Read more about the article Chapter 1: Demography – Where are the Jews today and how did they get there?

Chapter 1: Demography – Where are the Jews today and how did they get there?

One of the most difficult series of questions in the Jewish world today concerns demography. How many Jews actually exist in the world today? What is happening to the Jewish population in different centers of the world? What are the relative shares of Israel and Diaspora in the overall Jewish population of the world? And as important as the numbers themselves are, the really crucial questions lie underneath the surface.

What is the meaning of the numbers? What is the nature of the changing balance of demographic power between the State of Israel and the Diaspora as a whole? What trends do they suggest? What are the implications of today’s numbers for tomorrow’s future? And perhaps the most difficult question of Jews for those who spend their lives counting Jews: Who, exactly do you count? In other words, for the purpose of demographic calculations, who is a Jew?

Click for the downloadable pdf of this chapter. (more…)

Continue ReadingChapter 1: Demography – Where are the Jews today and how did they get there?
Read more about the article Chapter 12: the Jews of Hungary

Chapter 12: the Jews of Hungary

Hungary is one of the most interesting and dynamic centres in the Jewish Diaspora. It is a centre in the process of returning to life after more than a generation of cultural and religious silence. Only after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980’s did democracy return to Hungary. The Jews were now free to resume their life as Jews openly. But things were not so simple. A generation of Jews had forgotten what it meant to be Jewish.  Jewish life slowly and warily resumed. It had to be learned and many Jewish organizations from the west and Israel came in to try and help the community fight its way back to life and health. Hungarian Jewry is still in the process of finding itself, defining itself and fighting its way back to life. 

Click for the downloadable pdf of this chapter. (more…)

Continue ReadingChapter 12: the Jews of Hungary
Read more about the article Chapter 13: the Jews of Germany

Chapter 13: the Jews of Germany

Germany boasts the fastest growing Jewish community in the world. If someone had suggested that as a possibility even twenty years ago, it would have been dismissed as too ridiculous for words. But times have changed, and in the one European country where it seemed certain that no Jew would willingly live a generation after the Holocaust, there are now anything between 100,000 and 180,000 Jews (depending on the criteria for counting the numbers). It is a phenomenon that raises many questions. Let us address them now.

Click for the downloadable pdf of this chapter. (more…)

Continue ReadingChapter 13: the Jews of Germany