Past Issues

Volume 3, Issue 2 | March 25, 2026

Since the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey brought attention to the rising rate of intermarriage among American Jews, questions about interfaith families and their children have shaped debates about Jewish identity, continuity, and communal priorities.

This digest aims to review the latest research and highlight findings that may help communities better understand people who have both a Jewish and a non-Jewish parent. By centering the experiences of this demographic group, this digest spotlights a large and dynamic population whose choices and trajectories carry significant implications for the Jewish future.

Research shows that people with both a Jewish and non-Jewish parent are shaped not only by their parents’ diverse religious backgrounds but also by the environments in which they grow up, the messages they receive from Jewish institutions, and the forms of belonging available to them. Their Jewish identities develop in response and in relation to these opportunities and experiences rather than being predetermined by ancestry alone.

We hope this digest becomes an essential tool for leaders navigating a complex and evolving Jewish communal landscape.

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Sasha Volodarsky, CASJE Research Digest Editor

To understand the size of the population with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent, the Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of American Jews remains the gold standard and the most reliable source of data. Pew reports that 69% of the adult “Net Jewish” population in the US (defined below) has two Jewish parents, while 24% has one Jewish parent. Accordingly, Pew estimates that there are 5.8 million Net Jewish adults in the US, of whom approximately 1.3 million have only one Jewish parent.

The research literature on this topic uses different terms to describe this population. For instance, Pew simply uses the number of Jewish parents (one parent or both parents). Other researchers refer to this population as “children of intermarriage” (see example).

Bruce Phillips, a leading scholar of Jewish interfaith marriage, has suggested using the term single Jewish ancestry for individuals with two Jewish parents and mixed Jewish ancestry for those with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent (see more details).

It is important to remember that people may not naturally think of themselves in these categories. A recent qualitative study of interfaith couples shows that people usually describe their households in more personal and concrete ways—being raised by a Jewish parent with a non-Jewish parent, or a family with a mixed religious background.

Importantly, the way we define Jewishness can have implications for how we estimate the number of adults in the United States with only one Jewish parent. Pew’s 2013 and 2020 studies of the Jewish population mainly report on what they call the Net Jewish population (sometimes referred to by others as the “core Jewish population” or the “consensus definition”). This population consists of:

Pew’s Net Jewish definition leaves out a sizable group—2.8 million people, according to Pew’s 2020 estimate—who have at least one Jewish parent but either do not currently identify as Jews or identify both as Jewish and as adherents of another religion. Pew refers to this population as “people of Jewish background.”

Bruce Phillips provides a detailed analysis of this excluded group and finds that 60% of all adults with one Jewish parent (according to Pew’s 2020 data) fall into the “people of Jewish background” category. More importantly, Phillips shows that many of the people within this category participated in some Jewish education, feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, feel emotional attachment to Israel, observe Jewish traditions, and, in general, are similar in many respects to Jews included in Pew’s Net Jewish population, especially JNRs.

Consequently, estimates of how many Jews in the United States have one Jewish parent can vary depending on which populations are included in the count. Pew’s Net Jewish definition identifies roughly 1.3 million adults with one Jewish parent. Yet Pew also shows that, in total, approximately 3.3 million U.S. adults have one Jewish parent (the 1.3 million Net Jewish adults plus an additional 2 million classified as people of Jewish background who have only one Jewish parent).

The open question is how many among these 2 million adults of Jewish background with one Jewish parent should be included when applying a broader definition of Jewishness. As Phillips’ analysis shows, people of Jewish background are not a monolithic group: not all identify as Jewish, and they vary in their religious and cultural alignment. Pew’s 2020 data suggests that 54% of people of Jewish background with one Jewish parent self-identify as Jewish, which means that at least an additional 1 million adults with one Jewish parent may see themselves as part of the Jewish people.

This chart was produced by CASJE using weighted data from Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020 study. The category “Other” includes: No Jewish parents, grandparents, or other relatives, Other, and no answer.

Even if we only consider the Net Jewish population, Pew’s data shows that the prevalence of American adults with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent is growing; it is most common among younger people (18-29) and least common among people over 65.

Assuming this trend holds, we can expect to see an even larger population of American Jews with only one Jewish parent, as Jews with one Jewish parent intermarry at substantially higher rates than Jews with two Jewish parents. According to Pew’s data (2020), among married Jewish adults with one Jewish parent, 82% are married to a non-Jewish person. Pew’s data also shows that 

intermarriage rates have risen in recent decades: 61% of Net Jewish adults who married after 2010 have a non‑Jewish spouse, compared with 45% of those who married between 2000 and 2009. 

