DANIEL SCHIFF

4. See infra at p. 8.

6. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(Third Edition) defines adultery as“voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a partner other than the lawful spouse.”

7 There is good reason why adultery is often regarded as much more widespread than it really is. Andrew Greeley ,“Marital Infidelity,” Society(May/June 1994), pp. 9-13, observes that most well-known data reported before 1990 vastly overstated the extent of adultery. Thus, Kinsey asserted that about 50 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in his samples had committed adulte­ry. Shere Hite in The Hite Report averred that 72 percent of married men were adulterous. The June 1977 issue of Marriage and Divorce stated that“70 percent of all Americans engage in an affair sometime during their marital life.” More recently, the Janus Report on Sexual Behavior in America put the infidelity figures at around 33 percent of married men and 25 percent of married women. But, as Greeley observes,“All these statistics have one characteristic in common: they are not based on national probability samples....”

Hence, the statistically more acceptable numbers are less dramatic. According to Greeley , the authoritative 1991 General Social Survey, based on a national probability sample, reveals that 21 percent of men and 11 percent of women have had sex with someone other than their spouse during marriage. If prostitution is excluded from the statistics, however, and only those who are in the work force are counted, the gender gap disappears:“Fifteen per cent of working women and men who have never paid for sex report that they have had sex with someone other than their spouse.” Theorists hypothesize that the opportunities for women to find partners for adultery increase when they enter the work force. It is clear, though, that if 21 percent of men have committed adultery of some type(including prostitution), then—unless the 11 percent of women who have committed adul­tery are all married to the male adulterers—the figure of one in five marriages being touched by adultery may well be conservative. It is, of course, also possible that although the researchers use all available tools to compensate for those who are apt to answer untruthfully, a degree of under­reporting may nevertheless be a factor.

Greeley also suggests the possibility that infidelity rates may be slightly on the rise. He bases this estimation on the fact that adultery rates among younger people seem to be a little higher than for older age groups.

8. Indeed, the 1994 University of Chicago survey, The Social Organization of Sexuality, reports that Jews —on average—had the most partners(lifetime) of any religious grouping. It would stretch credibility to maintain that fewer of these partners represent adulterous liaisons than for the rest of the population. See Time Magazine, October 17, 1994.

9. This decision of the Reform movement was first articulated at the 1869 Philadelphia conference. The original text can be found in David Philipson , The Reform Movement in Judaism,

(New York , 1931), p. 484, n. 38.

10. Such confusion is clearly referred to in M. Yevamot 3:10.

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