We’re not radically different after all: JCF survey turns up growing local Jewish population

Guess what, San Francisco? Your Jewish community isn't radically different from anyone else's. Not that that's a bad thing.

The S.F.-based JCF's survey of the local Jewish population is complete, and demographer Bruce Phillips has a mountain of numbers to sort out. But one of the first to jump off the page is the local intermarriage rate.

"Popular thought is that everyone here is a Buddhist and the intermarriage rate is very high. In fact, I found it looks like the rest of the country," he said.

The 53 percent intermarriage rate is right around the national average, and a huge departure from the draconian 70-plus percent rates often bandied about by alarmists.

The recently completed S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation survey is the first undertaken in the Bay Area since 1986, and will provide a much-needed baseline for community decisions. Unlike the 1986 survey, however, the East Bay and San Jose areas were not included in the demographic, as the federations representing those regions chose not to contribute to the study's $190,000 price tag.

The study instead focuses on the "West Bay": San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma counties.

Phillips correlates the lower-than-expected intermarriage rate with a huge influx of Jews since the last survey. Quite simply, a lot has happened locally since 1986.

The population has literally doubled in many parts of the Bay Area, and the same goes for Jews. Including the areas this survey did not cover, Phillips estimates the Bay Area's Jewish population may be in the neighborhood of 500,000 — hailing distance from Los Angeles' estimated population of 600,000. What's more, Phillips believes the Bay Area's Jewish growth rate has surpassed Southern California's.

Gary Tobin's 18-year-old survey estimated 54,000 Jewish households in the "West Bay." This year's study ups that total to 125,000 households, a 131 percent increase. What's more, 42 percent of those households weren't living here in 1986, including Jews from overseas.

Phillips, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, points out that people moving to the Bay Area have grown steadily older since the 1960s; many now are already married with families in tow.

Fleshing out his point, Phillips mentions the polling he did among young West Bay adults, ages 18 to 34. Twice as many Bay Area natives had a non-Jewish parent as those born elsewhere — so the stereotype of the Bay Area as an intermarriage-saturated community may have been apropos in past decades, but not now.

Incidentally, Phillips is unsure what percentage of Jews getting married right now are marrying other Jews — the vast majority of the survey's preliminary findings are awaiting his complete analysis, which is due in early 2005.

Observing the Bay Area's growth trends, Phillips detects a pattern that one might call Encino-ization, after the Los Angeles-area city.

Many of what he calls "inner suburbs" are growing more and more heavily Jewish, as Jews seeking Jewish institutions head there and create even more of a demand for those institutions.

The South Peninsula added 24,000 Jewish households since the last survey — more than anywhere else — and, with its high percentage of married families, has the region's highest synagogue affiliation rate (36 percent). Overall, the West Bay shows a 22 percent affiliation rate; this is lower than the national average, but on par with totals reported by Bay Area churches.

Phillips concedes that the 22 percent affiliation rate is a "challenge" for Jewish institutions, but he believes that the Bay Area's Jews can not be dismissed as secularists uninterested in Jewish life.

Fully 65 percent of those polled said they had celebrated Shabbat during the past year.

"We can't write off people who are unaffiliated and dismiss them as being uninterested," he said. "People are maintaining their own personal connections to Jewish life and culture."