judaism research article

Articles on Judaism

Displaying 1 - 20 of 141 articles.

Passover: The festival of freedom and the ambivalence of exile

Nancy E. Berg , Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

From sumptuous engravings to stick-figure sketches, Passover Haggadahs − and their art − have been evolving for centuries

Rebecca J.W. Jefferson , University of Florida

The roots of the Easter story: Where did Christian beliefs about Jesus’ resurrection come from?

Aaron Gale , West Virginia University

Purim’s original queen: How studying the Book of Esther as fan fiction can teach us about the roots of an unruly Jewish festival

Esther Brownsmith , University of Dayton

Restaurants outside of Palestine and Israel are being attacked in protest of the war

Rebecca Haboucha , SOAS, University of London

Religious diversity is exploding – here’s what a faith-positive Britain might actually look like

Christopher Wadibia , University of Oxford

As a rabbi, philosopher and physician, Maimonides wrestled with religion and reason – the book he wrote to reconcile them, ‘Guide to the Perplexed,’ has sparked debate ever since

Randy L. Friedman , Binghamton University, State University of New York

Doxing or in the public interest? Free speech, ‘cancelling’ and the ethics of the Jewish creatives’ WhatsApp group leak

Hugh Breakey , Griffith University

Why having human remains land on the Moon poses difficult questions for members of several religions

Joanne M. Pierce , College of the Holy Cross and Mathew Schmalz , College of the Holy Cross

When is criticism of Israel antisemitic? A scholar of modern Jewish history explains

Joshua Shanes , College of Charleston

More than religion: why some of Israel’s staunchest support comes from the Pacific Islands

Fraser Macdonald , University of Waikato

Seeing the human in every patient − from biblical texts to 21st century relational medicine

Jonathan Weinkle , University of Pittsburgh

‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ speaks to the meaningful impact of religious rituals for Jewish girls

Celia E. Rothenberg , McMaster University

Israel’s mosaic of Jewish ethnic groups is key to understanding the country

David L. Graizbord , University of Arizona

Universalism or tribalism? Michael Gawenda’s memoir considers what it means to be a Jew in contemporary Australia

Dennis Altman , La Trobe University

A memorial in Yiddish, Italian and English tells the stories of Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims − testament not only to tragedy but to immigrant women’s fight to remake labor laws

Karla Goldman , University of Michigan

#UsToo: How antisemitism and Islamophobia make reporting sexual misconduct and abuse of power harder for Jewish and Muslim women

Keren McGinity , Brandeis University

On Sukkot, the Jewish ‘Festival of Booths,’ each sukkah is as unique as the person who builds it

Samira Mehta , University of Colorado Boulder

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are times for soul-searching , but not on your own – community has always been at the heart of the Jewish High Holidays

Nonbinary genders beyond ‘male’ and ‘female’ would have been no surprise to ancient rabbis, who acknowledged tumtums, androgynos and aylonot

Sarah Imhoff , Indiana University

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Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

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Senior Lecturer in Population, Medical and Evolutionary Genomics, Lund University

Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University

Kraft-Hiatt Professor in Judaic Studies, College of the Holy Cross

Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University

Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University

Faculty, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Gratz College

Lecturer in Religious Studies, Brandeis University

Professor of Jewish Studies, Interim Academic Dean and Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Chicago Theological Seminary

Visiting Research Fellow University of Chester, University of Chester

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President and Professor of American Jewish History, Gratz College

Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Israel Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

The resilience of jewish communities living in the diaspora: a scoping review.

• 1 Department Humanism and Social Resilience, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, Netherlands
• 2 ARQ National Psychotrauma Center, Diemen, Netherlands
• 3 Scientific Information Service, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 4 Department of Health Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden
• 5 Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, National Research Center in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NAFKAM), Arctic University of Norway (UiT), Tromsø, Norway

Introduction: Throughout history, Jewish communities have been exposed to collectively experienced traumatic events. Little is known about the role that the community plays in the impact of these traumatic events on Jewish diaspora people. This scoping review aims to map the concepts of the resilience of Jewish communities in the diaspora and to identify factors that influence this resilience.

