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American Jew (also commonly Jewish American) is a general term frequently used to describe an American who maintains an active connection to the Jewish community in the United States or abroad, either through an active practice of Judaism, or through cultural and historical affiliation, or both. This article describes the demographic groups usually designated by the term.
Overview
The United States is competing with Israel for the title of home to the world's largest Jewish population, and has by far the largest community of Ashkenazi Jews *. The umbrella term of American Jews covers a range of Jewish religious communities ranging from the Haredi communities to a large segment of Jews who are entirely secular.
History
Though Jews arrived in the United States as early as the 17th century, Jewish immigration grew in the 19th century. During the early 19th century, many secular Jews from the former Holy Roman Empire arrived in the United States and primarily became merchants and shop-owners. There were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States by 1880, and many of them were middle class and secular. As a result of persecution in parts of Eastern Europe, Jewish American immigration increased dramatically in the 1880s, with most of the new immigrants coming from the poor rural populations of Russia and Eastern Europe. Over two million Jews arrived between the late 19th century and 1924, when immigration restrictions increased. A large number of these immigrants settled in New York City and its immediate environs, establishing what became one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population.
At the beginning of the 20th century, these newly-arrived Jews lived primarily in urban immigrant neighborhoods, and built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and Landsmannschaften (associations of 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. Five hundred thousand 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 twenty percent in 1930 to sixty percent in 1960.
Population
The 2000 American Census recorded 5.2 million Jews in the United States, accounting for less than 2% of the population. Jews in the U.S. settled largely in and near the major cities, 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 (254,000), Chicago (248,000), San Francisco (210,000), Boston (208,000), and Washington DC (165,000). New York is the second largest Jewish population centre in the world after Tel Aviv in Israel. * Miami's Jewish community skews older than most other U.S. Jewish centers as it heavily consists of retirees from the big cities of the northeast (but this has been offset somewhat by more recent immigration to the area by younger Jews from Latin American countries such as Argentina, Cuba, and Brazil). Several other major cities have large Jewish populations per capita, like Cleveland, Baltimore, and St. Louis. Also, some areas of the Sunbelt outside of Florida and California (in which both states have always had significant Jewish communities) that have seen a large general population growth have also seen both the size and proportion of their Jewish population grow significantly. Examples of this are Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte, and especially Atlanta and Las Vegas. In many cities the majority of Jewish families have moved to the suburbs.
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 United States of America that facilitated the extraordinary economic, political, and social success of the American Jewish community have also contributed to assimilation, a controversial and significant issue in the modern American Jewish community. While not all Jews disapprove of intermarriage, many members of the Jewish community have become concerned that the high rate of interfaith marriage will result in the eventual disappearance of the American Jewish community.Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40%-50% in the year 2000.*" target="_blank" > Only about a third 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.*.
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, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore-Washington, Chicago, and Cleveland (which has the highest Jewish-American population per capita for smaller, major U.S. cities). 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. Daniel Pipes noted in an essay in 2005 that 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.*
Religion
Although Judaism is generally considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one, the Jewish religion is the root of Jewish identity and culture.
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 Jewish Americans returning to a more religious Orthodox lifestyle, called Baal teshuva, although it is not clear how widespread or demographically important this movement is.
Education
American Jews are generally more educated than the American public as a whole. 55% of Jewish adults 18 years of age and older have at least a bachelor's degree, and 24% have a graduate degree. The comparable numbers for the general population are about 25% with a bachelor’s degree or higher and 6% with a graduate degree. There is also an active Jewish education system, with a wide network of Jewish day schools, as well as Jewish colleges and universities. Jewish education is also commonly offered at synagogues in the form of supplementary Hebrew schools or Sunday schools.
Jewish American culture
- See also: Secular Jewish culture
As the last major wave of Jewish immigration to America was the two million 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 really didn't spread "west of the Hudson" until the 1980s.Language
Although almost all American Jews are native English speakers, many Hassidic Jews are still raised speaking Yiddish. Once spoken as a primary language by most of the several million European Jews who immigrated to the United States, Yiddish has had an influence on American English. The following are examples of words borrowed from Yiddish: chutzpah ("effrontery", "gall"), nosh ("snack"), schlep ("drag"), and schmuck ("fool", literally "penis").Many American Jews also study Hebrew, the language of most Jewish religious literature, the Tanakh (bible), Siddur (prayerbook), and the modern State of Israel. Some American communities of Iranian Jews, notably the large group in and around Los Angeles, California and Beverly Hills, primarily speak Persian in the home and synagogue and support Persian newspapers.
In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, large numbers of Jews immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. These Jews tend to live in their own communities, particularly in and around Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and especially New York City (most famously in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach). As a group they are far more secular than other American Jews, and speak Russian as their primary language. Both of these are the result of assimilation into Soviet Russian culture during the twentieth century.
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, and Bernard Malamud all fall in this category. Younger authors, like Paul Auster, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer continue this view of Jewish American literature, examining the Holocaust, and the meaning of being an American Jew.