Taken together, the data points to a clear trajectory: in the years ahead, a growing share of Jews in the US will have only one Jewish parent. As patterns of identity and family formation continue to evolve, the organized Jewish community will need to grapple with how best to adapt its priorities and long-term strategies to a population that is increasingly diverse in background, experience, and expression of Jewishness.

Few studies explicitly focus on people with only one Jewish parent, and those that do typically focus on those who qualify as Jewish under some formal definition. As Bruce Phillips’s work shows, the boundary between the consensus definition (e.g., Pew’s Net Jewish category) of Jewishness and people outside of it is often blurred. His analysis indicates that people who identify with another religion (mainly Christianity) but also consider themselves Jewish (by religion or aside from religion), in some cases demonstrate more Jewish behaviors than Jews of No Religion, who are categorized within the consensus Jewish population.

In this section, we want to shed light on what we know about adults with one Jewish parent without limiting the analysis to those who meet consensus definitions of Jewishness. At the same time, it is important to distinguish between those who see themselves as part of the Jewish people and those who do not. For that reason, in this section, we analyze data from Pew’s 2020 survey of Jews, focusing on people with one Jewish parent in general while distinguishing between those who self-identify as Jewish in some way (religiously or aside from religion) and those who do not see themselves as Jewish.

This chart was produced by CASJE using weighted data from Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020 study and includes all respondents with one Jewish parent.

Pew’s 2020 data shows that among all US adults with one Jewish parent, 72% identify as Jewish in some way. This group includes 14% who identify as Jewish by religion (and do not claim any other religious identity); 29% who are not religious in general but identify as Jewish aside from religion; and 27% who identify with a different religion (primarily Christian denominations) but also see themselves as Jewish ethnically, culturally, or by ancestry. Only 2% identify as Jewish by religion and hold another religious identity simultaneously.

Among people with one Jewish parent who identify as Jewish, 50% say that being Jewish is primarily about ancestry, 32% connect it to culture, and only 10% percent associate it mainly with religion. Interestingly, people with one Jewish parent who do not identify as Jewish are more likely to say that being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion and less likely to see it as a matter of culture.

This chart was produced by CASJE using weighted data from Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020 study and includes all respondents with one Jewish parent. Pew’s survey allowed multiple responses for this question, so the total percentages exceed 100%.

Among adults with one Jewish parent, a majority of those who identify as Jewish report that being Jewish is important to them (61%) and that they feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people (64%). Even among adults who do not identify as Jewish, 30% say they feel at least some sense of belonging to the Jewish people, indicating that a degree of connection can exist even without Jewish self‑identification.

This chart was produced by CASJE using weighted data from Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020 study. People who do not identify as Jews were not asked a question about the importance of being Jewish.

Examination of the prevalence of Jewish behaviors among American adults consistently shows that those who identify as Jewish by religion (JBR) consistently report higher levels of participation in Jewish traditional behaviors. This holds true regardless of whether a person has one or two Jewish parents, and even in cases when people describe themselves as being both Jewish and another religion. In contrast, people who identify as Jewish aside from religion (JNR) participate in Jewish life at noticeably lower rates, regardless of the number of Jewish parents they have.

Even among adults with one Jewish parent who do not identify as Jewish, some engagement with Jewish practices persists. For example, 33% attended a Jewish religious service, 19% marked a lifecycle moment with a Jewish ritual in the past year, and 16% attended a Passover seder.

It is also notable that a meaningful share of people in every category attend non‑Jewish religious services. Taken together, this indicates that people with one Jewish parent often maintain engagement with Jewish activities and rituals as well as activities and rituals associated with other religious traditions.

This table was produced by CASJE using weighted data from Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020 study.

*Attendance of religious services is measured as the general frequency of attendance (more than once a week, once a week, once or twice a month, a few times a year such as for High Holidays, seldom, never).

While, on average, people who have only one Jewish parent tend to have lower Jewish engagement and connection to Jewish practices compared to people with two Jewish parents (see studies that investigated this Sasson et al., 2015 or Phillips, 2017), over the past several decades, the magnitude of these differences might be changing. Several scholars have noted that millennial children of intermarriage are more likely to maintain their Jewish identity than earlier generations. Theodore Sasson and his colleagues found that compared with older generations, millennial Jews who are children of intermarried couples are more likely to identify as Jewish and to participate in Jewish practices. Researchers argue that more children of intermarried couples are identifying as Jewish because Jewish institutions became significantly more welcoming and inclusive toward intermarried families starting in the 1980s and 1990s. This shift encouraged more intermarried couples to raise and educate their children as Jews, which in turn increased Jewish identification in the next generation.

