American Jews

American Jews or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by ethnicity, religion, or culture. According to a 2020 poll conducted by Pew Research, approximately two thirds of American Jews identify as Ashkenazi, 3% identify as Sephardic, and 1% identify as Mizrahi. An additional 6% identify as some combination of the three categories, and 25% do not identify as any particular category.
During the colonial era, Sephardic Jews who arrived via Portugal and via Brazil represented the bulk of America's then small Jewish population. While their descendants are a minority nowadays, they represent the remainder of those original American Jews along with an array of other Jewish communities, including more recent Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Beta Israel-Ethiopian Jews, various other Jewish ethnic groups, as well as a smaller number of gerim. The American Jewish community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, encompassing the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance.
Depending on religious definitions and varying population data, the United States has the largest or second largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel. As of 2020, the American Jewish population is estimated at 7.5 million people, accounting for 2.4% of the total US population. This includes 4.2 million adults who identify their religion as Jewish, 1.5 million Jewish adults who identify with no religion, and 1.8 million Jewish children. It is estimated that up to 15 million Americans are part of the "enlarged" American Jewish population, accounting for 4.5% of the total US population, consisting of those who have at least one Jewish grandparent and would be eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.

History

Jews were present in the Thirteen Colonies since the mid-17th century. However, they were few in number, with at most 200 to 300 having arrived by 1700. Those early arrivals were mostly Sephardi Jewish immigrants, of Western Sephardic ancestry, but by 1720, Ashkenazi Jews from diaspora communities in Central and Eastern Europe predominated.
For the first time, the English Plantation Act 1740 permitted Jews to become British citizens and emigrate to the colonies. The first famous Jew in US history was Chaim Salomon, a Polish-born Jew who emigrated to New York and played an important role in the American Revolution. He was a successful financier who supported the patriotic cause and helped raise most of the money needed to finance the American Revolution.
Despite some of them being denied the right to vote or hold office in local jurisdictions, Sephardi Jews became active in community affairs in the 1790s, after they were granted political equality in the five states where they were most numerous. Until about 1830, Charleston, South Carolina had more Jews than anywhere else in North America. Large-scale Jewish immigration commenced in the 19th century, when, by mid-century, many German Jews had arrived, migrating to the United States in large numbers due to antisemitic laws and restrictions in their countries of birth. They primarily became merchants and shop-owners. Gradually early Jewish arrivals from the east coast would travel westward, and in the fall of 1819 the first Jewish religious services west of the Appalachian Range were conducted during the High Holidays in Cincinnati, the oldest Jewish community in the Midwest. Gradually the Cincinnati Jewish community would adopt novel practices under the leadership Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, the father of Reform Judaism in the United States, such as the inclusion of women in minyan. A large community grew in the region with the arrival of German and Lithuanian Jews in the latter half of the 1800s, leading to the establishment of Manischewitz, one of the largest producers of American kosher products and now based in New Jersey, and the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the United States, and second-oldest continuous published in the world, The American Israelite, established in 1854 and still extant in Cincinnati. By 1880 there were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States, many of them being the educated, and largely secular, German Jews, although a minority population of the older Sephardi Jewish families remained influential.
Jewish migration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, as a result of persecution and economic difficulties in parts of Eastern Europe. Most of these new immigrants were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom arrived from poor diaspora communities of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement, located in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. During the same period, great numbers of Ashkenazic Jews also arrived from Galicia, at that time the most impoverished region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a heavy Jewish urban population, driven out mainly by economic reasons. Many Jews also emigrated from Romania. Over 2,000,000 Jews landed between the late 19th century and 1924 when the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration. Most settled in the New York metropolitan area, establishing the world's major concentrations of the Jewish population. In 1915, the circulation of the daily Yiddish newspapers was half a million in New York City alone, and 600,000 nationally. In addition, thousands more subscribed to the numerous weekly papers and the many magazines in Yiddish.
At the beginning of the 20th century, these newly arrived Jews built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and Landsmanshaften for Jews from the same town or village. American Jewish writers of the time urged assimilation and integration into the wider American culture, and Jews quickly became part of American life. Approximately 500,000 American Jews fought in World War II, and after the war younger families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated and demonstrated rising intermarriage. The suburbs facilitated the formation of new centers, 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; the fastest growth came in Reform and, especially, Conservative congregations. More recent waves of Jewish emigration from Russia and other regions have largely joined the mainstream American Jewish community.
Americans of Jewish descent have been successful in many fields and aspects over the years. The Jewish community in America has gone from being part of the lower class of society, with numerous employments barred to them, to being a group with a high concentrations in members of the academia and a per capita income higher than the average in the United States.

