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Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Americans don’t know much about Judaism but love the Jews, survey says
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleUS Jews know more about religion in general than their non-Jewish neighbors, a new survey shows.
Americans who are not Jewish, meanwhile, don’t know a lot about Judaism. But they like Jews more than any other religious group. And they think there are more Jews in the country than there actually are. The more non-Jews know about Jews, the more they like them.
The data comes out of a new survey on what Americans know about religion published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked a group of diverse Americans a set of 32 questions about religion, ranging from knowledge of the Bible and Christianity to knowledge of Judaism and other religions.
Ten of the questions related to Judaism in some way: four asked directly about Jewish history, practice and texts; five were about the Hebrew Bible; and one was about the size of America’s Jewish population.
The survey was conducted Feb. 4-19 and included a total of nearly 11,000 respondents.
None of the questions on Judaism received a majority of correct answers: Only 29% of respondents knew that the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat) begins on Friday night. Just 27% knew Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) was associated with Judaism. And only 24% knew that Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year.
Older Americans did better on all of these questions than the youth.
Jews did much better on these questions. Nearly 90% knew that Shabbat begins on Friday night, almost 80% knew Kabbalah is Jewish, and 82% knew Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year.
Americans as a whole also didn’t know how many Jews live in the country. Fewer than one in five knew that Jews are less than 5% of Americans. A quarter thought Jews were more than 5% of Americans, and the rest of the respondents didn’t know.
But Jews know a lot about religion. They outscored everyone when it came to general religious knowledge, not just on Judaism. Jews were the only religiously affiliated group to get a majority of the questions right.
Jews scored highest, the survey said, “even after controlling for levels of education and other key demographic characteristics such as race, age and gender.”
The more Americans know Jews, the more they like them. As other surveys have shown, Americans tend to have warm feelings toward Jews. Asked to rate religious groups on a thermometer scale, from 1 to 100, Jews got an average rating of 63, the highest of any group.
— JTA
The Times of Israel Community.