Imagining Jewish America’s future (or lack thereof)

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Two new opinion pieces predict the demise of Jewish America as we know it within a few decades.

Uzi Silber writes in the Forward that the disappearance of the "secular and religiously liberal" American Jew is inevitable due to intermarriage, low birth rates and assimilation. The fervently Orthodox community of Boro Park and its ilk, he argues, with its fecund birth rates and strong communal affiliation, represent the future of Jewish America.

Meanwhile, at Jewcy, Robin Margolis envisions a takeover of the State of Israel by its fervently Orthodox community in the year 2040, which will precipitate a civil war with Israeli Arabs who feel excluded by the establishment of a Jewish theocracy a la the Islamic Republic of Iran. As for the Jewish American community, by 2040 it has shrunk to "perhaps 30 to 50 percent" of its size in 2009, as "bagel jokes, Israel trips, discussions on intermarriage, arguments over Yiddish proverbs" proves too little to keep it together.

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