I don't personally agree that Judaism outside the US is unimportant, obviously; I'm very proud of my European heritage. I was talking about the pure numbers, and in terms of religiously affiliated Jews, American Reform Jews are by far the biggest single group worldwide. All the statistics I've seen say that Reform Judaism is the largest denomination in the USA; looking it up to check now that you've given me cause to doubt, I learn that the USian Conservative movement is only a little smaller, not half the size as I previously thought. My guess is that your average Conservative Jew would probably have heard quite a lot of Friedman's music too, and if that's the case we're looking at ten times the entire UK Jewish population. (Probably the reason why I had a hazy view of the relative sizes of the two movements is that people often lump Reform and Conservative Judaism together, in order to make the rhetorical point that the Orthodox-dominated demographic in the UK is not particularly typical.)
I'm not in the least trying to suggest that your Jewish context, or my own, are irrelevant and not worthy of attention. I'm purely taking issue with your implication that if you haven't heard of Friedman before this Limmud, she can't be all that famous.
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Date: 2011-01-10 01:27 pm (UTC)I'm not in the least trying to suggest that your Jewish context, or my own, are irrelevant and not worthy of attention. I'm purely taking issue with your implication that if you haven't heard of Friedman before this Limmud, she can't be all that famous.