Uzi REBHUN Jewish Identification in Contemporary America: Gans’s Symbolic Ethnicity and

The author attempts to further the current understanding of the role of group identification among white Americans by reassessing Herbert Gans’s theory of symbolic ethnicity and religiosity. I focus on Jews, a small yet deeply inte-grated group in the social mainstream, using data from the 1970–1971 and 1990 National Jewish Population Surveys. A cohort follow-up over the 20-year period shows that intermittent and home-centered practices have sustained a fair amount of stability, but those requiring persistent religious behavior or participation declined significantly. Likewise, the importance attached to being Jewish has declined. Multivariate analysis reveals that when Jewish back-ground and socio-demographic characteristics are held constant, the sense of group belonging is strongly and positively associated with religious behavior and affiliation; these relationships have strengthened between 1970 and 1990. Other factors, on the macro-level of the American scene, deter everyday beha-viors while they maintain, and often increase, the levels of the intermittent ones