From 2022 through early 2025, I was part of the research team behind On the Edge: Voices of Economic Vulnerability in U.S. Jewish Communities. After conducting the largest study of economic vulnerability among American Jews to date, funded by the Weinberg Foundation, the finding that has stayed with me most is not a statistic but a pattern: People who were once deeply connected to Jewish communal life have fallen out of sync with it not because they stopped caring, but because the institutions were designed for lives that do not match the ones they are living.

“Max” is one such person. Max grew up going to Hebrew school, and his family celebrated his bar mitzvah. He participated in USY and traveled to Israel. His USY friends even showed up at his wife’s funeral decades later.

After his wife’s death from cancer, Max became a single father of three young children, supporting them on a truck driver’s salary. A Jewish organization he reached out to for financial assistance told him that he earned too much to qualify; and he felt out of place at synagogue, surrounded by two-parent families with more money. The system that had shaped him couldn’t accommodate the life he ended up living.

What Max needed in that moment was someone to recognize that the death of a spouse is a predictable, institutionally significant moment and to reach out proactively rather than waiting for him to navigate the system alone. Perhaps someone would have asked Max not just how to get his children through the bar and bat mitzvah pipeline, but how to support Max himself. He was grieving and seeking meaning at precisely the moment when Jewish life has the most to offer. None of what Max needed was exotic or expensive. What was missing was a way of seeing — a framework for recognizing that his situation was not an exception to be accommodated, but a predictable consequence of a life course that the institution was not quite designed to serve.

To understand this, we need a concept the Jewish communal world has not yet seriously reckoned with: the life course.

Sociologists use the phrase “life course” to describe the sequence of roles, transitions and events that make up a person’s life over time. Several features of this framework matter enormously for anyone working in Jewish education or communal life.

The first feature is timing: the age at which key events occur. Having children at 24 and having children at 38 are not just different dates on a calendar; they create fundamentally different relationships with the institutions that serve young families.

The second one is transitions: the processes of change set off by life events. A divorce is not a moment in time but a multi-year reshaping of housing, finances, social networks and daily routines. A job loss can coincide with bar mitzvah tutoring fees, turning what should be an on-ramp into a wall.

The third is linked lives: the principle that our engagement with institutions is never purely individual. A spouse’s connection to Judaism shapes the whole family’s participation, while a partner’s death or departure can sever an entire family’s relationship to communal life.

Here is the insight that should change how we think about Jewish education: The life course is profoundly shaped by socioeconomic status.

People with more economic resources tend to have more stable, predictable life courses. They finish school, establish careers, marry and have children in a sequence that aligns neatly with the institutional infrastructure of American Jewish life. People with fewer resources tend to experience more disruption: earlier or later parenthood, more divorce, more health crises, more job instability and more geographic dislocation. And Jewish educational institutions, from preschool through adult learning, have been designed almost entirely around the first kind of life course.

The communal architecture that emerged over the 20th century — day schools, camps, youth movements, synagogue programming — reflected the trajectory of a rapidly upwardly mobile community. It works well for families living that kind of life, but it has a hidden dependency: when the life course deviates from the expected pattern, the architecture breaks down. It’s doesn’t mean that the education itself is flawed, but that the on-ramps — the timing, the cost structures and the social assumptions — are all calibrated to a life that many Jews are not living. 

Recently, I worked with Rosov Consulting to study how social class shapes American Jews. We gathered data from nearly 2,000 survey respondents and 175 in-depth interviews. What struck me most was not simply that economic vulnerability creates financial barriers to Jewish participation, though it certainly does. It was that economic vulnerability produces a fundamentally different life course, and that different life course puts people out of sync with the rhythm of Jewish institutional life. 

The impulse in our field has been to address these problems one at a time — a scholarship here, a sliding-scale fee there — but piecemeal accommodations will always be insufficient when the problem is the underlying architecture itself. The question is not how to make exceptions to the system but how to redesign it. It requires rethinking when we offer entry points, how flexible our programming is and what social assumptions are embedded in everything from preschool newsletters to High Holy Day ticketing.

We have spent decades asking how to get more people into the Jewish pipeline. The life course perspective suggests different questions: What kinds of lives are people actually living, and how do we meet them there? That shift from pipeline thinking to life course thinking is what it would take to build a Jewish community that holds not just the people whose lives go according to plan, but the ones whose lives, like most lives, don’t.

Ilana M. Horwitz is the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University, where she is an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology.