ABSTRACT
The Jewish people number some 15 million worldwide. Almost half of these, approximately 7 million, live in the US. The majority of Jews both in the US and the rest of the world are secular: they maintain some type of Jewish identity but have little or no strong connection to Judaism as a religion. Of the 6.8 million Jews who live in the US, less than a third are members of one of the movements into which modern Judaism is divided. The memberships of the three main movements are: 355 thousand Orthodox, 760 thousand Reform and 890 thousand Conservative. Some percentage of the remaining Jews will align themselves with the Reform movement, which is in some sense the default movement of American Jewry. Outside of the US, the numbers of Orthodox Jews outweigh those of the other movements, due in part to the fact that outside America Orthodoxy tends to be the default position taken by Jews who have no other strong alignment.
