In this article, we examine how COVID‐19 has affected the mental health of Orthodox Jews and how religious resources cushion the effects of isolation and deprivation of religious gatherings over time. Using longitudinal data from the COVID‐19 Community Portrait Study, fixed‐effects regression models are employed to predict how religious resources are affected by COVID‐19 and how mental health is affected by both COVID‐19 and religious resources. We find two competing effects upon participants’ religious resources. While group resources decreased as a result of the pandemic, psychosocial resources were strengthened. A Closeness‐to‐God Index predicted lower levels of depression and anxiety, less perceived stress, and less loneliness. Congregational prayer also predicted lower stress and less loneliness, but the magnitude of the effect was smaller. The findings provide empirical support for theoretical frameworks emphasizing the positive effects of religion on mental health and suggest psychosocial resources enable religious coping during particularly challenging times.

Background Religious identity research has predominantly investigated effects of discrete factors, despite many factors exercising interconnected effects on religious connectedness, resulting in a limited understanding of the mechanism influencing religious identity development. Purpose This study examined the mechanism underlying the religious identity development in Jewish young adults, also showcasing the benefits of bringing together a range of known catalysts for examination in a single analytic model. Methods Informed by Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, data from a sample of 1712 young adults from the Gen17: Australian Jewish Community Study (2018) was used to estimate bivariate and OLS regression models including moderated mediation to examine the relationships between Jewish schooling, critical Jewish experiences, parental religious connectedness and young adult religious connectedness. Results Jewish schooling significantly affected young adults’ religious connectedness; without mediating effects of other critical Jewish experiences, however, Jewish schooling effects were negligible. Upbringing by parents with high religious connectedness had an intensifying effect, while parents with low religious connectedness had a diminishing effect on the association between Jewish schooling and young adult religious connectedness. Those raised by parents with high religious connectedness had higher religious connectedness than those raised by parents with low-to-moderate religious connectedness, regardless of Jewish schooling. In addition, having a high proportion of Jewish peers in one’s friendship network was the most powerful of the critical Jewish experiences in mediating the effect of Jewish schooling on religious connectedness. Conclusions and implications Parents and Jewish friendship networks play important roles in the development of young adults’ religious connectedness, which is only apparent with research approaches that acknowledge the complexity of the formation of religious connectedness. The enduring nature of these influences even into young adulthood has implications for scholars of religion as well as religious communities, as there may be greater gain from investment in agency-building in families and coreligionist friendship networks rather than outsourcing to program development by communal institutions.

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The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities. This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities’ levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research.

Jewish identification and engagement have cultural as well as religious salience. Jewish cultural engagement, however, is overwhelmingly circumscribed as a fait accompli, often an outcome, rarely a predictor in quantitative examinations of contemporary Jewish life. Consequently, the sociological understanding of Jewish cultural identity formation is limited. This study examines Jewish cultural identity formation in young Australian Jews, identifying roles played by three wellsprings, or sources of Jewish culture. Using the Gen17 Australian Jewish Community Survey 2018, the most recent nationally representative study of Australian Jewry, relationships between Jewish day school education, communal engagement, cultural upbringing, and cultural identity were analyzed using linear and OLS regression models. Jewish day school education significantly affected cultural identity; without mediating effects of communal engagement, however, day school education’s effects were inconsequential. High-level cultural upbringing had amplifying effects, while low-level cultural upbringing had attenuating effects on associations between Jewish day school education and cultural identity. The cultural identity formation mechanism was similar to a proposed religious identity formation mechanism. These results highlight interconnected and indirect effects of cultural wellsprings on identity formation, and similarities between cultural and religious identity formation, with implications for scholars of culture and religion.