< $30,000	$30,000–49,999	$50,000–99,999	$100,000+
16%	15%	24%	44%

Self-identity

Scholars debate whether the historical experience of Jews in the United States has been such a unique experience as to validate American exceptionalism. Korelitz shows how American Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned a racial definition of Jewishness in favor of one that embraced ethnicity. The key to understanding this transition from a racial self-definition to a cultural or ethnic one can be found in the Menorah Journal between 1915 and 1925. During this time contributors to the Menorah promoted a cultural, rather than a racial, religious, or other views of Jewishness as a means to define Jews in a world that threatened to overwhelm and absorb Jewish uniqueness. The journal represented the ideals of the menorah movement established by Horace M. Kallen and others to promote a revival in Jewish cultural identity and combat the idea of race as a means to define or identify peoples.
Siporin states that the family folklore of ethnic Jews provides insights that illuminate collective history and transform it into art, and that these insights tell us how Jews have survived being uprooted and transformed. Many immigrant narratives bear a theme of the arbitrary nature of fate and the reduced state of immigrants in a new culture. By contrast, ethnic family narratives tend to show the ethnicity more in charge of his life, and perhaps in danger of losing his Jewishness altogether. Some stories show how a family member successfully negotiated the conflict between ethnic and American identities. After 1960, memories of the Holocaust, together with the Six-Day War in 1967 had major impacts on fashioning Jewish ethnic identity. Some have argued that the Holocaust highlighted for Jews the importance of their ethnic identity at a time when other minorities were asserting their own. The world's largest Jewish gathering outside of Israel occurred in Edison, central New Jersey, on December 1, 2024.

Politics

Election year	Candidate of the Democratic Party	% of Jewish vote to the Democratic Party	Result of the Democratic Party
1916	Woodrow Wilson	55	Won
1920	James M. Cox	19
1924	John W. Davis	51
1928	Al Smith	72
1932	Franklin D. Roosevelt	82	Won
1936	Franklin D. Roosevelt	85	Won
1940	Franklin D. Roosevelt	90	Won
1944	Franklin D. Roosevelt	90	Won
1948	Harry Truman	75	Won
1952	Adlai Stevenson	64
1956	Adlai Stevenson	60
1960	John F. Kennedy	82	Won
1964	Lyndon B. Johnson	90	Won
1968	Hubert Humphrey	81
1972	George McGovern	65
1976	Jimmy Carter	71	Won
1980	Jimmy Carter	45
1984	Walter Mondale	67
1988	Michael Dukakis	64
1992	Bill Clinton	80	Won
1996	Bill Clinton	78	Won
2000	Al Gore	79
2004	John Kerry	76
2008	Barack Obama	78	Won
2012	Barack Obama	69	Won
2016	Hillary Clinton	71
2020	Joe Biden	69	Won
2024	Kamala Harris	63

Election year	Candidate of the Republican Party	% of Jewish vote to the Republican Party	Result of the Republican Party
1916	Charles E. Hughes	45
1920	Warren G. Harding	43
1924	Calvin Coolidge	27
1928	Herbert Hoover	28
1932	Herbert Hoover	18
1936	Alf Landon	15
1940	Wendell Willkie	10
1944	Thomas Dewey	10
1948	Thomas Dewey	10
1952	Dwight D. Eisenhower	36
1956	Dwight D. Eisenhower	40
1960	Richard Nixon	18
1964	Barry Goldwater	10
1968	Richard Nixon	17
1972	Richard Nixon	35
1976	Gerald Ford	27
1980	Ronald Reagan	39
1984	Ronald Reagan	31
1988	George H. W. Bush	35
1992	George H. W. Bush	11
1996	Bob Dole	16
2000	George W. Bush	19
2004	George W. Bush	24
2008	John McCain	22
2012	Mitt Romney	30
2016	Donald Trump	24
2020	Donald Trump	30
2024	Donald Trump	36