Methods: We followed the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology. Database searches yielded 2,564 articles. Sixteen met all inclusion criteria. The analysis was guided by eight review questions.

Results: Community resilience of the Jewish diaspora was often described in terms of coping with disaster and struggling with acculturation. A clear definition of community resilience of the Jewish diaspora was lacking. Social and religious factors, strong organizations, education, and communication increased community resilience. Barriers to the resilience of Jewish communities in the diaspora included the interaction with the hosting country and other communities, characteristics of the community itself, and psychological and cultural issues.

Discussion: Key gaps in the literature included the absence of quantitative measures of community resilience and the lack of descriptions of how community resilience affects individuals’ health-related quality of life. Future studies on the interaction between community resilience and health-related individual resilience are warranted.

1. Introduction

“A sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its ways of life, its businesses, its economy, physical structures, technologies, and social institutions, do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life” ( Capra and Luisi, 2014 ).

Jewish communities worldwide have a long and continuous history of traumatic events. The adaptation of Jewish individuals to these traumatic events, especially the Holocaust, has been well documented ( Stein, 2009 ; Keysar, 2014 ; Lurie, 2017 ; Diamond et al., 2020 ; Zimmermann and Forstmeier, 2020 ). However, research institutions such as the Institute for Jewish Policy Research have mostly reported on community resilience in Israel ( Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2015 ; Dellapergola and Staetsky, 2020 ). This paper is based on the assumption that it is also important to understand how the Jewish communities affect the resilience, life, and health of Jewish people living in the diaspora outside Israel.

In this paper we define Jewish diaspora communities as the core and enlarged Jewish population, as described by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research ( Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2015 ). According to recent numbers ( The Jewish Agency for Israel, 2022 ) 8.25 million Jews live outside Israel (55% of the 15.3 million Jews worldwide). Most of them live in the United States (6 million). Other countries hosting Jewish diaspora communities are France (446.000), Canada (393.500), Great Britain (292.000), Argentina (175.000), Russia (150.000), Germany (118.000), Australia (118.000) or smaller communities, such as the Netherlands (30.000–50.000) ( Van Solinge and de Vries, 2001 ; Van Solinge et al., 2010 ). Around 38 countries worldwide have a Jewish population of 500 people or fewer.

The concept of resilience has been applied in many scientific disciplines and is one of the core concepts in contemporary social studies ( Van der Schoor et al., 2021 ; Derakhshan et al., 2022 ). Resilience is often studied from an individual perspective, even though many of these studies have stressed the relevance of the social dimension to maintain and strengthen people’s resilience: the role of the family, the neighborhood, and the community ( Bronfenbrenner et al., 1986 ; van der Kolk, 2014 ).

In the research literature, three perspectives on resilience can be distinguished ( Pfefferbaum et al., 2015 ; Verbena et al., 2021 ). First, the resource-based perspective focuses on certain core attributes and resources that resilient entities possess ( Tengblad and Oudhuis, 2018 ). Second, the outcome-based perspective focuses on positive outcomes amidst adversity ( Bonanno, 2004 ; Bonanno et al., 2015 ). Last, the process-based perspective explores the working mechanisms involved in navigating using resources in the context of adversity to achieve a positive outcome ( Norris et al., 2008 ). This ‘fluctuating’ process is described as a phenomenon occurring through interactions within and between multiple levels, i.e., individual, community, and society ( Infurna and Luthar, 2018 ; Wiles et al., 2019 ).

In recent decades, there is growing interest in the meaning of the community for individual resilience ( Hobfoll et al., 2007 ; van der Kolk, 2014 ) and the need for a better understanding of the concept of community resilience. It has been reported that contextual factors, such as the family or the community in which people live, are likely to exert more influence on individual resilience outcomes than individual traits ( Landau, 2007 ; Ungar, 2011 ; Fischer and McKee, 2017 ). Several authors have highlighted the relevance to gain a better understanding of the dynamics between community resilience and individual resilience ( Norris et al., 2008 ). Others study the impact of traumatic events on the resilience and health of individuals ( Duckers et al., 2017 ; South et al., 2018 ) as there is growing evidence of a relationship between somatic and psychological conditions, social context, well-being, and functioning ( Scott et al., 2013 ; Huber, 2014 ).

