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In response to the rising rate of intermarriage in the US, Israeli lawmakers called on the government to pay increased attention to Diaspora Jewry. The call came at a Monday meeting of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs. Representatives of the Jewish Agency, Jewish Federations of North America and the Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs Ministry testified regarding the decline in Jewish endogamy, while MKs debated the best way for Israel to engage Diaspora Jewry to stem the tide of assimilation.

In the presentation “U.S. Jewry 2010: Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Population,” given at the Association for Jewish Studies meeting in Boston on December 20th, Professor Leonard Saxe reported that rather than declining, the Jewish population has been increasing since 1990. NJPS 2000-01, the last national Jewish population study sponsored by the United Jewish Communities (currently, the Jewish Federations of North America), found that the U.S. Jewish population had declined by 300,000 during the 1990-2000 period. Saxe and his colleagues found that the Jewish population has actually risen from about 5.5 million individuals in 1990 to an estimated 6.5 million as of 2010, an increase of nearly 20%.

The Women Who Reconstructed American Jewish Education is a collection of essays about important but woefully understudied and underappreciated women outstanding in the field of American Jewish education. As editor Carol K. Ingall explains in the introduction, the eleven women profiled in the book “planted the seeds of social reform and progressivism in the soil and soul of American Jewish education” during professional careers that spanned the twentieth century. Few of these women’s names are known to any but specialists today, despite the key role most of them played in religious education, a central feature of modern American Jewish life.

The AVI CHAI Foundation recently published a summary of key findings from the 2008-09 Census of Jewish Day Schools in the United States. Commissioned by AVI CHAI, this third census was conducted by Dr. Marvin Schick. The statistics in this summary include grade by grade enrollments for every Jewish day school in the Unites States.