Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Page 70

Demographics

Honey, I Shrunk the Community

By R. Clemente Holder

Former Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams had his 14 minutes of fame back in 1986 during the Iran-Contra hearings when it was disclosed that he "inadvertently" had put a $10 million contribution for the Nicaraguan Contras from the Sultan of Brunei into the Swiss bank account of a man then described as a "Swiss businessman." There it accumulated more than $200,000 in interest before it was discovered and retrieved.

What most U.S. journalists (perhaps "inadvertently") didn't report was that the Swiss businessman was in fact an Israeli-Swiss dual citizen closely associated with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres who, in conjunction with State Department and White House consultant Michael Ledeen, then a protegé of National Security Adviser Robert (Bud) McFarlane, originally cooked up Irangate, a scheme to get U.S. permission for Israel to sell at sizable profits American arms to the Ayatollah Khomeini's government during its eight-year war with Saddam Hussain's Iraq.

All that, and the close brush with jail of some Irangate participants before they were pardoned by President George Bush, is behind Elliott Abrams now. In fact, he has gotten religion. He describes himself as a "somewhat observant Conservative Jew" who attends synagogue every Sabbath and who has written a book called Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian World.

The brief book describes the demographics of America's Jewish community as "a disaster in the making." He explains: "Of the 6.8 million people who are Jews or of Jewish descent, 1.1 million say they have no religion and 1.3 million have joined another religion. This means that one-third of the people in America of Jewish ethnic origin no longer report Judaism as their current religion."

By our calculations, using Abrams' figures leaves an American Jewish community of 4.4 million, meaning about 1.7 percent of the U.S. population of 260 million. It gives rise to questions as to why America's Islamic population hasn't yet been able to make any discernible impact on U.S. Middle East policy. Clearly Muslims already outnumber America's Jewish population, whose leaders, informed Americans agree, are calling the Mideast shots for the United States.

American Muslims are variously estimated at five to eight million people depending upon whether only those who attend a mosque regularly are counted, or instead the total is based upon all Americans who describe themselves as Muslim. Since Islam is America's (and the world's) fastest growing religion, the numbers may presage at least a diminution of the influence of the organized U.S. Jewish community on U.S. policies in the Middle East and South Asia.

It's pertinent to mention here that there also are about two million Arab-American Christians, whose outlook on the the Israeli-Palestine dispute seems identical with that of the great majority of American Muslims.

Israeli Demographics

An official breakdown of Israel's 1997 population total of 5,863,000 also yields interesting statistics. Of these, 4,702,200 are Jewish, 872,000 are Muslims, 190,000 are Christians, and 100,000 are Druze. Taking the Jewish population figure at face value (and no one does, since Israel counts any former Jewish resident as still present so long as they visit Israel at least once every four years), that provides a total of 9.1 million Jews in the U.S. and Israel, of whom up to 600,000 or 700,000 may actually be counted in both places. The total of Jews living in the rest of the world outside Israel is generally assumed to be about the same as the Jewish population of the United States.

Since Elliott Abrams, son-in-law of Commentary editors Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, is a self-proclaimed Zionist, his forecast of "disaster" seems accurate from his point of view.

Fruits of Intermarriage

An extract by Yaakov Arnold in The Jewish Week of New York from a study by Bruce A. Philips entitled Re-examining Intermarriage Trends, Textures and Strategies, which was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, provides additional information pertinent to the figures above. In the U.S., according to the study, 52 percent of all Jews marry someone out of the faith. Of the children of these marriages, nearly two-thirds are raised outside of the Jewish faith.

According to the extract, of the children of mixed marriages in the U.S., 33 percent are reared as Christian only, 25 percent are reared as Jewish and Christian, 24 percent are reared with no religion, and 18 percent are reared as Jewish only.

Personally, we think we'd fit in best with those kids being reared as both Jewish and Christian. "Only in America," as we used to say when we all felt good about ourselves.