ABSTRACT
Jews in the United States are generally classified as a religious group. Paradoxically, they make use of concepts borrowed from a variety of social science disciplines to study themselves; but not concepts peculiar to the study of religious groups. They have relied on the fields of intergroup relations and minority group behavior or policy formation and interest group behavior. The key concepts have been: antisemitism, prejudice and discrimination or identity, acculturation and assimilation and more recently pressure group, lobbying and public opinion. Hardly any studies are informed by the sociology of religion. There are exceptions and Marshall Sklare’s Conservative Judaism, which still remains the finest study of American Jewish life, is a notable one. But most studies of Jews make little explicit or even implicit use of the sociology of religion. Even those few studies which direct their attention to the internal aspects of Jewish life are more likely to rely on the literature of organizational behavior and/or decisionmaking than the sociology of religion.