A systematic review of community resilience concluded that community resilience remains an amorphous concept that is understood and applied differently by different research groups ( Patel et al., 2017 ). Depending on the perspective of the author, community resilience is, respectively, seen as a continuous adaption process to adversity, the absence of negative effects, the presence of various positive factors, or a combination of all three. Although the definitions differ, Patel et al. (2017) found nine main categories which were subdivided into nineteen sub-elements of community resilience that were common among the definitions in the reviewed scientific articles on disasters. The main elements they mentioned were local knowledge, community networks and relationships, communication, health, governance and leadership, resources, economic investment, preparedness, and mental outlook. Patel et al. (2017) suggest for future research to focus on these main elements as they can be measured and improved, which may contribute to understanding as well as policy making.

While the review of Patel et al. concentrated on the literature on disasters, Flora et al. (2016) focused their research on the dynamic process of communities constantly changing and responding to adversities. Based on that, they developed a theoretical model, the Community Capital Framework, that consists of seven resource categories or ‘capitals’: three material capitals – natural, built, and financial – and four immaterial capitals – human, social, cultural, and political. Van der Schoor (2020) 1 assumes these resources can function in several ways, (1) as a buffer against the impact of adversity, (2) as compensation for the negative effects of the adversity and (3) as a catalyst of community members’ ability to change or transform the structural conditions of adversity. Comparable models, in which several capitals are defined can be found in studies aiming to measure community resilience ( Mayunga, 2009 ; Derakhshan et al., 2022 ).

Though some research has been conducted on the resilience of diaspora communities ( Kidron, 2012 ; Smid et al., 2018 ; Alefaio-Tugia et al., 2019 ), there is currently no published systematic overview on the factors that hinder or strengthen the resilience of communities living in the diaspora. Therefore, we aimed to conduct a systematic review of the existing literature on the resilience of Jewish communities living in the diaspora to identify factors that influence community resilience. A scoping review was considered the most suitable type of systematic review method for this purpose, as it is a form of knowledge synthesis that addresses exploratory research questions aimed at mapping key concepts, identifying key characteristics related to these concepts, examining how research is conducted on that topic, and identifying knowledge gaps ( Colquhoun et al., 2014 ). The current scoping review intends to inform researchers on how to design future studies on drivers and barriers of diasporic community resilience and inform policymakers, leaders, and members of communities on methods to strengthen the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities outside Israel. A preliminary search for existing reviews on this topic was conducted in PROSPERO, MEDLINE, databases of the Joanna Briggs Institute, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. No protocols for a similar scoping review were identified.

The predefined protocol for this scoping review was published in the public domain ( Meijer et al., 2022 ). The protocol followed the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Reviewers’ Manual for scoping reviews ( Aromataris et al., 2020 ; Jong et al., 2021 ) and guidance for conducting systematic scoping reviews as published by Peters et al. (2020) . Results are reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist ( Tricco et al., 2018 ; Supplementary File 1 ). Since a scoping review analyzes data already published in the literature, no ethical review was needed.

2.1. Eligibility criteria

To identify and define the main concepts in the review questions the Participants/Concept/Context (PCC) framework was used ( Peters et al., 2021 ). The PCC framework is recommended by JBI as a guide to formulate the main review questions of the scoping review.

2.2. Participants

We included studies about Jewish communities worldwide that describe Jewish persons aged 18 years and older. We defined Jewish communities as the core and enlarged Jewish population, as described by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research ( Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2015 ). The core Jewish population includes people who self-identify as Jewish in social surveys and do not have another monotheistic religion. It also includes people who may not recognize themselves as Jewish but have Jewish parents and have not adopted a different religious identity. It further consists of all converts to Judaism by any procedure and other people who declare themselves Jewish, even without having undergone conversion. The enlarged Jewish population includes the sum of (a) the core Jewish population; (b) all other people of Jewish parentage who, by core Jewish population criteria, are not currently Jewish (e.g., they have adopted another religion or otherwise opted out); and (c) all respective non-Jewish household members (spouses, children, etc.).

