Bruce A. Phillips is Professor of Sociology and Jewish Communal Studies in the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California and Senior Research Fellow at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. He also serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Jewry and serves as Treasurer Executive Board member for the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry.

He has been among the leading researchers in the sociology of American Jewry for over three decades. He served on the National Technical Advisory Committees for the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys and has conducted local Jewish population surveys in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Houston.

His published work covers a wide variety of topics from Iranians and Israelis in the United States to Jewish suburbanization, Jewish education, the economics of Jewish life, and the Jews of Los Angeles. His 2005 essay, “American Judaism in the 21st Century,” is among the most widely cited sources on contemporary American Jewish denominations. He is widely recognized as the leading researcher on American Jewish intermarriage. His national survey, Re-Examining Intermarriage, published in 1997 remains a widely used resource on this topic, and he is currently completing a book pulling together his last two decades of intermarriage research.

His current research projects examine the impact of migration and community size on the affiliation of new migrants, multi-racial studies as a lens for understanding Jews of mixed parentage, and applying the work of economists to understanding intermarriage.