The mainstream media never miss a chance to portray Christianity as deficient, and a recent WaPo article touting “Jewish” girls’ academic superiority over their Christian peers may be a good example.
Labeling Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as models of “Jewish” female success, The Washington Post cites a study finding that “raised Jewish” girls “have ambitious career goals and prioritize their professional success over marriage and motherhood,” as the paper puts it.
In contrast, WaPo quotes a non-Jewish girl named Mandy as saying, “I think the biggest thing that a mother can do is to be with her kids. That’s the greatest thing over her career.” Of course, which of these perspectives a person thinks reflects superiority — of the most important kind — tells us much about his character.
As for the study’s authors and in fairness to them, however, they emphasize that they’re not making this value judgment.
The study itself is entitled “From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Outcomes,” and was published in the latest edition of the American Sociological Review (ASR). The researchers — two sociology professors and two Ph.D. candidates — explain that they followed “3,238 adolescents for 13 years by linking the National Study of Youth and Religion [NSYR] to the National Student Clearinghouse.”
The academics then write in their summary, “Survey data reveal that girls with a Jewish upbringing have two distinct postsecondary patterns compared to girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after controlling for social origins.” To wit: “(1) they are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate college, and (2) they graduate from much more selective colleges.” The researchers continue:
We then analyze[d] 107 interviews with 33 girls from comparable social origins interviewed repeatedly between adolescence and emerging adulthood. Girls raised by Jewish parents articulate a self-concept marked by ambitious career goals and an eagerness to have new experiences. For these girls, elite higher education and graduate school are central to attaining self-concept congruence [consistency between one’s ideal self and actual self]. In contrast, girls raised by non-Jewish parents tend to prioritize motherhood and have humbler employment aims. For them, graduating from college, regardless of its prestige, is sufficient for self-concept congruence. We conclude that religious subculture is a key factor in educational stratification….
Note that the “non-Jewish” study subjects the researchers speak of were “conservative” Protestants. (One might expect a different result if Indian-descent Hindus were analyzed).
Regardless, saying that “Jewish” girls exhibit high academic and career achievement may seem a Captain Obvious claim to anyone acquainted with human and group natures (or with stereotypes!). For one thing, 90 to 95 percent of American “Jews” are of Ashkenazi heritage, an ethnicity boasting the highest average IQ (115) of any group.
The researchers, however, as political correctness would dictate, reject genetic explanations for the success; they instead emphasize cultural factors. And with most human behaviors being a function of both nature and nurture, these are no doubt highly relevant. Yet one matter not addressed (or at least inadequately so) here is a definitional one.
WaPo speaks of how girls “raised Jewish” “outperform Christian girls academically,” whereas the researchers write of “girls raised by Jewish parents.” But what does it mean to be “raised Jewish”?
Related to this, what does it mean to be Jewish?
If at issue were Orthodox Jews, the definition would be pretty clear: People who adhere to all of the 613 Judaic laws relevant to them (some pertain only to individuals of certain statuses). Yet few of the ASR study’s subjects were Orthodox; rather, they all had only “a ‘moderate’ level of Jewish engagement,” according to WaPo.
This gets at why I’ve put the term “Jewish” in quotation marks: Can Orthodox Jews and largely irreligious people identifying as Jews all be “Jewish”?
Many pious Jews don’t think so. For example, Israeli politician David Azoulay said in 2018 of “Reform Jews,” “I cannot allow myself to call such a person a Jew.”
Some “Reform Jews” may agree, too. Carlo Strenger, a Tel Aviv University psychology and philosophy professor, suggested in 2017 that “Reform Jews should declare themselves a different religion than [what he called] bigoted forms of Ultra-Orthodoxy.”
Of course, many find such definitional questioning offensive — despite often being the very same people who question what a “woman” is and find a hard-and-fast definition of the term offensive.
This matters because one can’t draw the correct conclusions from the ASR study without clear definitions of the terms used therein. As to this, Duke University sociology professor Stephen Vaisey, an interviewer for the NSYR while in graduate school, added perspective. The NSYR “’contrasted two very different groups: liberal Jews and often conservative Protestants,’” WaPo relates him as expressing. “Had it included nonreligious as a comparison group, he said, the results may have looked different.”
Note that “liberal Jews” are generally quite secular, considering themselves Jewish “culturally” but not religiously. Now consider that this means the ASR study subjects
- would be wealthy, since Americans identifying as Jews are the highest-earning “religious” group in the nation; and
- would have worldly “values,” as secular people tend to.
In other words, the ASR study’s findings are not news and are better translated thus: Wealthy, high-IQ people with worldly values tend to stress and achieve worldly success.
Once again, however, note that the ASR researchers appear fair, writing that “we should avoid attributing success to ethnicity or religion without considering [other factors].” Moreover, “Religious [or irreligious?] subculture shapes girls’ habitus,” they add, “but we want to be cautious about prescriptive judgments regarding which habitus is ‘better.’”
“Religious groups may value education and investment in oneself equally, but they construct different visions of what a ‘good’ education is…,” they further state. Quoting other researchers, the academics also call on readers “to consider ‘the possibility that success may mean different things to different people….’”
The real question is, however, what does it really mean, objectively speaking (under the light of Truth)? Many of the ASR-study, Jewish-identifying girls aspired to attend Ivy League schools. But is inculcation with leftist ideology at high-priced propaganda mills to be considered success?
As for WaPo’s citing of SCOTUS justice Elena Kagan, the CDC’s Rochelle Walensky, and Treasury’s Janet Yellen as role models, critics may ask: Is doing violence to the Constitution and indulging judicial activism, killing Americans via bad Covid prescriptions, or spiking inflation and helping destroy our economy reflective of success?
What’s more, data show that career-oriented, secular females have below-replacement-level fertility rates, whereas devoutly religious women tend to have large families. Does embracing a worldview that may guarantee your demographic erasure — and perhaps that of your “values” as well — reflect success? (The Left is very effective, however, at converting other people’s children to their cause.)
With success like that, who needs failure?
