Diverse, diversified, sprawling and growing: San Francisco Bay Area's Jewish community
Golden Gate Bridge: Thousands of new Jewish Bay Area residents are pouring through its gates
Bay Area's growing Jewish scene
Diversity, intermarriage, decentralization mark population spike, pushing SF area into third place behind New York and Los Angeles
The Bay Area is home to more and more Jews, but you may end up bumping into fewer and fewer of them.
The ongoing “Encino-ization” of the Bay Area’s Jews was one of the major developments quantified in the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s recently released Jewish community study.
- Find the full study here
The most eye-popping figure among its ocean of numbers is the estimated local Jewish population: Perhaps as many as 450,000 Jews now call the Bay Area home, which would make it the third-largest Jewish haven in the nation, behind New York City and Los Angeles.
Yet the study concluded that local Jews are now so dispersed that there isn’t so much a Bay Area Jewish community as several smaller, self-contained regional ones with less and less cross-interaction.
The buildup of large, suburban Jewish population centers at a far higher rate than the traditional metropolitan bases mirrors developments in the Los Angeles area (the origin of chief demographer Bruce Phillips’ nod to the Southern California suburb of Encino).
Southern suburbs top SF
Nowhere is that more evident than in the South Peninsula, where the Jewish population has increased by 250 percent since the last federation survey in 1986. In fact, the South Peninsula now boasts more Jews than San Francisco - for the first time.
What’s more, a huge percentage of the South Bay’s Jews are recent arrivals who, unlike so many Bay Area natives, didn’t grow up thinking of San Francisco as the regional nucleus.
As a result, they’ll tend to stay close to home, and the flourishing of Jewish institutions in suburban Bay Area communities (and those yet to come, such as the South Peninsula’s Campus for Jewish Life) will create a world “Jewishly bigger but geographically smaller,” according to Phillips.
“There’s so much growth and dispersion, you lose the sense of a larger Jewish community,” says Phillips, the survey director and a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles.
“For the Jews of the South Bay, unless they’re involved in the federation or with synagogue matters that take them out of the area, that’s probably where their Jewish life is lived.”
450,000 'conservative estimate'
Some of the many other eye-catching trends revealed by the complete survey, which was made public this week (although some of the data was released late last year):
- The number of young Jews and couples with children has dropped sharply as a percentage of the total Jewish population.
- Slightly more Jewish children are raised in mixed-faith households than by two Jewish parents.
- Nearly one of every 10 Bay Area Jews is living in poverty, and many of these low-income Jews are younger than commonly perceived.
Phillips’ survey, incidentally, did not include the East Bay or San Jose areas, as the federations representing those regions declined to pick up a share of the roughly $285,000 price tag.
Phillips believes, however, that there’s no reason many of the statistics culled from the S.F.-based JCF’s service area - San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma counties (i.e. the “West Bay”) - aren’t consistent with the realities of the East Bay and San Jose. His approximation of 400,000 to 450,000 Jews in the greater Bay Area includes both of those regions with the assumption of similar growth, and is a “conservative estimate.”
But Jews who moved from the West Bay to San Jose or the East Bay in the last 18 years were unable to be charted by Phillips’ survey; for all intents and purposes, they disappeared down a black hole.
The 2004 survey is based on information provided by 1,600 Jewish households among 50,000 overall households called.
Since Gary Tobin’s 1986 study, the Jewish community has nearly doubled and grown at six times the Bay Area’s already rapid rate. And, counter to any stereotypes about West Coast Jewry, the Bay Area is looking more and more like the rest of the nation - for good reason.
As Phillips puts it, “Lots of the rest of everybody moved here, and now we look like the rest of everybody.”
Younger people leaving?
The “typical” Jewish family is no longer typical. A married couple with children represents just 22 percent of the West Bay’s 125,400 Jewish households (down sharply from 34 percent in 1986).
Interestingly, Jews aged 25 to 44 also plummeted as a percentage of the local population, from 33 percent to 21 percent since 1986. Like two-parent families, young Jews may be moving out of the Bay Area in search of more affordable living situations. A full quarter of Jewish renters said they could be squeezed into leaving the area within three years.
Locally, 41 percent of Jewish children are raised by two Jewish parents, 42 percent are raised in a household with a non-Jewish parent, and the rest are in single-parent Jewish households.
The Bay Area’s intermarriage rate of 55 percent is a shade lower than the national average (59 percent), and is greatly affected by a large influx of married Jewish families with children moving to the Bay Area from elsewhere.
Yet Phillips revealed an atypically large number of mixed-faith families leaning toward Judaism. A full 38 percent of mixed-faith families raise their children solely with Judaism, and another 12 percent mix Judaism and some other religion.
Furthermore, mixed families with children were three times likelier to describe themselves as Jewishly “observant” than childless mixed families. And a higher percentage of children from interfaith families have received some form of Jewish education than children of two Jews (85 percent to 77 percent).
