The city of Hayward is a great place to get body and fender work done. But in the future, it may be the hub of the East Bay’s Jewish community — and a great place for body and fender work.
Professor Bruce Phillips, the demographer behind the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Jewish Community Study released last year, speculates that the outlying communities of the East Bay — Hayward as well as places like Fremont and Livermore — may be “the South Peninsula of the East Bay.”
Phillips’ survey turned up statistics regarding the South Bay that warm the heart of Jewish community professionals — high rates of affiliation, low rates of intermarriage and explosive population growth.
Hayward et al. doesn’t yet feature those sorts of statistics, but Phillips believes it might for several reasons. One is spillover from the high-tech economy based in the Silicon Valley — “It could be that new firms are in Hayward. And property got expensive in Sunnyvale, so it’s only a little further to Hayward.”
It’s also worth noting that longtime residents from the heart of the East Bay, Oakland and Berkeley, have the same dismissive attitudes toward Hayward that San Franciscans feel toward Palo Alto. But Phillips points out that many of the folks moving to the Bay Area (Jewish and otherwise) don’t have those built-in points of view.
Phillips was the keynote speaker for the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay’s annual meeting June 14. And on some levels he was an ironic choice, as the East Bay federation declined to pay to be included in the expansive survey Phillips conducted and reviewed at the meeting in great detail.
As a result, Phillips could only lean on the 20-year-old data from the last demographic survey including the East Bay, and go over trends revealed in his “West Bay” study which, almost undoubtedly, are also taking place on the East side.
The big question is: Which West Bay trends are being mirrored on the East and where? Phillips’ survey turned up maddeningly disparate Jewish lifestyles in different parts of the JCF’s service area. Perhaps the starkest example is that 9 percent of Jewish children in Sonoma are growing up with two Jewish parents, while 69 percent of the South Peninsula’s Jewish children do so.
What Phillips wants to know is where are the East Bay’s versions of Sonoma and the South Peninsula? Making matters even messier, he believes Jewish trends will hardly break evenly along city or county limits in the East Bay, but into “micro-climates.”
As in his native Los Angeles, where he’s a professor at both the University of Southern California and Hebrew Union College, he sees differences in the East Bay based on the elevation above sea level of one’s house. Simply put, the folks in the hills live differently than do those in the flats.
While Phillips’ West Bay survey wasn’t in any way directly connected with the East Bay communities his audience lived in, he said the major purpose of the night was planting the seed of “thinking about rethinking yourself.”
The explosive growth of Jewish populations in San Francisco and, more so, the South Peninsula (which extends from Redwood City down to San Jose), pockets of Jewish poverty in the North Peninsula and patterns of intermarriage, affiliation and other behaviors are certainly applicable to the East Bay.
And while a future East Bay demographic survey is “possible,” he feels his West Bay survey is relevant across the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.
His study “can change the way people think about things, they can ask different questions. [The study shows] unaffiliated people are not disconnected from the community. We can understand how there are many informal connections. I think this directly translates” to those interested in applying his work in the East Bay.
“Looking at all the East Bay zip codes on the [San Francisco] federation’s list … there’s certainly a stratum of people who may not think as regionally as federations do. I know a guy came to a North Peninsula meeting and told us that until he got this invitation, he never realized he lived in the North Peninsula.”