Menachem Mendel

Many people are familiar with the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. While I admit that I haven’t read the book, I do find the blog Freakonomics very interesting. There was a recent post which was simply fascinating, and scary in a way. The question discussed was “What is the Future of Suburbia?” A number of experts gave fascinating descriptions of what they felt was going to happen in the coming decades. This isn’t a blog for urban planners, so it will be interesting to see how these developments, whatever they may be, affect the Jewish community. Demographic changes have always affected where Jews live, and recently a number of synagogues in such places as Long Island have closed or merged because of population shifts. It should be emphasized that new synagogues are being built all of the time, and it is nothing new that synagogues are closing and Jews are moving around the country (see this website about old synagogues the Bronx), yet is seems that we may be at the cusp of large shifts in resources and population.

Posted on August 12th, 2008 under Current Events • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed