Always_Ask_Questions,
“Sephardim seem to have more united communities, with many masorti people who feel like part of am yisrael even if not always observant or learned.”
Admittedly I don’t have a large amount of experience with Sefardic communities. In my neighborhood, the Sefardim are overwhelmingly Israeli and speak Hebrew as a first language. And I notice that the native Hebrew speaking Ashkenazim also have a good camaraderie with the Hebrew speaking Sefardim. So it’s possible that a common Israeli language and culture in the midst of a foreign country help with the camaraderie we see, whereas many Ashkenazic families have been in the US for several generations now, struggling against or succumbing to assimilation. Feel free to prove me wrong – I’m just thinking “aloud” here.
“Possibly, we suffer the post-haskala shock that we probably need to get over already. Number of reformim, socialists, OO is not that high any more, most non-observant Jews are ignorami rather than apikoiri.”
Ignorance of Yiddishkeit doesn’t mean ignorance of other “isms” as well. I think the perception that their numbers or influence is going down is more due to our being increasingly sundered from them than an actual reduction. When I was growing up, many non-Orthodox Jews (myself included) knew grandparents or great-grandparents who were frum, and had good memories of seders, or Shabbos dinners, despite feeling rather lost and confused. Nowadays for many secular Jews, there is R”L absolutely no connection to Torah Judaism whatsoever. Judaism is defined as the Democratic party platform and appropriating the Passover story for social justice causes.