2.3. Concept

Resilience is defined as the ability to withstand adversity and the capacity to bounce back from potentially traumatic events ( Vanhamel et al., 2021 ). Articles on closely related concepts, such as coping, recovery, dealing with adversity, adaptation, and acculturation were included in the review. Articles included were not limited to resilience in relation to health or healthcare. Articles describing individual resilience only, without mentioning a link to the community or contextual variables, were excluded. Articles that describe the resilience of Jewish communities in relation to historical events before the Second World War were also excluded.

2.4. Context

Diasporic communities are defined as communities of people who live outside their shared country of origin or ancestry but maintain passive or active connections with it ( Nazeer, 2015 ). A diaspora includes both emigrants and their descendants. In this scoping review, Israel is not considered a diaspora; therefore, studies on Jewish communities in Israel were excluded.

2.5. Objectives

The review addressed the following questions:

Review question 1. What concepts of resilience are being described for Jewish communities living in the diaspora? How is resilience defined, and which underlying theoretical models have been used to understand how the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities functions?

Review question 2. Which trauma or underlying causes of stress (e.g., Holocaust, genocides, or racism) are described in relation to the resilience of Jewish communities living in the diaspora?

Review question 3. Which facilitating factors for the resilience of Jewish communities in the diaspora are described?

Review question 4. Which barriers to the resilience of Jewish communities in the diaspora are described?

Review question 5. What methods are used in studies to measure the resilience of communities?

Review question 6. What is described about the relationship between the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities and the health-related quality of life of individuals belonging to the community?

Review question 7. What are the key gaps in the literature on the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities?

Review question 8. Are there any ethical issues or challenges identified that relate to the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities?

2.6. Types of sources

The selected studies describe peer-reviewed scientific research publications on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including randomized controlled trials, controlled (non-randomized) clinical trials, controlled before-after studies, prospective and retrospective comparative clinical studies, non-controlled prospective and retrospective observational studies, cohort studies with before-after design, case series, case reports, qualitative studies, PhD theses, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, meta-syntheses, narrative reviews, mixed-methods reviews, qualitative reviews, and rapid reviews. Studies published as master’s or bachelor’s theses, information from books or book chapters, analyses/reviews of books, and analyses/reviews of movies were excluded because we considered them to be outside the scope of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Conference reports/proceedings were also excluded because they may not contain adequate detailed information for our scoping review and/or describe preliminary data.

2.7. Search strategy and study selection

Two information specialists developed the search strategy ( Supplementary File 2 ) aiming to locate studies already published in the literature. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) (or comparable controlled vocabularies) and free text terms (terms in the title and/or abstract of the articles) were used in databases with controlled vocabulary. The search strategy was adapted broadly in databases without controlled vocabularies to obtain the maximum search yield. In addition to the database searches, the reference lists of articles selected for full-text review were screened for additional studies. In the searches, no restrictions were applied to the study design, date, or language. However, only articles published in English, Danish, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, and Swedish were included. Articles published after World War II to the present were included. Excluded were articles describing the resilience of Jewish communities in relation to earlier historical events.

The same information specialists performed searches from April 25 to 28, 2021 in the following databases: PsycInfo, Ovid Medline ALL, Embase, PTSDpubs, SSRN, Sociological Abstracts, JPR, Berman, Rambi, NARCIS, Google Scholar, and Web of Science. Additionally, the gray literature was searched to identify possible relevant PhD theses for inclusion in this scoping review ( Paez, 2017 ). The source of the gray literature search was OpenGrey.eu.

Following the literature search, all identified records and citation abstracts were collated and uploaded into the review web tool Rayyan to facilitate the study selection and data extraction process. Duplicates were removed. Each step in the scoping review process (screening, study inclusion, data extraction etc) was performed independently by at least two authors. The search results and decisions regarding inclusion/exclusion were recorded in Rayyan and are reported in the Prisma-ScR flow diagram ( Tricco et al., 2018 ).

