American Jews
| American Jews |
|---|
| Total population |
|
7,000,000 |
| Regions with significant populations |
| New York City, All along the BosWash Megalopolis in the Northeastern United States, South Florida, the West Coast (especially the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas), the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor, the eastern and Great Lakes region and Las Vegas areas |
| Language(s) |
|
Traditional Jewish languages Hebrew and Aramaic Predominant and Spoken Languages American English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Ladino |
| Religion(s) |
| Judaism, atheism, agnosticism, theism, deism |
| Related ethnic groups |
| Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews |
American Jews, or Jewish Americans, are American citizens or resident aliens who were born into the Jewish community or who have converted to Judaism. The United States is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.
The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominately of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly during the wartime periods, including their US-born descendents. There are, however, small numbers of older (and some recently arrived) communities of Sephardic Jews with roots tracing back to 15th century Iberia (Spain and Portugal), and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as much smaller numbers of Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews and others from the various Jewish ethnic divisions. The Jewish community in America, therefore, manifests a wide range of cultural traditions, as well as encompassing an array of religious observances, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi communities to Jews who are entirely secular.
History
Jews have been present in what is today the United States of America as early as the seventeenth century, if not earlier, though they were small in numbers and almost exclusively Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry.[4][5] Until about 1830 Charleston, South Carolina had more Jews than anywhere else in North America. Large scale Jewish immigration, however, did not commence until the nineteenth century, when by mid century many secular Ashkenazi Jews from Germany arrived in the United States, primarily becoming merchants and shop-owners. There were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States by 1880, and many of them were these educated and secular German Jews, though a minority population of the older Sephardic Jewish families remained.
As a result of persecution in parts of Eastern Europe, Jewish immigration to the
United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, with most of the new immigrants also being Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, though mostly from the poor rural populations of
At the beginning of the twentieth century, these newly-arrived Jews built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and Ashkenazi Jewish Landsmannschaften (German for "Territorial Associations") for Jews from the same town or village. Jewish American writers of the time urged assimilation and integration with the wider American culture, and Jews quickly became part of American life. 500 000 American Jews (or half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50) fought in World War II, and after the war Jewish families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated as rising intermarriage rates with non-Jews combined with a trend towards secularization. At the same time, new centers of Jewish communities formed, as Jewish school enrollment more than doubled between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, while synagogue affiliation jumped from 20% in 1930 to 60% in 1960.
Politics and civil rights
The German Jews were primarily Republicans. However the Yiddish speakers were either Socialists (especially if they were connected with the garment industry), Communist or nonpolitical until the 1930s. Polls showed Jews gave 90% support to Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in the elections of 1940, 1944 and 1948. They gave about a third of their vote to Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. In 1960 Jews voted 83% for Catholic Democrat John F. Kennedy. In 1964, when the Republicans nominated a strongly conservative candidate, Barry Goldwater, who was of partial Jewish descent, 90% of Jews voted for his opponent.[1] Since 1968 Jews have voted about 70%-80% Democratic, surging to 87% for Democratic House candidates in 2006.[2] After the 2006 elections there were 13 Jews in the Senate ( out of 100 members ) and 30 in the House ( out of 435 members ).[3]
Jews participated in movements for civil rights for all United States citizens, including themselves, homosexuals and African Americans. Seymour Siegel argues the historic struggle against prejudice faced by Jews led to a natural sympathy for any people confronting discrimination. This further led Jews to dialogue about the relationship they had with African Americans. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, stated the following at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963: "As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a twofold experience — one of the spirit and one of our history"[4] Yet there was dissension within Judaism about this civil rights involvement. Rabbi Bernard Wienberger exemplified this point of view, warning that "northern liberal Jews" put at risk southern Jews who faced hostility from white southerners because of their northern counterparts. Jewish responses to the civil rights movement and black relations lean toward acceptance and activism against prejudice, demonstrating the important role that this community played in race relations during the 1960s.[5]
Holocaust
The Holocaust had a profound impact of the community in the United States, especially after 1945, as Jews tried to comprehend what happened and especially to commemorate and grapple with it going into the future. Abraham Joshua Heschel summarized this dilemma when he attempted to understand Auschwitz: "To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray God's radiance in the jungles of history."[6]
International affairs
Jews began taking a special interest in international affairs in the early twentieth century, especially regarding pogroms in Imperial Russia, and restrictions on immigration in the 1920s. They organized large-scale boycotts of German merchandize during the 1930s. They strongly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policies in the 1930s and 1940s, and supported the United Nations. The founding of Israel in 1948 made the Middle East a center of attention. However an internal debate followed the Six-Day War. The American Jewish community was divided over whether or not they agreed with the Israeli response; the great majority came to accept the war as necessary. A tension existed especially for leftist Jews, between their liberal ideology and Zionist backing in the midst of this conflict. This deliberation about the Six-Day War showed the depth and complexity of Jewish responses to the varied events of the 1960s.[7]
Population
The Jewish population of the United States is one of the largest in the world.