Original figure from the Sasson et al. study (2017), figure 2 (analysis based on Pew’s survey of Jewish Americans from 2013).

Pew confirmed this dynamic in their survey from 2020, noting that the share of offspring of intermarriages who choose to be Jewish in adulthood appears to be rising. Moreover, Bruce Phillips, in his analysis, shows that Jewish education can have a meaningful impact on the sense of belonging to the Jewish people among people with mixed backgrounds. This suggests that educational programs can serve as a counterbalance to the drift from engagement with Jewish practice and community.

For instance, a study that followed multiple cohorts of Birthright applicants found that Birthright educational trips increase Jewish engagement both indirectly—by making participants more likely to have a Jewish partner—and directly, independent of partner choice. These combined effects can shape long-term outcomes for people with one Jewish and non-Jewish parent, such as stronger connections to Israel, greater participation in Jewish rituals, higher enrollment of children in Jewish educational programs, and more frequent celebration of Jewish lifecycle events. This illustrates how educational interventions can meaningfully support people with varying Jewish backgrounds to become more connected to the Jewish community.

These findings underscore that even though people with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent on average are less connected to Jewish life, they are shaped by the environments, messages, and educational opportunities available to them. While differences in engagement persist, participation in Jewish educational opportunities can play a critical role in supporting children of intermarriage growing into adults who identify as Jewish and participate actively in Jewish life. Education—both formal and informal—can serve as a powerful tool for strengthening Jewish identity and fostering a sense of belonging.

As families with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent represent an increasing share of the Jewish landscape, communities are grappling with how best to welcome and support them. The studies highlighted below reveal both the obstacles these families encounter and the opportunities for strengthening their connection to Jewish life.

In his review of recent research on interfaith family inclusion, Edmund Case analyzes data from local Jewish community studies and finds that interfaith families want to be part of Jewish communities but often feel excluded. His review notes that some interfaith families experience feelings of being “othered” or marginalized within Jewish communal spaces. For example, focus groups from the Santa Clara County Jewish Community Study reveal that perceptions of not being “Jewish enough” can create significant barriers to connection and participation.

Additionally, a qualitative study of interfaith parents in Greater Los Angeles by Tobin Belzer identifies several specific obstacles that interfaith Jews face when trying to engage in Jewish communal life. Among interfaith Jews affiliated with Conservative synagogues, some expressed concern about feeling excluded by movement-level policies or halachic (Jewish legal) norms that restrict certain forms of ritual participation to Jews of matrilineal descent. Interfaith families with mixed racial backgrounds also reported experiencing racial bias within Jewish communal settings, compounding feelings of marginalization. Both Jewish and non-Jewish partners in interfaith families further described a lack of Jewish knowledge or confidence as a major barrier to participation, contributing to discomfort in communal and institutional environments.

Belzer’s study also highlights several promising pathways for engagement. Interfaith families expressed a need for learning and engagement opportunities tailored to: (1) non-Jews who are raising Jewish children but do not seek conversion; (2) Jews in interfaith partnerships who wish to deepen their Jewish knowledge and practice; (3) millennials and parents—particularly mothers—who are in the process of forming a Jewish family; and (4) interfaith couples representing diverse racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious identities. Together, these findings suggest that more differentiated and inclusive engagement strategies may help address persistent barriers to belonging and participation among interfaith families.

What questions, possibilities, and new insights did this digest raise for you? Email casje@gwu.edu to share your thoughts.

Acknowledgements
The CASJE Research Digest is supported by The Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, with additional support from the Jim Joseph Foundation and Crown Family Philanthropies.

CASJE Leadership and Staff
Research Digest Editor: Sasha Volodarsky, PhD
Managing Director: Arielle Levites, PhD
Research Digest Advisory Board Liaison: Aaron Pallas, PhD
Assistant Director of Operations: Naomi Gamoran, MSW

Program Coordinator: Miriam Levitin, MSW

CASJE Advisory Board co-chairs: Benjamin M. Jacobs, PhD, and Susan Kardos, EdD

CASJE Research Digest Contributors

Conflict of Interest Statement

The current editor of the CASJE research digest is a co-author of the CMJS study cited in this digest.