Mervin F. Verbit

Verbit served on Technical Advisory Committee for the National Jewish Population Study (NJPS) 2000-2001 national survey of American Jews.

Other areas of academic involvement include serving as Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Contemporary Jewry journal (1977-1980), as a contributing editor for Review of Religious Research (1977-1979), and as a member of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies' Advisory Board (1990-199?).

In 1976, Benjamin Fain initiated a sociological study on Soviet Jewry. After emigrating to Israel in 1977, Fain and Verbit published the study on the Jewish identity of Soviet Jews. The study was published in 1984, through the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The report recounts the extraordinary faithfulness of Soviet Jews to the surviving remnants of Judaism under the rule of the Soviet Union.

The study used data gathered from a 1976 survey organized by Fain. The respondents were some 1,200 Soviet Jews who had not taken any steps to try to leave the country. Fifty three percent of the respondents reported to respect religion though they did not believe, compared with thirty five percent who entertained various negative positions on religion. Eleven percent had more positive attitudes towards religion.

Verbit was among the sociologists of religion to explore the theoretical analysis of the sociological dimensions of religiosity. His contribution includes measuring religiosity through six different "components" (similar to Charles Glock's five-dimensional approach (Glock, 1972: 39)), and the individual's behaviour vis-à-vis each one of these components has a number of "dimensions", making it a twenty-four-dimensional measure of religiosity.

Mervin Verbit served as the first president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ), a cross-disciplinary organization of individuals whose research concerns the Jewish people throughout the world. He was president of the ASSJ from 1971 to 1973.

Mervin Feldman Verbit (born November 24, 1936) is an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion, American Jews and the American Jewish community. He is currently the chair of the Sociology Department at Touro College.

Verbit was born in Philadelphia in 1936. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where he received his B.A. and M.A. Verbit received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His dissertation studied the religious attitudes of Jewish college students. Verbit was a full-time professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been visiting professor at several institutions, among them Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Yeshiva University, and Jewish Theological Seminary. Verbit was appointed deputy chair of Touro College's Sociology Department in 2006, and was later appointed as the department chair.