Cohesion and Constraint: Expanding a Model of Jewish Ethnicity

In the social scientific study of Jews, a three-concept model of cohesion, assimilation, and division has been effectively utilized to examine the emergent and variable nature of Jewish ethnicity in modernizing and post-modern societies, including in the United States. This article seeks to expand the existing model by adding a fourth concept, constraint, defined as unwanted restrictions on the desired ability or capacity to participate fully in the production and consumption of a group’s ethnicity, thereby reducing an ethnic group’s cohesion. Constraint can take numerous forms, including political, cultural, financial, and geographic. This article specifically examines financial constraint, drawing on a recent nonprobability survey that focused on economic vulnerability among a sample of American Jewish respondents. By demonstrating the empirical existence of financial constraint and its associations with a series of sociodemographic and Jewish variables in the nonprobability sample, the article provides initial evidence of the concept’s analytic and interpretive utility. It concludes with several considerations, including implications of financial constraint for U.S. Jews and Jewish community, suggestions for further research using probability sampling and measuring other forms of constraint, and examining the conceptual and empirical relationship of constraint not only with cohesion but also with assimilation and division.