We are excited to announce the release of the 2021-22 Long Beach Area Jewish Community Study. In planning for the study release, Richard Marcus, new Jewish Long Beach president, told Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies (CMJS) that
"If ever the Cohen Center needed to give an example of immediately putting its investment in a community study to use in strategic planning, Long Beach is a good one!"
CMJS followed up with a series of questions in the hope that others who are thinking about the next step in moving from research to action might find Long Beach's experience helpful. Below is an excerpt from our interview, slightly edited for clarity.
Richard Marcus: ...it seems the most surprising finding was around age groups. We knew we had a disproportionately large senior generation, but it is much larger than we assumed. There were marked differences in perceptions and needs across generations and more differences in these in perceptions, needs, and demographics than we anticipated. We knew that the ways in which our population negotiates its identity was changing, but we were surprised by the speed of ethnic and racial diversification as well as movement toward personal activities at the expense of community engagement. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised that Jewish identification was, in a number of ways, increasing. Even while the number of intermarried families is increasing, Jewish identification within these families is standing firm.
These “surprises” pushed us to accelerate some of our programmatic changes and, particularly, the ways in which we serve the community across the lifecycle. While our new fundraising and development plan is still in the works, this finding is also likely to impact both our fundraising strategies (such as the direction of our capital campaign) and the ways in which we diversify our funding streams.