In New York City, while the German-Jewish community was well established 'uptown', the more numerous Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe faced tension 'downtown' with Irish and German Catholic neighbors, especially the Irish Catholics who controlled Democratic Party politics at the time. Jews successfully established themselves in the garment trades and in the needle unions in New York. By the 1930s they were a major political factor in New York, with strong support for the most liberal programs of the New Deal. They continued as a major element of the New Deal Coalition, giving special support to the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-1960s, however, the Black Power movement caused a growing separation between blacks and Jews, though both groups remained solidly in the Democratic camp.
Earlier Jewish immigrants from Germany tended to be politically conservative, though many, including the devoutly Republican Louis Marshall, believed that Jews should not have a political direction at all. Meanwhile, the wave of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in the early 1880s were generally more liberal or left-wing and became the political majority. Many came to America with experience in the socialist, anarchist and communist movements as well as the Labor Bund, emanating from Eastern Europe. Many Jews rose to leadership positions in the early 20th century American labor movement and helped to found unions that played a major role in left-wing politics and, after 1936, in Democratic Party politics.
American Jews generally leaned towards the Republican party in the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. This was compounded by the strong Evangelical imagery used by William Jennings Bryan and other Populist Democrats, which caused fears of Antisemitism among American Jews. Additionally Republican candidates such as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were extremely popular with Jewish voters. However, the majority of Jews have generally voted Democratic since at least 1916, when they voted 55% for Woodrow Wilson, and especially since 1928, when 72% supported the unsuccessful candidacy of Al Smith.
With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Jews voted more solidly Democratic. They voted 90% for Roosevelt in the elections of 1940, and 1944, representing the highest of support, equaled only once since. In the election of 1948, Jewish support for Democrat Harry S. Truman dropped to 75%, with 15% supporting the new Progressive Party. As a result of lobbying, and hoping to better compete for the Jewish vote, both major party platforms had included a pro-Zionist plank since 1944, and supported the creation of a Jewish state; it had little apparent effect however, with 90% still voting other-than-Republican. In every election since, except for 1980, no Democratic presidential candidate has won with less than 67% of the Jewish vote.
During the 1952 and 1956 elections, Jewish voters cast 60% or more of their votes for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, while General Eisenhower garnered 40% of the Jewish vote for his reelection, the best showing to date for the Republicans since Warren G. Harding's 43% in 1920. In 1960, 83% voted for Democrat John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon, and in 1964, 90% of American Jews voted for Lyndon Johnson, over his Republican opponent, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater. Hubert Humphrey garnered 81% of the Jewish vote in the 1968 elections in his losing bid for president against Richard Nixon.
During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, Jewish voters were apprehensive about George McGovern and only favored the Democrat by 65%, while Nixon more than doubled Republican Jewish support to 35%. In the election of 1976, Jewish voters supported Democrat Jimmy Carter by 71% over incumbent president Gerald Ford's 27%, but during the Carter re-election campaign of 1980, Jewish voters greatly abandoned the Democrat, with only 45% support, while Republican winner Ronald Reagan garnered 39%, and 14% went to independent John Anderson.
During the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, the Republican retained 31% of the Jewish vote, while 67% voted for Democrat Walter Mondale. The 1988 election saw Jewish voters favor Democrat Michael Dukakis by 64%, while George H. W. Bush polled a respectable 35%, but during Bush's re-election attempt in 1992, his Jewish support dropped to just 11%, with 80% voting for Bill Clinton and 9% going to independent Ross Perot. Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 maintained high Jewish support at 78%, with 16% supporting Bob Dole and 3% for Perot.
In the 2000 presidential election, Joe Lieberman became the first American Jew to run for national office on a major-party ticket when he was chosen as Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's vice-presidential nominee. The elections of 2000 and 2004 saw continued Jewish support for Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, a Catholic, remain in the high- to mid-70% range, while Republican George W. Bush's re-election in 2004 saw Jewish support rise from 19% to 24%.
In the 2008 presidential election, 78% of Jews voted for Barack Obama, who became the first African American to be elected president. Additionally, 83% of white Jews voted for Obama compared to just 34% of white Protestants and 47% of white Catholics, though 67% of those identifying with another religion and 71% identifying with no religion also voted Obama.
In the February 2016 New Hampshire Democratic Primary, Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish candidate to win a state's presidential primary election.
For congressional and senate races, since 1968, American Jews have voted about 70–80% for Democrats; this support increased to 87% for Democratic House candidates during the 2006 elections.
The first American Jew to serve in the Senate was David Levy Yulee, who was Florida's first Senator, serving 1845–1851 and again 1855–1861.
There were 19 Jews among the 435 US Representatives at the start of the 112th Congress; 26 Democrats and 1 Republican. While many of these Members represented coastal cities and suburbs with significant Jewish populations, others did not. The total number of Jews serving in the House of Representatives declined from 31 in the 111th Congress. John Adler of New Jersey, Steve Kagan of Wisconsin, Alan Grayson of Florida, and Ron Klein of Florida all lost their re-election bids, Rahm Emanuel resigned to become the President's Chief of Staff; and Paul Hodes of New Hampshire did not run for re-election but instead sought his state's open Senate seat. David Cicilline of Rhode Island was the only Jewish American who was newly elected to the 112th Congress; he had been the Mayor of Providence. The number declined when Jane Harman, Anthony Weiner, and Gabby Giffords resigned during the 112th Congress.
, there were five openly gay men serving in Congress, and two are Jewish: Jared Polis of Colorado and David Cicilline of Rhode Island.
In November 2008, Cantor was elected as the House Minority Whip, the first Jewish Republican to be selected for the position. In 2011, he became the first Jewish House Majority Leader. He served as Majority Leader until 2014, when he resigned shortly after his loss in the Republican primary election for his House seat.
In 2013, Pew found that 70% of American Jews identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, with just 22% identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party.
The 114th Congress included 10 Jews among 100 U.S. Senators: nine Democrats, and Bernie Sanders, who became a Democrat to run for President but returned to the Senate as an Independent.
In the 118th Congress, there are 28 Jewish US Representatives. 25 are Democrats and the other 3 are Republicans. All 10 Jewish Senators are Democrats.
Additionally, six members of President Joe Biden's cabinet were Jewish.