, things like that. Would you feel comfortable with that?
Zev Eleff
Yes, so I think that’s the shorthand of where we’re getting at, is that even though there’s this menagerie of orthodoxy, there is a certain unspoken baseline. Now obviously there are massive disagreements, but at the end of the day, especially it’s practice that means so much.
There’s a look, there’s a feel, there’s an understanding of what people do. And I think you’re right. also the certain… egalitarianism is a really interesting point because even that is really complicated. Noam and I attended an elementary school in which a wonderful woman educator was the principal, Dr. Rita Shlush. And I certainly at six years old did not appreciate that we were like the only school.
that had that. And now it’s much, much, much more common, but the pushback against this Goliath Shiva around in Baltimore, part of it was that. And so it’s even egalitarianism in one space. So egalitarianism, guess, ensconced in the synagogue, you’re absolutely right. In certain areas.
Mijal
Right, I feel like.
Noam
And we haven’t, Mijal, we haven’t touched upon theology either. Like there’s, we haven’t made theological distinctions between these movements. And is there a theological distinction?
Zev Eleff
I think those are much more understated. We care about what our rabbis think much more. People get into great big fights about that. That’s not as obvious. It’s not as evident.
Mijal
Maybe Zev, would you feel comfortable if I say this, that let’s say again, taking the 80 % rule, that 80 % of Orthodox Jews believe in a God that gave us a Torah at Sinai and that the Torah that we have reflects revelation from God. I would say that that is a belief that I think is fairly widespread in the Orthodox community. Again, taking the 80 % rule.
Zev Eleff
This was a big fight among sociologists around 1990 when there was this survey of Orthodox Jews in the United States came out and about a huge chunk of the survey data came from the membership of Lincoln Square Synagogue in the mid-1980s. And so it turned out that a much smaller quotient than 80 % believed in God.
Mijal
That’s a modern orthodox synagogue in the Upper West Side.
Zev Eleff
to Noam’s point about the margins and a question about which data set. So I think it’s always hard to drive and to think about consensus. So I think on the whole, I think you’re absolutely right.
Mijal
We’re oversimplifying here.
Zev Eleff
We’re oversimplifying and I think people would even quibble of, so you believe it, which parts of the Talmud are divine? Every single semicolon or the essential ideas. These are, people have battled and excommunicated one another over these things. They are not light things. And yet I think you’re right. The idea of the textual authority, of the idea of the 13, though Mark Shapiro wrote an important book about the,
monody and 13 principles of faith and how not everybody agreed with my monodies. And yet, they have engendered themselves to the Orthodox in a way that it becomes a shorthand for what Naum’s asking for, which is Jewish belief, or Orthodox belief.
Mijal
Right. Zev, let me just mention some other things to see if you agree or disagree. This is an oversimplification describing about 80 % of Orthodox Jews. All right. I’m going to describe certain trends. Trend number one. I’m going to say three trends or three phenomenon. Trend number one, Orthodox Jews are much more right-wing politically in terms of American politics than other American Jews. And some surveys show they’re getting more so. And they’re also.
Mijal
much more Zionistic and connected to Israel than other denominations. I’m going to say three of them just to make your life harder. Trend number two, Orthodox Jews are growing faster demographically than other denominations in terms of birth rates and retention of religious tradition. if we look at how many, let’s say, Jewish children in New York are Orthodox,
then we might get a portrait of certain demographic growth that will continue. Trend number three, one of the big conversations about orthodoxy in America is that it is not only we spoke about theology and law, but there’s very significant economic trade-offs that both describe and sustain a community that has to build its own institutions, its own schools, have its own food, live near synagogues, all of that. These are three trends that I’m just adding to the pile.
Zev Eleff
Awesome. Awesome. okay, so I think that they’re all true. With regard to the political shift, I would say that specifically in this last election, we’ve seen a strong movement away from the Democratic Party. I would not have said that and I’ve written a little bit about, hard to tease out exactly.
Zev Eleff
to figure it out. You don’t identify at the polls as a certain type of person this way. So I think that we have definitely seen it in the last election, that movement. I would also add, and this is what people don’t talk about, is that there are people who identify rightward politically who have found themselves into orthodoxy.
in last couple of years, it’s not that, it’s my Zionism, it’s my, you know, use other oversimplifications, my Judaism is leading me to orthodoxy.
Noam
That’s so interesting.
Mmm.