Precise population figures vary depending on whether "Jews" are accounted for based on halakhic considerations, or secular, political and ancestral identification factors. There were about 4 million adherents of Judaism in the U.S. as of 2001, approximately 1.4% of US population.[8] The community self-identifying as Jewish by birth, irrespective of halakhic (unbroken maternal line of Jewish descent or formal Jewish conversion) status, numbers about 7 million, or 2.5% of the US population. According to the Jewish Agency, for the year 2007 Israel harboured 5.4 million Jews (40.9% of the world's Jewish population) and the United States contained 5.3 million (40.2%).[9] The Jewish Agency's figure for Israel, however, included those who do not consider themselves Jews and those who are not Jewish by halakha, while the estimate for the US and other countries did not include such people.
The most recent large scale population survey, released in the 2006 'American Jewish Yearbook population survey' estimates place the number of American Jews at 6.4 million, or approximately 2.1% of the total population. This figure is significantly higher than the previous large scale survey estimate, conducted by the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population estimates, which estimated 5.2 million Jews. A 2007 study released by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute (SSRI) at Brandeis University presents evidence to suggest that both of these figures may be underestimations with a potential 7.0-7.4 million Americans with Jewish ancestry.[10] Jews in the U.S. settled largely in and near the major cities. The Ashkenazi Jews who are now the vast majority of American Jews settled first in the Northeast and Midwest but in recent decades increasingly in the South and West. In descending order, the metropolitan areas with the highest Jewish populations are New York City (1,750,000), Miami (535,000), Los Angeles (490,000), Philadelphia (285,000), Chicago (265,000), San Francisco (210,000), Boston (208,000), and Baltimore-Washington (165,000). New York is the second largest Jewish population center in the world, after the Gush Dan metropolitan area in Israel. [6]. Several other major cities have over 5% Jewish proportions like Cleveland, Baltimore, and St. Louis. Miami and Los Angeles have long been major centers. Smaller, but growing numbers are found in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte, and especially Atlanta and Las Vegas. In many metropolitan areas, the majority of Jewish families live in suburban communities.
Jewish Texans have been a part of Texas History since the first European explorers arrived in the 1500s. [7] By 1990, there are around 108,000 adherents to Judaism in Texas. [8]
The Israeli community in America is less widespread. The four significant Israeli immigrant communities in the United States are in Los Angeles (approximately 150,000), New York City (162,000), Miami (105,000), and Chicago (50,000).
Immigrant
Persian Jews began arriving to the United States in the late 1970s before the
Islamic Revolution and most of them settled in Los Angeles and Great Neck on
According to the 2001 undertaking of the National Jewish Population Survey, 4.3 million American Jews have some sort of strong connection to the Jewish community, whether religious or cultural.
Assimilation and population changes
The same social and cultural characteristics of the
Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40%-50% in the year 2000.[9][10] Only about 33% of intermarried couples raise their children with a Jewish religious upbringing. This in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s.[11]. In addition to this, when compared with the general American population, the American Jewish community is slightly older. [12]
However, it is much more common for intermarried families to raise their children as Jewish in areas with high Jewish populations, like the greater New York City metropolitan area, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore-Washington, Chicago, and Cleveland (which has the highest Jewish-American population per capita for smaller, major U.S. cities). In the Boston area, 60% percent of children of intermarriages are being raised as Jews by religion; intermarriage is contributing to a net increase in the number of Jews.[13] Detroit stands out in particular, because the Jewish population is particularly concentrated in suburban Oakland County. As well, some children raised through intermarriage rediscover and embrace their Jewish roots when they themselves marry and have children.