2.8. Data extraction

A pilot data extraction of two articles ( Azoulay and Sanchez, 2000 ; Chalew, 2007 ) was carried out in Rayyan. After piloting, the authors extracted and assessed the data in relation to the scoping review questions. Accordingly, two items were added to the data extraction form ( Supplementary File 3 ).

2.9. Collating and summarizing the results

All authors were involved in the process of data synthesis and interpretation. A summary table with detailed information about every included article was provided (see Table 1 ).

Table 1 . Characteristics of included studies.

2.10. Patient and public involvement

The first author was employed by the Dutch Jewish Welfare Organization from 2017 to 2021. Furthermore, the review questions of this scoping review were actively discussed and refined with input from three experts within the international Jewish community.

2.11. Deviations from the protocol

In the predefined protocol, it was described that the PAGER methodological framework is used to assist data analyses ( Meijer et al., 2022 ). However, due to the large variety in designs, methodologies, populations, and outcomes of the sixteen studies included, it was not feasible to apply this framework. Instead, an inductive analysis in Atlas-ti was conducted to retrieve a thematic categorization of the mentioned positive factors and barriers ( Kiger and Varpio, 2020 ). Next, all positive factors and barriers were deductively analyzed using the elements of Patel et al. (2017) and the seven capitals of the Community Capitals Framework of Flora et al. (2016) in order to gain further insight into the characteristics of the community resilience of the Jewish diaspora.

2.12. Article identification and selection process

The database and gray literature search yielded 2,564 records after deduplication ( Figure 1 ).

Figure 1 . Prisma 2020 flow diagram scoping review.

Screening of titles and abstracts resulted in a first selection, after which 2,471 records were excluded because they did not meet the inclusion criteria. Of the resulting 93 records, seven records were not retrieved, of which six were dissertations. A total of 86 records were therefore assessed for eligibility. After the full-text screening, sixteen articles met the eligibility criteria for inclusion in the scoping review.

3.1. Characteristics of included articles

A summary of the included articles and their study designs ( n  = 16) can be found in Table 1 . Included articles were methodologically diverse, mostly based on case studies ( n  = 8). Other types of studies included were qualitative studies ( n  = 5); cross-sectional studies ( n  = 2), and text and opinion ( n  = 1). Nine of the 16 articles were based on empirical research. The research was conducted by a broad diversity of disciplinary fields including amongst others psychology, economics and sociology (see Table 1 ). The applied empirical methods were interviews ( n  = 6), surveys ( n  = 2) and one focus group. Several types of analysis were conducted: descriptive ( n  = 8), thematic ( n  = 3) documentation ( n  = 2), ethnographic ( n  = 2) and one content analysis. Two records were dissertations. Nine articles originated from the USA, and others were from Europe ( n  = 3) or reported on diasporic populations in more than one country ( n  = 4). The articles were either published from 2000 to 2010 ( n  = 7) or after 2010 ( n  = 9). In only five out of sixteen studies, the migration background of the Jewish diasporic community was specified.

3.2. Concepts of community resilience, definitions, and underlying theoretical models (review question 1)

The concepts of community resilience in the included articles are listed in Table 2 . The main finding is that the reviewed articles use different definitions of resilience and various underlying theoretical models or frameworks for Jewish diaspora community resilience. In only one of the articles ( Pollock, 2007 ) community resilience was defined as such. Most studies characterized the diasporic Jewish communities by means of a specific geographic location, for example the Antwerp community ( n  = 9). Other studies characterized the Jewish community based on their migration background, for example Russian Jewish migrants ( n  = 5). In two studies, the Jewish community was characterized by religious affiliation, in both cases as Orthodox communities. Furthermore, resilience was used as a concept close to other related concepts, such as coping, mitigation, survival, or recovery.

Table 2 . Concepts of community resilience.

