ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mixing of secularity with religion in Jewish life from three distinct perspectives: the demographic, the social, and the cultural. The mixing of secularity and religion corroborates the current understanding in the social sciences, which calls secularity into question. At one time, common wisdom assumed that religion, understood as a means of organizing social life with respect to a supreme, superhuman being, would disappear. Demographic information sets the stage for understanding the contemporary Jewish world, although it cannot avoid the script provided by Western bias. The contemporary world is fortunate to have available a number of high-level demographic studies of the Jews, from which the prevalence of the secular–religious divide is obvious. Religious and/or ethnic identification are the salient categories, where ethnicity is a secular variation of Jewish identity. Secularity is a human construction merely "clothed in an aura of factuality," thereby opening the door to reconsidering religion.
