Identity.

The quest to maintain individual identity in the ever-growing pluralist society was a struggle that constantly plagued Jewish culture and increased in the 1980s because of several cultural and demographic factors. The Jewish population had remained steady at less than 6 million since the early 1970s, but with increasingly low birth rates and growths in intermarriage the future of Judaism was in question in the 1980s. In November 1983 a conference on Jewish Population Growth was held in New York to look at these trends and consider ways to reverse them. Jewish intermarriage reached a rate of 30 percent and had tripled in the last three decades. Most traditional faiths frowned on intermarriage, but in Jewish culture this issue was a matter of premier importance. All four divisions of American Judaism viewed intermarriage as a crisis, and all found different ways to cope with...