ABSTRACT
When I was still an impressionable young student, my teacher announced that Economics is not a subject, but rather a discipline. His point was that once we had mastered the analytical tools of our trade we would be able to apply them to any subject that interested us. This was an especially liberating concept for me, who at the time shared in the popular notion that economists mainly studied interest rates and the stock market. My teacher was Gary S. Becker, who would go on to win the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for opening up many new subject areas for economic analysis. Despite initial fears that economists were trying to “take over” the domain of other social scientists, it turned out that the insights provided by economic analysis mainly complemented those of the other social science disciplines and greatly enriched our understanding of the subject areas. It was in this spirit that I began my own research into the economics of Judaism, hoping to enrich our understanding of the American Jewish community and to contribute an economic perspective to the design of Jewish communal policy.