Jewish contributions to the United States
Popular culture
- See also: List of Jewish American writers, List of Jewish American artists, List of Jewish American musicians, and List of Jewish American show business figures
Many individual Jews have made significant and diverse contributions to American popular culture. Probably the most famous examples are the early Hollywood moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, Jesse L. Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, and the original Warner Brothers and the characteristically Jewish humor of the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner, but 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, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Jeff Barry, Lou Reed, and Paul Simon and writers as diverse as J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, Lillian Hellman, Allen Ginsberg (who continued to consider himself a Jew even after he began practicing Buddhism), Isaac Asimov, and Harlan Ellison in addition to the authors listed above. On the countercultural and radical political front, Jewish hippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, with help from Allen Ginsberg, formed the controversial Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and the four main organizers of the 1969 Woodstock Festival concert were all Jewish, as was Max Yasgur, the man on whose farm the legendary concert took place. In addition, master sound mixer and producer Eddie Kramer was Jewish, as is Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, his first wife, Sara and sons Jesse and Jakob.
Government and military
Since 1845, 29 Jews have served in the Senate, including present-day senators 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), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), and seven have served 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 (Hungarian physicist), Albert Einstein,John von Neumann (Hungarian mathematician), Isidor I. Rabi, Edward Teller (Hungarian physicist), Eugene Wigner (Hungarian physicist and mathematician), Otto Frisch, Samuel Goudsmit, Jerome Karle, Stanisław Ulam (Polish mathematician), Robert Serber, Louis Slotin, George Kistiakowsky, Walter Zinn, Robert Marshak, Felix Bloch, Emilio G. Segrè, James Franck, Harold C. Urey, 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 and academia
Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally been drawn to academia (see Secular Jewish culture for some of the causes), and have made major contributions in science and the humanities. Of American Nobel Prize winners, 37% have been Jewish Americans (19 times the percentage Jewish population), as have been 71% of the John Bates Clark Medal winners (35 times the percentage Jewish population).
Distribution of Jewish-Americans
According to the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States *, the 100 counties in 2000 with the largest Jewish communities, based by percentage of total population, were:
Major Jewish-American communities
- California
- Southern California
- Agoura Hills, California
- Bel Air, California
- Beverly Hills, California
- Brentwood, Los Angeles, California
- Burbank, California
- Calabasas, California
- Coachella Valley, California
- Fairfax District, Los Angeles, California
- Glendale, California
- Irvine, California
- Lake Forest, California
- Marin County, California
- Newport Beach, California
- Palm Springs, California
- Pasadena, California
- San Fernando Valley -- western and southern portions
- San Francisco, California
- Santa Monica, California
- Sun City, California
- Thousand Oaks, California
- Ventura County, California
- West Hollywood, California
- Westlake Village, California
- Westside Los Angeles
- Southern California
- New Jersey (See Note at the bottom)
- Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- East Brunswick, New Jersey
- Edison, New Jersey
- Elizabeth, New Jersey
- Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
- Fair Lawn, New Jersey
- Highland Park, New Jersey
- Lakewood, New Jersey
- Livingston, New Jersey
- Manalapan Township, New Jersey
- Marlboro Township, New Jersey
- Millburn, New Jersey
- Morristown, New Jersey
- Newark, New Jersey
- South Orange, New Jersey
- West Orange, New Jersey
- Passaic, New Jersey
- Springfield, New Jersey
- Teaneck, New Jersey
- Tenafly, New Jersey
- Wayne, New Jersey
- Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey
- Englewood, New Jersey
- Paramus, New Jersey
- Fort Lee, New Jersey
- New York (See Note at the bottom)
- Kiryas Joel, New York
- Long Island
- Baldwin, New York
- Bellmore, New York
- Brighton, New York
- Dix Hills, New York
- East Hampton, New York
- East Meadow, New York
- "Five Towns", New York
- Great Neck, New York
- Huntington, New York
- Merrick, New York
- Oceanside, New York
- Old Bethpage, New York
- Plainview, New York
- Roslyn Heights, New York
- Port Washington, New York
- Woodbury, New York
- New York City
- Rockland County, New York
- Westchester County, New York
- Pennsylvania
- Philadelphia
- Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania
- Overbrook, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Upper Dublin Township, Pennsylvania
- Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania
- Narberth, Pennsylvania
- Richboro, Pennsylvania
- Spring House, Pennsylvania
- West Chester, Pennsylvania
- Oxford Circle, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Rhawnhurst, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Pittsburgh
- Philadelphia
Note: Long Island, New Jersey, New York City and Westchester County have large Jewish communities throughout, but the areas mentioned above have the highest concentrations of Jews.
See also
- Jew
- History of the Jews in the United States
- List of Jewish Americans
- Secular Jewish culture
- Model minority - Highly successful minority ethnic groups
External links
- Resources > Jewish communities > America > Northern America The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Feinstein Center. Comprehensive collection of links to Jewish American history, organizations, and issues.
- United Jewish Communities of North America. Also site of population survey statistics.
- Jews in America from the Jewish Virtual Library.
- American Jewish Literature
- Jewish-American History on the Web
- Jewish American Hall of Fame
- List of Famous Jews
- Ben Stein talks about the very large Jewish element in Hollywood
- The Jewish Impact on America
- Jewish Success In The American Media
Further reading
- Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism Yale University Press: New Haven, 2004. ISBN 0-300-10197-X
Ethnic groups in the United States | History of immigration to the United States | Jewish American history | American culture | American people by religion
"American Jews"