In contrast, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number. [14] This trend, however, is likely due at least as much to declining synagogue membership and practice among the non-Orthodox as to greater numbers of Orthodox.
In 2000, there were 360,000 ultra-orthodox ( Haredi ) Jews in USA (7.2%). The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%). [15]
Religion
Jewishness is generally considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one.
Jewish religious practice in America is quite varied. Among the 4.3 million strongly connected American Jews, over 80% have some sort of engagement with Judaism, ranging from Passover Seders to lighting Hanukkah candles.
The survey found that of the 4.3 million strongly connected Jews, 46% belong to a synagogue. Among those who belong to a synagogue, 38% are members of Reform synagogues, 33% Conservative, 22% Orthodox, 2% Reconstructionist, and 5% other types. The survey discovered that Jews in the Northeast and Midwest are generally more observant than Jews in the South or West.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable trend of secular American Jews, called baalei teshuva (repenters/returners), returning to a more religious Orthodox lifestyle, though it is not clear how widespread or demographically important this movement is.
Education
The great majority of students attend public schools, although there are Jewish day schools and yeshivas. Jewish cultural studies and Hebrew language instruction is also commonly offered at synagogues in the form of supplementary Hebrew schools or Sunday schools.
Until the 1950s, a quota system at elite colleges and universities limited the number of Jewish students. Before 1945 only a few Jewish professors were at elite universities. In 1941 anti-Semitism drove Milton Friedman from a nontenured assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[12] Harry Levin became the first Jewish full professor in the Harvard English department in 1943, but the Economics department decided not to hire Paul Samuelson in 1948. Harvard hired its first Jewish biochemists in 1954.[13]
Today American Jews no longer face the discrimination in college admissions that they did in the past. By 1986 a third of the presidents of the elite undergraduate clubs at Harvard were Jewish,[12] and Paul Samuelson's nephew, Lawrence Summers, became President of Harvard University in 2001. According to estimates from Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life people of the Jewish faith make up well over a fifth the student body in Americans most prominent institutions of higher learning:
Public Universities
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Private Universities
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Jewish American culture
- See also: Secular Jewish culture
As the last major wave of Jewish immigration to America was the 2 000 000 Eastern European Jews who arrived between 1890 and 1924, Jewish secular culture in the United States has become integrated in almost every important way with American culture more broadly. Many aspects of Jewish American culture have, in turn, become part of the wider culture of the United States.
Food
Several staples of Jewish cuisine have been adopted into mainstream American culture; bagels and lox (cured salmon) are examples, and to a lesser extent, corned beef and pastrami. Initially, they were adopted as part of New York City's culture, and then spread to the rest of America. For example, bagels have been a staple of New Yorkers - both Jewish and non-Jewish - for decades, but did not gain widespread acceptance in other parts of the country until the 1980s. Archaeologists have studied changes in the foodways of immigrant Jews in California.[19]
Language
Although almost all American Jews are today native English-speakers, a variety of other languages are still spoken within some American Jewish communities, communities which are representative of the various Jewish ethnic divisions from around the world that have come together to make up America's Jewish population.
Many of America's Hasidic Jews of Ashkenazi descent are raised speaking Yiddish. The language was once spoken as the primary language by most of the several million European Jews who immigrated to the United States. Yiddish has had an influence on American English, and words borrowed from it include chutzpah ("effrontery", "gall"), nosh ("snack"), schlep ("drag"), and schmuck ("fool", literally "penis").
America's Iranian Jewish community, notably the large community in and around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, California, primarily speak Persian in the home and synagogue. They also support their own Persian language newspapers.
Many recent Jewish immigrants from Russia and Ukraine speak primarily Russian at home, and there are several notable communities where public life and business are carried out mainly in Russian, most famously Brighton Beach in New York City.
American Bukharian Jews speak Bukhori and Russian. They have their own newspapers called the Bukharian Times and mainly live in Queens, New York. Rego Park in the New York City borough of Queens is home to 108th Street, which is called the Bukharian Broadway [16] because of the stores and restaurants around the street that have Bukharian influences.
