Abstract
Marshall Sklare Award Lecture given by Leonard Saxe and published in Contemporary Jewry. Although there is diversity and division within the community of social scientists who study contemporary Jewry, there is a shared commitment to rational scientific analysis. The paper describes the author’s positivist social psychological orientation and its roots in the theorizing/empiricism of three seminal psychological thinkers, Daniel Kahenman, Kurt Lewin, and Donald Campbell. The application of these meta-theorists’ work on cognitive psychology, action research, and experimentation is illustrated by research on Taglit-Birthright Israel, an effort designed to alter the trajectory of Jewish identity development. A number of ‘‘common ground’’ principles are then drawn for the development of social scientific research on Jewry. The principles concern the need to control bias, to develop generalizable knowledge, and to direct research to solving actual problems. Contemporary Jewry (2014) 34:3–14.