Decentering the study of jewish identity: Opening the dialogue with other religious groups

While social science research in Jewish studies is important for the particular knowledge it conveys about and for Jews, it also raises more general questions about the complicated and sometimes ambivalent nature of contemporary ethnic and religious identity in the sociological study of religion and ethnicity. This article focuses on Jewish identity as a way of raising questions about the relationship between religiosity and ethnicity; the dialectical nature of assimilation; and the methodological implications raised by defining identity subjectively or objectively for both qualitative and quantitative research. Our aim in sharing these explorations is to raise questions about the ways in which particularistic concerns and explorations of one group can deepen and/or provoke similar explorations in other contemporary religious and ethnic groups and vice versa.