The reviewed literature was categorized according to the three previously reported perspectives on resilience, resource-based ( Tengblad and Oudhuis, 2018 ), outcome-based and process-based ( Infurna and Luthar, 2018 ; Wiles et al., 2019 ). In most of the articles, resilience was defined from a process-based perspective ( n  = 9), in six articles the resource-based perspective was leading, and the outcome-based perspective was identified in one article ( Chalew, 2007 ). Chalew, describing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, also applies a process-based perspective as he distinguished three phases after the disaster: (1) saving lives (pikuach nefesh), (2) return to home and initial recovery, and (3) renaissance beyond recovery to transformation. Three articles ( Glöckner, 2010 ; Frogel, 2015 ) combined a resource-based perspective with a process-based perspective. Even though these authors defined resilience as resource-based, all three articles describe processes of communities dealing with adversities.

3.3. Traumatic events or causes of stress described (review question 2)

The answer to review question 2 is listed in Table 1 . The forms of adversity that were most studied were natural disasters, such as a flood ( n  = 3) and the COVID-19 pandemic ( n  = 3). Other adversities in the studies were (un)voluntary migration ( n  = 5) and five articles did not specify the adversity. Furthermore, eight of the sixteen articles ( Carp, 2007 ; Heitlinger, 2009 ; Glöckner, 2010 ; Gidley and Kahn-Harris, 2012 ; Frogel, 2015 ; Vollhardt and Nair, 2018 ; Pirutinsky et al., 2020 ; Vanhamel et al., 2021 ) mentioned antisemitism as one of the adversities influencing the quality of life of the members of diasporic Jewish communities.

3.4. Factors facilitating community resilience (review question 3)

The inductive qualitative analysis identified that social and religious factors, strong organizations, and the role of education and communication were facilitating factors for community resilience. All articles describe the importance of good social networks within the community. Next, several articles mention the role of religion as a social factor to strengthen community resilience, and in the sense of a spiritual source of individual resilience. A good education was seen as a facilitator on an individual level, but Jewish educational institutions can also strengthen the community. Communication is important in dealing with adversity. Both articles about COVID-19 stress the role of the community in communication about the developments around the pandemic. This included digital and face-to-face communication, both within the community and from government institutions with community leaders ( Aronson et al., 2020 ; Vanhamel et al., 2021 ). Elo and Vemuri (2016) , Frogel (2015) , and Pollock (2007) mentioned specific cultural narratives of resilience, grounded in the Jewish value system, norms, and identity, suggesting that these contribute to the willingness of Jews to invest in their community and the survival of Jewish diaspora communities. An active role in the community is rewarded by bringing societal status, respect, and satisfaction from the community to the individual ( Elo and Jokela, 2014 ).

3.5. Barriers to community resilience (review question 4)

The qualitative analysis identified the following barriers to community resilience: The interaction with the hosting country and other communities, characteristics of the community itself, and psychological and cultural issues. Examples of the first group of barriers are legislation of the hosting country, antisemitism, and connection with Israel. An example of a characteristic of the community itself is the size of the community. Being a small community was considered by two authors as a disadvantage ( Frogel, 2015 ; Elo and Vemuri, 2016 ). Examples of psychological issues were the impact of the Holocaust and a loss of identity. Cultural issues were different values between generations about family values or gender issues. Several authors also mentioned a language barrier that made it difficult to connect with sources outside the community or communicate between generations.

3.6. Comparing categorizations of community resilience

As a next step to gain further insight into the specific characteristics of the community resilience of the Jewish diaspora, all facilitators and barriers described in the included articles were deductively analyzed according to the elements of Patel et al. (2017) . All articles included in this review described factors that fall in at least one of the nine main elements: local knowledge, community networks and relationships, communication, health, governance and leadership, resources, economic investment, preparedness, and mental outlook ( Table 3 ). Furthermore, all main elements of Patel et al. were attributed more than once. The element ‘health’ was only found concerning mental health. The majority of studies on the resilience of the Jewish diaspora community described facilitators and barriers in the ‘economic investment,’ ‘social networks and relationships’ element.

Table 3 . Factors for community resilience, categorized by the main elements of Patel et al.