Classical Hebrew is the language of most Jewish religious literature, such as the Tanakh (Bible) and Siddur (prayerbook). Modern Hebrew is also the primary official language of the modern State of Israel, which further encourages many to learn it as a second language. Some recent Israeli immigrants to America speak Hebrew as their primary language.
Some of the Jews in Miami and Los Angeles, the second largest Jewish community in the United States, immigrated from the countries of Latin America. Many of these Hispanic Jews (many of them of Sephardic origin dating back to the Spanish and Portuguese colonial era, but also many of Ashkenazi descent from recent Central and Eastern European immigration to Latin America) speak Spanish in the home, and some have intermarried with the non-Jewish Hispanic population. There are a large number of synagogues in the Miami area that give services in the Spanish language, as well as a Haitian Creole-language synagogue in Miami's Little Haiti.
Latin-American countries with the largest Jewish populations (either of Sephardic or Ashkenazi descent) are Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay. Other significant communities exist in Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, El Salvador,Colombia, and Peru.
There are a handful of older European immigrant communities that still speak historic Sephardic languages like Ladino.
Jewish American literature
Although American Jews have contributed greatly to American arts overall (see the following section), there remains a
distinctly Jewish American literature. Generally exploring the experience of being a Jew, especially a Jew in America, and the
conflicting pulls of secular society and history, the literary traditions of Philip Roth,
Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok,
Notable American Jews
Popular culture
- See also: Secular Jewish culture
Many individual Jews have made significant contributions to American popular culture. There have been many Jewish American
actors and performers, ranging from early 1900s actors like Carmel Myers, Fanny Brice and the first cowboy film star, Broncho Billy
Anderson, to classic Hollywood film stars like Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and culminating in many
currently known actors, including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Winona Ryder, Alicia Silverstone, Natalie Portman, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson, Zac Efron, Evan Rachel Wood, Adrien Brody, Lisa Kudrow, Ben Stiller, Adam
Sandler, Bahar Soomekh,Sara Paxton,
Jake Gyllenhaal and Maggie Gyllenhaal,
amongst others. Many of the early Hollywood moguls and pioneers were Jewish, such as
Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, Jesse L. Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Adolph
Zukor, and the original Warner Brothers. The characteristically Jewish field of
American comedy includes the Marx Brothers, Milton
Berle, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner. The legacy also includes songwriters as
diverse as Irving Berlin, Burt Bacharach,
Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott,
Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman
(aka "The Sherman Brothers"),
Government and military
Since 1845, a total of 29 Jews have served in the Senate, including present-day senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Norm Coleman (R-MN), Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl (both D-WI), Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (both D-CA), Carl Levin (D-MI), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Joe Lieberman (Independent-CT). In 2007, the number of Jews in the Senate rose to thirteen with the additional of Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). The number of Jews elected to the House rose to an all time high of 30. Seven Jews have been appointed on the United States Supreme Court.
Sixteen American Jews have been awarded the Medal of Honor. Judah P. Benjamin was a member of the Confederate cabinet.
The Manhattan Project, America's World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb, included the contributions of American Jewish physicists, many of whom were refugees from Hitler's Germany or from anti-semitic persecution in other European nations: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard P. Feynman, Wolfgang Pauli, Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Isidor I. Rabi, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Samuel Goudsmit, Jerome Karle, Stanisław Ulam, Robert Serber, Louis Slotin, Walter Zinn, Robert Marshak, Felix Bloch, Emilio G. Segrè, James Franck, Joseph Joffe, Eugene Rabinowitch, Hy Goldsmith, Samuel Cohen, Victor F. Weisskopf, and David Bohm. Hans Bethe and Niels Bohr both had Jewish mothers, which also necessitated their fleeing from Nazi-occupied lands during the war.
Science, business, and academia
Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally been drawn to business and academia (see Secular Jewish culture for some of the causes), and have made major contributions in science, economics, and the humanities. Of American Nobel Prize winners, 37% have been Jewish Americans (19 times the percentage of Jews in the population), as have been 71% of the John Bates Clark Medal winners (thirty-five times the Jewish percentage). While Jewish Americans only constitute roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population, they occupied 7.7% of board seats at U.S. corporations.[20]
Distribution of Jewish-Americans
According to the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States [17], the 100 counties and independent cities in 2000 with the largest Jewish communities, based by percentage of total population, were:
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