A leading sociologist is predicting that intermarriage rates among non-Orthodox Jews will begin to drop "in two or three generations," and that "smaller, more intimate institutions" may begin replacing large synagogues and Jewish organizations.

Intermarriage rates, currently hovering between 47 and 50 percent for American Jews, "are beginning to see a decline, and I think that will continue," said Steven M. Cohen in an interview following an Oct. 30 speaking engagement at Temple B'nai Abraham in Livingston.

His appearance was one of the special lectures in the temple's adult education program.

Among his reasons for the drop are higher rates of day school enrollment and the growing popularity of Taglit-Birthright Israel young people's trips to Israel.

"We are selecting families who are Jewishly committed and they are adjusting to modernity," said Cohen, research professor of Jewish social policy at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

In the interview and his talk, Cohen focused on recent themes in his extensive research for Jewish institutions, namely that growing assimilation among Jews on the "periphery" is being matched by even more intensive Jewish involvement at the community's "core."

"We are in a period of a flowering of communal and spiritual and other forms of Jewish life," he said in his hour-long talk. "The Internet is full of Jewish creativity, and they offer some kind of a hope for a change in Jewish life."

Cohen said he is currently aware of "47 newly independent minyanim" — prayer groups and congregations that tend to be led by learned laypeople, not rabbis.

Similarly, "in terms of federations and synagogues, I see a greater diversity of cultural forms," he said. "Federations and big synagogues will continue, but they will be augmented by other charitable and social justice communities that will be more niche-oriented."

At the same time, however, there are "two major marital changes in Jewish life" — the sharp rise in intermarriage and Jews who delay getting married or don't get married at all.

"If you look at non-Orthodox Jews in late 1990, one third were not married; in 2000, that number had grown to 50 percent, and I think it has gone up since then," said Cohen. "If we are not Orthodox, most of our adult children under the age of 40 are not married."

The result is a delay or absence by as much as 20 years of traditional rites of passage and affiliation.

"People join organized Jewish life when they become Jewish parents," he said, adding facetiously: "Most Jews join organizations when they give birth to a seven-year-old Jewish child."

Until then, single and childless Jews tend to live outside the "conventional Jewish community."

"They may not have much in common with the people who are populating synagogues, JCCs, and other institutions," said Cohen. "The rates of affiliation among this group are as low as they have ever been."

Rates of intermarriage are also key in determining if Jews and their children will affiliate with Jewish organizations.

"If they marry Jews, then the vast proportion of them will be somehow engaged in Jewish life. Among inmarried Jews who have children, 82 percent belong to a congregation. It is a phenomenally high figure," he said.

But those with non-Jewish partners "have far, far fewer rates of affiliation and association with things Jewish in all respects."

And among the children of mixed marriages, "the group that was raised exclusively Jewish has a 55 percent intermarriage rate. The group that was not raised exclusively Jewish has a 95 percent intermarriage rate," Cohen said.

He also said he was sympathetic to the impulse behind "outreach" programs that aim to make intermarried families feel welcome in Jewish institutions.

"I'm not sure it will change the rates, but as a matter of making everybody feel welcome when someone has this very reasonable fear of being rejected, we have to make the extra effort to make that person feel totally accepted," he said.

And yet he is pessimistic about the success of these programs in encouraging intermarried families to raise their children as Jews.

"As a social program, I think it hasn't yet worked," he said to a questioner. "There is evidence that we are not winning the battle. There may be an outreach program that works, but overall our effort has not worked.

"I wish I was wrong," he added. "I wish we were solving the problem.

"But we're not."