Welcome to the Tikva podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen. It's my great

pleasure to be joined today by Jay Lefkowitz. Jay is a distinguished public servant, having served in both

the Bush administrations and important policy positions.

He's a distinguished lawyer in private practice, but also someone who's been involved in some of the most interesting cases related to religion and American democracy.

And he's also an important writer and thinker in general, and especially on topics in Jewish life, Jewish culture, and Jewish politics. Jay, thanks

for joining us. Thank you, Eric. Good afternoon. So our subject is an essay you wrote in 2014

called The Rise of Social Orthodoxy, an essay that spurred tremendous reaction from the Orthodox

world, the general Jewish world, and invites a lot of conversation.

I thought before we got into the topic of social orthodoxy itself, you try to help us

understand, set the stage a bit with American Judaism in general, meaning where its strengths

and its weaknesses, its competing directions, its rival spirits,

and how does this play out in terms of the different subgroups of American jury

and where do you think they're heading?

Well, I think the first place to stop on a journey through American jury is with a recognition

of the demographics.

American Jews are approximately

3% of the U.S. population now. It depends obviously how you count Jews who's involved in the Jewish

community or not, but somewhere in that 3% range. And yet Jews are disproportionately involved in so many endeavors in America, whether it's

in the boardroom, on Wall Street, in the entertainment world, in the halls of Congress.

Obviously, throughout the entertainment world,

Jews are overrepresented in so many areas that resonate.

And so American Jews really have an outsized influence in the United States today.

...