Outreach efforts to continue
Phillips chalks up those numbers to the positive effects of outreach efforts kicked off after the 1986 survey indicated they were necessary. They appear to be working - Phillips has no other explanation for the comforting statistics.
“We’re going to continue our outreach. We’ve been in this business for 18 years, and we’ll continue and expand,” says Phyllis Cook, acting director of the S.F.-based JCF, reacting to the survey findings.
Phillips notes, however, that children of interfaith marriages tend to end their Jewish educations sooner than kids with two Jewish parents.
“We’re pretty good at attracting people in one way or another but we’re not as good at holding on to them,” observes Bob Sherman, executive director of the Bureau of Jewish Education.
“I think (Phillips) was saying we need to be much better. That’s something we really ought to be thinking about and figuring out what we can do.”
Phillips also takes a glass-half-full approach to the Bay Area’s synagogue affiliation rate: a less than awe-inspiring 28 percent, a minor decline from years past and typical of the West Coast.
Yet while Bay Area Jews are unlikely to join up and pay dues, a hefty number of them volunteer for Jewish organizations, and nearly three-quarters of them attended some kind of Jewish event in the past year. Among Jews under 40, twice as many volunteered for a Jewish organization as belonged to one.
“We can’t see building up the Jewish community as synonymous with building memberships. You’re actually part of the Jewish community even if you choose not to be a member,” says Nate Levine, executive director of the Jewish Community Center San Francisco, who left Phillips’ June 1 presentation to Jewish community leaders in a good mood.
“If the doors to the community have a sign saying ‘Members Only,’ that goes in the face of this data. The interest in what we do (in the Jewish community) is real and broad-based and shouldn’t be measured in narrow terms.”
Just as there are more Jews than most people thought, there are more poor Jews here than commonly believed.
Nearly one in 10 Jewish households is poor, defined by Phillips as 1.5 times the federal poverty levels. (He notes, with a wry smile, that Reagan-era officials sought to eliminate poverty by lowering the financial threshold that defines it.) Eleven percent of children under 12 live in a poor household, and 22 percent of single-parent Jewish households are defined as poor; to illustrate Phillips’ guidelines, a family of three earning USD 30,000 or less meets the definition of poverty.
What’s more, 32 percent of self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender households and 14 percent of immigrants from the former Soviet Union are defined as poor.
15 percent of American-born poor; double for immigrants
Abby Snay, executive director of Jewish Vocational Service, and Anita Friedman, executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, notes that in the pricey Bay Area, double the federal poverty level is a more realistic definition of poverty than Phillips’ designation.
Using that equation, Friedman says about 15 percent of American-born Jews and 30 percent of the emigre population fall below the poverty line. “This really documents and quantifies our observations,” she says.
“I think the study underscores a more urgent need for financial assistance for the poor, and a more urgent need for us to do a better job supporting single-parent families.”
When it comes to poverty, not only are there more poor people than commonly believed, but more poor young ones. Common perception - especially among service organizations - had been that the elderly were the most needy Jewish population.
Not so, say the statistics. Today’s elderly aren’t the foreign-born and undereducated grandparents of yesteryear but American-born, educated former professionals often living in houses bought cheaply in past decades and worth a fortune today. On the average, seniors are more well off than Jews ages 18 to 40.
The most economically vulnerable Jewish population turned out to be young adults, 40 percent of whom say they are underemployed. One third of young adults said they needed employment counseling, but only 40 percent of that group got any.
Cook says the federation doesn’t plan to leave seniors in the lurch, but must redirect its efforts to address single-family parents and the poor.
Helping poor seniors
“We always focused on the elderly as the most indigent. With seniors, now we’ve got to focus on transportation” to existing services, she says.
Friedman echoes Cook’s call for enhanced transportation services, saying the JFCS has added vans to aid seniors living on the Peninsula and in Marin - but currently has no room in the budget to hire drivers.
Jewish community leaders seemed to leave Phillips’ presentation in San Francisco with a fairly upbeat feeling; several gathered outside the S.F.-based JCF’s Steuart Street headquarters to discuss the meanings behind Phillips’ avalanche of statistics.
“We often talk about living in ‘post-denominational’ times, that people are less concerned with the denomination of a synagogue than other factors. Now it sounds as if, at least here, we’ve got post-affiliation Judaism. That’s fascinating, and, of course, it has huge implications,” noted Sherman.
“The tacit assumption we’ve always had is if people get more involved, they’ll ultimately affiliate. Is that true? Maybe it’s less true than ever before.”
Added Rabbi Doug Kahn, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, “This is intriguing data, but it’s just the Cliff’s Notes. Let’s get to the book itself and see what it all means for the community.”
Joe Eskenazi is a staff writer at J, The Jewish Newsweekly of Northern California. Reprinted by permission
