Is the institution of marriage on the verge of extinction? Referring to declining marriage rates and changing views toward marriage in the United States, a recent cover of Time magazine asked: “Who Needs Marriage?” What is the Jewish perspective on this important community issue?

Marriage Just Is

L ast week, Google, in conjunction with a research team based at Harvard, released a new online tool called the Ngram Viewer that tracks culture through the words of 5.2 million books (4 percent of all books published). They call the quantitative analysis of this vast amount of data “culturomics,” a new research method in the humanities, linguistics and social science. JInsider test-drove the Ngram viewer (which can be found at www.culturomics.org) using Jewish/religious terms to evaluate how often a word or phrase has appeared and how usage has changed over time.