Pew Research Center survey: A quarter of US adults raised Jewish no longer identify as Jews
Survey of 78,000 people in 36 countries on ‘religious switching’ in the world also shows that 20% of the US Muslim population are converts
Rossella Tercatin is The Times of Israel's archaeology and religions reporter.
Almost one in four US adults who were raised Jewish no longer identify as such, a new report by the prominent Pew Research Center released on Wednesday has shown.
The report focuses on the phenomenon of “switching religions” around the world, and it is based on data obtained by polling almost 37,000 Americans and over 41,000 individuals in 35 other countries, including Israel. The study offers significant insights into religious identity and affiliation in the 21st century.
“The reason that we chose the term ‘religious switching’ instead of conversion is because the change can take place in multiple directions,” Kirsten Lesage, the report’s lead author, told The Times of Israel in a phone interview. “A person can switch from one religious group to another, such as from Christianity to Buddhism, but it could also mean switching from one religion to no religion, and that includes anybody that identifies as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.”
The study devoted a chapter to religious switching into and out of Judaism, drawing on the data collected in the US and Israel, where, the report noted, some 80% of world Jewry lives (other communities in the world were not considered).
“There are two reasons why we included an entire chapter on Judaism,” Lesage said. “First, we had a country, Israel, where a majority of the population is Jewish. Secondly, we were really interested in looking at religious switching in some of the major world religions. We did intentionally try to cover as many as we could. We were able to include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and the religiously unaffiliated.”
Overall, Lesage highlighted that Judaism as a religious group had a high retention rate (meaning that of all the people who say they were raised in a particular religious group, the percentage still describes themselves as belonging to that group). Christianity, in contrast, is described in the report as the group with the highest ratios of people leaving to people joining in most countries surveyed.
The situations in the US and in Israel emerged as significantly different.
In the US, only 76% of the respondents who said that they were raised Jewish still identify as such. Of the remaining 24%, 17% now describe themselves as unaffiliated, 2% as Christian, and 1% as Muslim.
Lesage highlighted that this gap could also be influenced by the specific nature of the questions that investigated the religious affiliation of participants.
The key questions asked respondents what their current religion was, if any, and if they thought about when they were children and in what religion they were raised, if any.
“In contrast, people could identify only as culturally Jewish or ethnically Jewish,” she said.
In Israel, 100% of the respondents — 591 adults polled face-by-face in the spring of 2024 — said that they were raised and still identified as Jewish.
“Of course, by 100%, we are rounding to the nearest integer,” said Lesage. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that every single person in Israel who was raised Jewish still considers themselves Jewish today.”
The survey also highlighted differences between the two countries regarding accessing Judaism.
Of all the respondents who identified as currently Jewish, only 1% in Israel said they did not grow up as such. In the US, 14% of the Jewish population are converts, including 7% who were raised Christian and 6% who were raised religiously unaffiliated.
Similar findings between polled Jews and Muslims
Pew also polled the Muslim population in Israel and the US.
Similar to the Jewish counterpart, virtually no one raised Muslim in Israel switched to a different religious group.
This was consistent with findings about Muslim individuals in other countries. According to the report, 13 of the 36 countries analyzed had sufficient sample sizes of Muslims to allow analysis of religious switching into and out of Islam, including the US, where about 1% of the population identifies as Muslim.
Overall, the researchers documented that only a tiny fraction of the adult population had left or joined Islam in most countries, whereas 20% of the Muslim population in the US are converts.
The researchers also documented the affiliation of the Israeli Jewish population to different Jewish groups, specifically Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), datiim (national religious), masortim (traditional), and hilonim (secular).
Over one in five Jewish Israelis (22%) said they were raised in a different Jewish group than the one they identified with today. In addition, older Israelis (ages 50 and up) were more likely than individuals under 35 to have switched religious groups (33% vs. 8%).
Overall, over 9 in 10 Israelis raised secular continue to identify as such in adulthood. In contrast, only 60% of those raised as Dati or Masorti have maintained their childhood identity (due to sample size limitations, the researchers could not analyze retention rates for those raised Haredi separately).
In the future, Pew will release additional findings related to religious practices that they investigated as they conducted the poll in Israel.
“We asked additional questions about different religious beliefs and practices, and we are actually working on other reports examining the answers to those questions,” she said.
The Times of Israel Community.