Key takeaways from Pew Research Center’s comprehensive study of religion in Israel, where there are major divisions not only between Jews and Arabs, but also within the major subgroups of Israeli Jews.
Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Israel’s largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and other former Soviet republics. These Soviet Jews brought a secular mindset to Israel, and more than two decades later, Jews who were born in the former Soviet Union continue to be noticeably less religious than Israeli Jews overall.
This report is based on the methodology used in the Pew Research Center’s ongoing study of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. The goal of the study was to devise quantifiable, objective and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion, and to […]
The two largest organized Jewish denominations in America – Reform and Conservative Judaism – together have about five times as many U.S. members as the historically much older, more strictly observant Orthodox community. But the Reform and Conservative movements have a far smaller footprint in Israel.
One of the less high-profile benefits of the news media’s move to online content is the fact that it has provided media researchers with an important tool: Readers now leave a digital footprint, meaning that researchers no longer need to rely only on a reader’s self-reports of what they saw, heard or read that day. […]
A majority of the public (62%) continues to approve of the U.S. military campaign against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria; fewer (33%) say they disapprove. Support for U.S. military action in Iraq and Syria has held steady over the course of the past year. Comparable majorities of Republicans (66%) and Democrats (65%) support the […]
Questions on the state of the U.S. economic system, free trade and the role of government – both generally and in specific areas such as health care – surface differences within both political parties. On the Republican side, supporters of Donald Trump stand out for their unfavorable views of free trade, negative assessments of national […]
Although they have differing perspectives on many political issues, members of Israel’s major religious groups – Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze – place great importance on a few core values, including family relationships, education, career success and helping the needy. Israeli Jews across the religious spectrum say these values are important to them. Although they […]