The baby bust: Too smart for our own good

Perhaps you like a sermon that reinforces your opinions, flays your enemies, or lets you fall into the deepest possible sleep.

But I like a good, old-fashioned harangue. I don’t need to agree with it — in fact, it’s probably better if I don’t. Nothing sharpens your game like a great opponent. And in that regard, Jack Wertheimer is a regular Grand Master.

Writing this month in Commentary, just in time for the holidays, Wertheimer takes aim at the Jewish people’s falling birthrate and blames it on Jewish communal leaders who refuse to reinforce “Jewish norms and obligations” — namely, the sanctity of Jewish-Jewish marriage and the duty to have plenty of children.

Wertheimer, a provost and history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, asserts that American Jews have lost their “demographic vitality.” He cites statistics showing that of all ethnic groups, Jews have the fewest siblings, smallest households, and “the second lowest number of children under 18 at home.”

American-Jewish women, he writes, are “significantly less fertile than their white, Gentile counterparts,” a trend that he says tracks with their “extraordinary rates of educational achievement.” These Jewish women remain childless while they get their advanced degrees and advance their careers. The result is a community “that has long since ceased to replace its natural losses.”

The exception to this rule is the Orthodox, with a fertility rate “far above the Jewish norm.” It is not enough to say, insists Wertheimer, that Orthodox women have more children because they are less educated than their non-Orthodox counterparts (although he does bring evidence that as Orthodox women’s education level rises, their birth rate declines). More importantly, the Orthodox example demonstrates what happens when Jewish norms of marriage and family are reinforced at home, in schools, and by example. The “pro-natalism” of the Orthodox contrasts with the “mantra” of hospitality found among the non-Orthodox movements. Their rabbis and leaders have embraced “inclusiveness, pluralism, and a welcoming atmosphere” — to the detriment of the birthrate.

“In order to welcome Jews who live in unconventional family arrangements, and in particular to eliminate any negative judgment of gays and lesbians,” writes Wertheimer, “the rabbis have rushed to scuttle what Judaism has always held about the centrality of marriage.”

The essay echoes, and reiterates, a similar tack Wertheimer has taken on intermarriage. He opposes the school of “outreach” to the intermarried and suggests that communal resources are better spent on shoring up the commitments of the affiliated.

And still bearing the scars of those battles, Wertheimer anticipates the objections his essay is bound to engender. “[O]ne can imagine the scoffing reply” to his thesis, Wertheimer writes, and demonstrates: “[C]an anyone seriously believe that contrary declarations by rabbis or communal leaders would have any salutary impact on behavior?... If Jewish organizations undertook actively to encourage young Jews to marry and raise children, would anyone pay attention?”

Wertheimer answers both objections with a resounding yes.

Wertheimer’s is a bracing and anxious glimpse of the Jewish future, with fewer practitioners, declining institutions, and — this is implied — waning political clout. We ignore these trends at our peril.

But readers may be less likely to scoff at Wertheimer’s conclusions if they were seasoned with even a soupcon of empathy, or rachmones. In all his talk of “demographic vitality” and “replacement level,” there is barely any mention — that is, positive mention — of the legitimate aspirations of Jewish women (and let’s face it, it’s women we are talking about). Note for example, what happens when he lists the “larger social forces” that have depressed Jewish birthrates. They range from:

the felt economic need to maintain dual-career marriages, to the obsessive quest for success, to a predisposition among the best-educated to regard family itself as a suspect category and child-rearing as a chore best left to others, to the triumph of the cult of individualism and freedom of personal choice.…

Words like “obsessive” and “cult” are a clues to Wertheimer’s attitude toward Jews who aren’t holding up their reproductive responsibilities. Wertheimer can find nothing positive to say about the educational achievements of American Jews and the quest by Jewish women to fully use their God-given intellects and talents in realms outside of the nursery. Nor does Wertheimer write about solutions other than rabbinic and organizational hectoring — no talk of affordable day care, alternative “mommy tracks” for young professionals, or, God forbid, the role of men in making it easier for their wives to study, work, and raise kids.

Wertheimer’s probably right that the “independent-mindedness” that characterizes many Jews is (often, I would add) “pursued at the cost of other values” — namely, group identification and practice. But since Wertheimer seems to be addressing Judaism’s leadership class (and is said to be on the short list to succeed Rabbi Ismar Schorsch as the chancellor of JTS, the training ground for Conservative rabbis), you don’t have to disagree with his conclusions to question the tone in which they’re expressed. It’s one thing to demand that Jews speak “boldly and forthrightly” about behaviors that would reinforce early marriage, large families, and in-marriage. But it’s quite another to suggest, as he does, that Jewish men marry gentile women because they remind them of their mothers — unlike those over-educated, career-minded Jewish gals.

Perhaps this is good demographics. But is it, I don’t know, menschy? How many other Jewish leaders are prepared to be so cold-blooded? And how effective will they be if they are?The baby bust: Too smart for our own goodSo, sure, let’s teach our fellow Jews that marriage is central, children are a blessing, and in-marriage is a goal. The trick is doing it in a way that doesn’t make educated women and those with fewer than 2.1 children feel lousy about their lives — or hightail it out of synagogues and federations altogether.

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