Navigating the Contemporary Terrain: Studying Jews and Jewishness in Changing Circumstances; Sklare Address, 2023.

In the face of changing societal conditions, how can we social scientists take stock of the changes and position ourselves and our work effectively? As a social psychologist studying contemporary Jews and their relationship being Jewish, I have used a navigational approach to deepen our understanding of how social actors reckon with the changing circumstances of their lives. This approach includes several foci. The first is attending to the sense-making of social actors over time, which involves discerning the considerations that compel them and also constrain them. A second feature of a navigational approach involves keeping tabs on emerging features of the societal landscape. I find it useful to employ the metaphor of the "gameboard" to represent that contextual grounding. A third focus of a navigational perspective is reflexive, one that asks us to revisit our analytic "habits of practice." Our theories and conceptions, our methods and modes of inquiry and discovery deserve to be examined as circumstances change. To illustrate the value of a navigational approach I analyze some longstanding ideas about the gameboard that were encoded in two major sociodemographic studies in the 1990s—in the 1990 National Jewish Population Study and in the 1991 New York Jewish Population Study. A few years later I was able to offer a different framing in the Connections and Journeys Study that provided a more dynamic portrayal of present-day realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]