Mijal
I see this with young conservative men in Manhattan, that some of them are like, I don’t really practice orthodoxy, but I feel way more comfortable in an orthodox space.
Zev Eleff
What is your position on the Israel-Hamas war? I guess I cannot be this Jew anymore. I’m going to have, if it’s just a perception. So it’s not that they are just growing, the Orthodox are growing more right wing politically, is that their numbers are, this gets to your second point, their numbers are growing because people who are naturally have a proclivity, they have a predisposition to a right word politic are moving into Orthodox Judaism.
Mijal
Right. Right.
Zev Eleff
And what does that mean? I don’t know if it necessarily means if they go to synagogue, attend synagogue every Saturday morning or every day. But if how they self-identify, they are moving it. Politics. And people are very uncomfortable about that. But remember that the Methodist Church in the 1840s split between North and South over slavery. That Judaism is being redefined based on political types, we’re 150 years behind in some ways. Second question about is it growing?
Yes, it’s growing because there so-called conversion to orthodoxy. There’s no question that birth rate among Jews, Orthodox Jews is much higher. That among again, to use that funny term, the non-orthodox.
Mijal
And there’s also shorter generations in terms of marriage. Like you get married younger, so it’s quicker. Right.
Zev Eleff
It’s quicker, it’s happening, it’s much more rapid, absolutely right. So the non-orthodox, funny term still, are getting married later and having fewer children, the orthodox are getting married younger and having more children. I think where we don’t study enough is that there’s much, we generally assume that once you’re orthodox you stay orthodox, I don’t think that’s so. Yeah, think retention is probably where I don’t think it’s as high as people think.
Mija
That’s what I mentioned about retention. That’s a question mark.
Zev Eleff
Your last one is the most fascinating one, which is the price the cost to do orthodextrish life is staggering. It depends on the community. Depen-
Noam
Can we talk about that for a minute? Because I want to give you my hot take and your reaction to that. Well, no, it’s, but no, but Zev, you would be shocked about prices. but the hot take that I have is that, and I want your reaction to this as it relates to that third question, is that Modern Orthodoxy is not a movement, but it’s become a socioeconomic status. And it doesn’t, there’s nothing that, modern orthodoxy,
Noam
has become not a specific movement that has any ideals that follows into the thought of Rabbi Joseph Beresolovechik or Rabbi Norman Lamb, but that it is that you enter this socioeconomic status community of upper middle class or middle class, and that’s what it is. And it’s exorbitant to be Modern Orthodox. And that is my hot take. I want your reaction to that.
Zev Eleff
The cost of doing Orthodoxy, particularly Modern Orthodoxy, is really expensive. Whether it’s after-tax dollars, people don’t talk about that enough, 80, 100, 120 thousand dollars for tuition. again, you’ll get to your point, more children. Synagogue membership is going up. Kosher food is rising in price. to the point where modern Orthodox Jews are not putting away much money into savings.
every penny in their paycheck is going to, is paying for doing Orthodox Judaism. Now, ask a modern Orthodox Jew, how much would you pay for 50 Thanksgiving quality level meals, free childcare?
Noam
50 times two.
Zev Eleff
So a hundred. Child care on annual basis, child care every Saturday morning, a built in network from, have, there are charities that can help me pay my mortgage if times get tough. If my child is in the hospital, there is a pantry to obtain kosher food. I have a whole system where I can rely on this social net. How much would you pay for that? Well, for the modern Orthodox and for the Orthodox generally, The answer is:
every single penny in my paycheck. That’s how much it’s worth, and that’s exactly how much they pay for it.
Mijal
Wow. So Zev, you’re making me think we need to have a whole other conversation around economics of Jewish life, which is really interesting. And some of the outstanding questions I’ll say, like, that there’s things happening around us, sociological changes in America and in our communities that are changing things. We don’t know exactly what things would look like in five to 10 years or in 50 years. But we are both inheriting
Mijal
systems and institutions from the past and also at the same time kind of like building the new roadmap for the future. So super grateful for your dizzying array of historical knowledge and analysis and also for bearing with us by oversimplifying at times and playing the 80 % game. And yeah, really grateful to have you with us. We’re going to add to the show notes some of your articles and some books. So if anybody wants to learn more about
deserves work as historian and as a scholar. You can read a lot of his work and it’s all fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us.
Zev Eleff
Thanks for having me. Thanks guys.
Noam
Zev, thank you so much.