A second framework was used for the further analysis of the community resilience characteristics of the Jewish diaspora, the seven categories of the Community Capital Framework of Flora et al. (2016) ( Table 4 ). All retrieved facilitators and barriers in the sixteen included articles were analyzed using Atlas-ti. A total of 249 quotations were created, and all quotations were coded with one or more of the seven capitals of Flora and Flora. An eighth code was added by the researcher, called ‘Other.’ In all articles, social capital was nominated more than once, human capital was nominated in 13 out of 16 articles, cultural capital in 9 articles, and political and financial capital were both mentioned in 7 articles. Built capital was nominated in two articles and nature in one. In 5 articles characteristics were mentioned that were categorized as ‘other.’ The division of the total quotations is shown in Table 5 .

Table 4 . Factors for community resilience, categorized by the Community Capital Framework.

Table 5 . The factors, divided over the seven community capitals of Flora and Flora.

As shown in Table 5 , the most frequently mentioned positive factor in the reviewed articles was related to social capital. Many social factors were mentioned by more than one author, such as the role of the family, marriage, friendship and the community, the role of other Jewish communities, the hosting country, the country they left, or Israel. Factors related to human capital were also mentioned often, such as language skills or psychological issues. The importance of the ‘sense of belonging’ was mentioned several times. Cultural and political factors came in third and fourth place. Financial factors were mentioned both on an individual level – the risk that people’s incomes drop after adversity – and on a community level – thus the need for funding after a disaster. Factors relating to the built capital were only mentioned four times, always related to a disaster, and natural capital was mentioned only once, indirectly related to people and their interests during COVID-19. The code ‘other’ was applied for two types of factors: several quotations regarding the availability of technology and the internet for information and social connection, and one for the factor ‘time’ ( Elo and Vemuri, 2016 ). A few authors claim there is a direct relationship between one of the factors and people’s involvement in a resilient community. Glöckner (2010) cites Cohen stating that ‘increasing economic security in private life normally correlates with a growing commitment in the local Jewish community.’

It was observed that the articles on natural disasters refer more often to the material categories, except for one article by Storr that deals specifically with social capital ( Storr et al., 2016 ). Articles dealing with more continuous adversities tend to focus on the immaterial categories. Some authors ( Pollock, 2007 ; Frogel, 2015 ; Elo and Vemuri, 2016 ) suggest that Jewish diaspora communities tend to be more resilient due to specific factors, such as Jewish values or being part of a religious community and are thus more capable to deal with adversities.

Previously, it has been suggested that culture and changing environments due to migration and living in the diaspora may significantly impact resilience ( Ungar, 2008 ). Two studies that have reported on the resilience of Jewish communities in the USA involve the way they respond to disasters, specifically, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy ( Chalew, 2007 ; Storr et al., 2017 ). Storr et al. (2017) found that privately organized social service providers within the community that joined to coordinate their actions were a key factor in the recovery of the Jewish community in New York after Hurricane Sandy. Chalew (2007) described the rise of a cohesive, committed, and revitalized Jewish community two years after Hurricane Katrina. The key factors for this transformation were found to be the financial generosity of the American Jewish community as a whole and the community leaders who acted to build a new future for the community after the disaster. A recently published study that reported on the importance of the community for the resilience of its members investigated the response of the Antwerp Jewish communities to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Vanhamel et al., 2021 ). In this study, the importance of engaging communities and religious leaders in risk communication and local decision-making was significant in dealing with pandemic control measures and the impact of COVID-19.

3.7. Methods to measure community resilience (review question 5)

The resilience of the Jewish diasporic communities was mainly investigated and narratively described by qualitative methods: (semi-structured) interviews, focus groups, case studies, (field) observations, or an analysis of data from historical, ethnographic, and strategic documents. None of the articles included quantitatively measured community resilience. One article by Aronson et al. (2020) surveyed aspects of individual resilience and indicated the level of involvement in a Jewish community.

3.8. The relationship between community resilience and the health-related quality of life of individuals (review question 6)

Flora et al. (2016) expect that the capitals support sustainability, consisting of a healthy ecosystem, social inclusion, and economic security, which in turn form the quality of life ( Vaneeckhaute et al., 2017 ). None of the articles referred explicitly to the concept of quality of life, in relationship with the resilience of the community, nor used measuring methods and outcomes regarding the quality of life of members of the community.

