Deep in our Jewish souls, we are outcasts. And with good reason - from generation to generation, from nation to nation, we have been pushed down, pushed out and put to death. It's even been suggested that most of what holds the Jewish people together is a shared memory of discrimination and persecution.

And so a funny thing happened on the way to 21st century America: we got popular - and we're having a really hard time with it.

But the truth is, if we were able to get past our discomfort, we might find that our newfound popularity could be the key to a new, more successful approach to reaching young Jews. For if we understood better what non-Jews think is cool about us, we might land closer to the sweet spot of today's Jews, too.

To be sure, it wasn't very long ago that Jews in the U.S. were reviled the old-fashioned way. In 1939, a survey by Elmo Roper, one of the nation's most prominent pollsters, found that only 39 percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. A full majority - 53 percent - believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted." Ten percent actually believed that Jews should be deported. In the 1940's, several national surveys found that Jews were considered a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious or racial group.

So consider this: in the summer of 2006, the Gallup organization, one of the world's leading polling organizations, asked a random sample of 1,001 Americans how they feel about people of different religious or spiritual groups in the United States, and Jews rated the highest of any group in America. No one - not Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, Muslims, Atheists or Scientologists - scored higher in the view of Americans nationwide. Number one! We are not merely tolerated, we are favored. (My goodness, we trigger fewer negative feelings than the Methodists.) From pariah to preferred, in two generations!

This generally increasing regard for Judaism has turned, for some, into a very personal preference. Non-Jews are having bar mitzvah ceremonies, says a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal - without the Torah reading, perhaps, but with other symbolic rites to mark the arrival of adulthood.

And non-Jews are copying Jewish weddings. There are elaborate discussions online about the propriety of using a chuppah in non-Jewish weddings, and we're even starting to see non-Jewish brides and grooms - and their parents - hoisted up on chairs in exuberant celebration.

Moreover, Americans eat over 8 million pounds of matzah all year long. Presumably, we get some help from the non-Jews. The Hasidic reggae artist Matisyahu - who dresses in shtetl garb and sings partly in Yiddish and Hebrew about Jewish themes - has so many mainstream fans he was named Billboard's Top Reggae Artist of 2006. And finally, just look at JDate. Its non-Jewish members - estimated at over 30,000 (out of about 400,000) in the U.S. alone - have become so significant that in the survey question on religious background, there is a drop-down option for "Willing To Convert."

Thus, in our new book MICROTRENDS: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (Twelve, 2007), we make the case that unlike ever before, society is being driven by small, intense groups who rally around common passions. From the Working Retired (older Americans who won't slow down), to Sun-Haters (dissidents in a land of sun-worshipers, railing against the dangers of the sun), to the Uptown Tattooed (affluent folks who ink on a little butterfly to show their wild side) - Americans today are making new, counterintuitive life choices that can have big implications for business, politics and social change. The groups may never grow to be very large, but they don't have to. In a country where the bestselling car is bought by barely 300,000 people, or 200,000 voters in a battleground state can tip a presidential election, small groups can make a big difference, even if they stay small.

The emerging group of non-Jews who seriously favor things Jewish - we call them Pro-Semites - are a perfect example of a microtrend. They are the niche edge of the popularity trend revealed by the Gallup poll: the small but intense group of non-Jews who not only have warm feelings about Jews, but who want to make Jews' ways their own. For others, it may mean studying Jewish texts (e.g., Madonna, Newark Mayor Cory Booker). For some, it may mean actively pursuing a Jewish mate (e.g., the tens of thousands of non-Jews who pay monthly membership fees to belong to JDate).

How big is this group and what motivates them? In a small poll conducted for our book, we found that nearly 4 in 10 non-Jews said they would be "very" or "somewhat" interested in dating or marrying a person who is Jewish. The chief reason they gave for wanting a Jewish mate was Jews' sense of strong values, with nearly a third also saying they were drawn to money, looks or a sense that Jews "treat their spouses better." But clearly, it's also about American values coming into line with Jewish ones. In the old days, Jewish priorities and lifestyles stood outside the mainstream. But in today's service-oriented, education-based economy, more people are focused on finding successful, highly educated mates - and Jews fit the bill. Indeed, 68 percent of Jewish women aged 25-44 have a college degree, by far the highest percentage of any religious group in America.

Cultural affinity may play a part, too. In our poll, Pro-Semites tended to be liberal-to-moderate, slightly downscale Catholics. Maybe Catholics and Jews are comfortable with each other's big family values, integration of ritual, orientation around food and sense of upward mobility, despite earlier discrimination.

A separate but related microtrend affecting the Jewish community is Christian Zionists. These are the 20 million or so Christian Americans who believe that their faith actively calls for support of Jewish rule in Israel.

Interestingly, they rarely overlap with the Pro-Semites. Whereas Pro-Semites tend to be Northeastern and Catholic, Christian Zionists are largely evangelical and Southern. Pro-Semites have a lot of interest in a Jewish mate, but little interest in Israel; Christian Zionists have a lot of interest in Israel, but little interest in a Jewish mate. Nonetheless, both groups represent a passion on the part of non-Jews for things that Jews generally assume they alone are passionate about.

Christian Zionism has long been scrutinized and debated in the Jewish community, and you can trigger some very heated arguments by bringing it up at a dinner party. But regardless of one's feelings toward the movement, the following numerical truths are inescapable:

Christian Zionists in the U.S. outnumber American Jewish supporters of Israel by at least 4 to 1.

Their commitment can be just as deeply rooted - if not more so - than ours. According to a 2006 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than half of people in the American South believe that the state of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. Among white evangelical Protestants, it is 69 percent. Among black Protestants, it is 60 percent. How many American Jews think the state of Israel was given to them by God? Would you even say 2 in 10?

