Jewish Americans

American Jews or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by culture, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Today the Jewish community in the United States consists primarily of Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from diaspora Jewish populations of Central and Eastern Europe and comprise about 90–95% of the American Jewish population.

During the colonial era, prior to the mass immigration of Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews who arrived via Portugal represented the bulk of America's then-small Jewish population, and while their descendants are a minority today, they, along with an array of other Jewish communities, represent the remainder of American Jews, including other more recent Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Beta Israel-Ethiopian Jews, various other ethnically Jewish communities, as well as a smaller number of converts to Judaism. 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 core American Jewish population is estimated at 7.6 million people, accounting for 2.4% of the total US population. This includes 4.9 million adults who identify their religion as Jewish, 1.2 million Jewish adults who identify with no religion, and 1.6 million Jewish children. It is estimated that up to 15,000,000 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 small in number, with at most 200 to 300 having arrived by 1700. Those early arrivals were mostly Sephardi Jewish immigrants, of Western Sephardic (also known as Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) 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. Despite the fact that some of them were 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.Alexander DeConde,
Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History
'', p. 52 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''.
Jewish Encyclopedia bibliography:
* I. M. Wise, ''Reminiscences'', transl. from the German and ed. by David Philipson, Cincinnati, 1901;
* ''Selected Writings of Isaac M. Wise'', with a biography by David Philipson and Louis Grossmann, ib. 1900;
* ''The American Israelite'', 1854–1900, passim, and the Jubilee number, 30 June 1904. 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 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'' (German and Yiddish for "Countryman Associations") 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 (or half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50) 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.

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