Christian Zionists' passion for Israel stems from their own understanding of scripture, particularly the passage in Genesis in which God promises Abraham, "I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee." There may be limited transferability, therefore, of this support for Israel to non-Jews who don't take the Bible literally.

But overall, the numbers behind Pro-Semites and Christian Zionists tell a powerful story. In America today, Jews are popular, and our chief political cause has deep, passionate support well beyond our community.

One would think that, perhaps, this is good news. After millennia of being outcast, we have been invited in - and not just welcomed but embraced with more regard than any other religious group in America. Moreover, we are not alone in our devotion to Israel; tens of millions of Christians feel as passionately about its defense and safety as we do. And yet, when Jews are presented with this data - if they don't try to tear down the methodology or otherwise disprove it - they generally have one, or several, of the following reactions:

1) Popularity will kill us. Sure, it's nice not to be discriminated against, but to be actively sought after by non-Jews? Intermarriage rates are high enough, and the kids of those marriages rarely end up Jewish. It's bad enough that Jews are so often attracted to non-Jews, but with non- Jews actively seeking us out, too, the intermarriage problem will only get worse. Or, as historian Jonathan Sarna has put it, "If they don't hate us to death, they'll love us to death."

2) Popularity will trigger a backlash. Another common reaction is that when Jews get too prominent, someone will reach out and try to smack us back in place. (You can have that No. 1 rating in the Gallup poll - we don't want it.) Wasn't exposure, and envy, the problem, after all, in Nazi Germany? And in France, before the Dreyfus Affair...and all the way back to Joseph in Pharaoh's court? This worry is very much alive today. When Joe Lieberman ran for president in 2004, far more Jews than non-Jews told him a Jew shouldn't run.

3) Popularity means we've lost our edge. A third common reaction is that if Jews are so popular, we must have done something wrong. If we have become so mainstream vanilla as to win popularity contests, are we now useless as leaders, as changemakers, as provocateurs? Isn't "popularity" just confirmation that we've shed all the distinctive traditions and practices that used to set us usefully apart?

4) Popularity conceals a subversive agenda. Finally, we tend to fear that non-Jews' engagement in our way of life - especially when it comes to support for Israel - is actually an attempt to convert us to their way of life. Many Jews, aware that the Christian vision of Jesus' second coming involves not just redemption for Christians but also conversion of the Jews, are wary that behind Christian Zionists' support for Israel may lie a hidden agenda.

We want to propose a fifth way to interpret the data. The growing regard for Jews and Jewish priorities, and particularly the emergence of Pro-Semites, may mean that there is a "marketing" angle to Judaism that many Jewish leaders are not taking advantage of.

In recent years, Jewish organizations in the U.S. have done groundbreaking work to refashion Jewish offerings for today's young people. From Jewish yoga to Alternative Spring Break to independent minyanim, many community leaders have learned that young Jews today need a greater variety of Jewish opportunities in order to land on ones that are truly meaningful. And indeed, some young Jews are finding whole new ways to live and lead in the Jewish community that their grandparents never could have imagined.

But the idea that non-Jews are drawn to Jewish living, independent of outreach efforts on anyone's part, suggests that there may be yet another way that Judaism can be successfully impressed upon Jews. Such an approach goes beyond exposure to Judaism as a "birthright," in which young people are exposed to the joys of Jewish belonging. And it goes beyond its opposite - call it "birth responsibility" - in which young people are instructed about their obligations to the community. Instead, the premise is that regardless of your background, Judaism is a system of living and learning so rich that once you engage it, you will want to dive in deeper and deeper.

What does Madonna see in Judaism? Or Cory Booker? Or the non-Jews on JDate? Or the approximately quarter-million converts who have become Jewish in recent decades? In a useful start, Sylvia Barack Fishman's 2006 report for the American Jewish Committee, Choosing Jewish: Conversations about Conversion, examined the motivations of a handful of non-Jews drawn to Judaism. But there is so much more to learn. After all, if every Jew these days is a Jew by Choice, shouldn't we really know how they think?

We are spending a lot of time and money these days studying and surveying young Jews. Why not study the Pro-Semites, too?

Because the truth is, if the Jewish community wants to secure Jewish identity into the future, it needs to design its outreach for the non-Jews. Not because we actually want to proselytize to non-Jews or to convert them, but because most young Jews in America today are more like their non-Jewish peers than ever before. In a 2002 study of America's Jewish college freshmen - a privately commissioned over-sampling within the annual UCLA survey of America's freshmen - author Linda Sax dutifully presents the differences she found between Jewish and non-Jewish freshmen. But frankly, she is reduced to reporting such insignificant differences as "Jews apply to more colleges" and "Jews go to college farther from home" - and even those differences, she says, largely disappear when Jewish and non-Jewish students on the same campuses are compared. The real "aha" of this study is that when it comes to the state of Jewish students - regarding political interest, volunteering background, interest in talking about religion, interest in advanced degrees, career interests, levels of stress, etc. - Jews are remarkably like everybody else.

In other words, if our engagement efforts aren't targeted toward the non-Jews, they're probably missing the bulk of the Jews.

Reorienting our outreach efforts in this manner would require a dramatically different approach. Explaining Jewish practice at every opportunity, instead of assuming common ground. Constantly looking for ways that Jewish insights can enrich mainstream American experiences. Offering prospective funders a vision of positive, thriving Jewish life, instead of fear about discontinuity.

Pro-Semites themselves may never grow to be very large. But they herald something very important for the Jewish community - the idea that Jewish ideas and practices are strong enough to compete in the larger marketplace. If we can put aside our suspicions about whether other people like us - and instead truly engage them on why - we might well use our popularity to our advantage. In our own community.

Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne are the authors of MICROTRENDS: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (Twelve, 2007).

© 2008 World Jewish Digest