3.9. Key gaps in the literature on community resilience (review question 7)

The findings of this scoping review reveal several key gaps in the literature on the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities. No univocal definition was found, nor methods to measure community resilience, nor was there elaboration on what community resilience meant for the quality of life of individuals.

Only a few articles were based on theoretical modeling or a framework, and just one author ( Pollock, 2007 ) refers to a theoretical model of community resilience developed by Ganor and Ben-Lavy (2003) . Even though nine articles were based on empirical research methods, only one study applied triangulation ( Vanhamel et al., 2021 ), no mixed-methods research was conducted, and, in most studies, the number of participants was small. The majority of studies focused on one type of adversity, a disaster or COVID-19, whereby a more overall perspective of resilience was lacking.

3.10. Ethical issues or challenges studying community resilience (review question 8)

Two authors questioned their role as researchers, one because the researcher was not part of the studied community ( Vanhamel et al., 2021 ), or – on the contrary – because the researcher was part of the studied community ( Frogel, 2015 ). Vanhamel et al. (2021) mentioned that due to his position as a researcher from outside the community he was not able to explore in more depth some social and cultural issues within the Jewish community toward the Belgian government and community. Frogel (2015) wonders if it might have influenced the interviews but indicates mostly positive aspects of her being part of the community. Vollhardt and Nair (2018) report the possibility of socially desirable answers due to group dynamics within the focus groups. They also describe the way they prepared and debriefed the respondents, given the sensitive nature of the topic.

As Jewish identity is not synonymous with the Jewish religion, there are many forms of Jewish identity. The issue of different and variable self-identifications was found in the study on the Afghan Jewish community ( Elo and Vemuri, 2016 ) and the article of Azoulay ( Azoulay and Sanchez, 2000 ). The study of Gidley and Kahn-Harris (2012) also mentions that the Anglo-Jewish community is an entity in motion. Instead, they use the terms “messy, contingent, fluid, evolving and contested” (p. 183, Gidley and Kahn-Harris, 2012 ) to describe the Jewish diaspora community. Gidley and Kahn-Harris point out another ethical challenge that relates to the neutrality of the researcher. According to them, Jewish leadership has used the existence of antisemitism to regain leadership. The wording they use by describing this reveals a judgment on the behavior of Jewish leadership doing so.

4. Discussion

To the best of our knowledge, this scoping review is the first comprehensive systematic review focusing on community resilience in the Jewish diaspora community. This review found sixteen studies targeting the concepts of the resilience of the Jewish communities in the diaspora and identified several key factors affecting the resilience of these communities.

4.1. Discussion of major findings in relation to existing literature

The present scoping review reveals that community resilience is mostly described in terms of coping with disaster or struggling with acculturation of the Jewish diaspora. Most articles described concepts that were closely related to resilience, such as adaptation, acculturation, or coping, as were the concepts of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While these concepts highlight the individuals’ reactions to impactful events, the concept of resilience can be applied to both individual and community responses to such events. A clear definition of community resilience of the Jewish diaspora as such, thus seems to be lacking in the literature. Only one article defined the concept of community resilience and associated it with the theoretical model of Ganor and Ben-Lavy (2003) and Pollock (2007) .

In the present scoping review we found that in most studies ( n  = 9) the Jewish diaspora communities were characterized as a place-based community ( Chalew, 2007 ; Storr et al., 2016 , 2017 ). Place-based communities are communities of people who are bound together because of where they reside, work, visit or otherwise spend a continuous portion of their time ( Gieryn, 2000 ). This finding is well in line with other studies on community resilience that mainly involved place-based communities ( Kulig et al., 2013 ; Flora et al., 2016 ; Vaneeckhaute et al., 2017 ). The other studies included in this review characterized the Jewish diaspora communities by the country of origin of the members, or by religious affiliation. It thus appears from this scoping review that the Jewish diaspora communities world-wide differ from one another regarding their specific geographic location, migration history and religious affiliation. It is well-known from the literature that the migration history of Jews, especially in Europe, is ancient ( Blom et al., 2021 ) and that in many countries, the Jewish diaspora communities are prosperous in the socioeconomic sense ( Wallerstein and Duran, 2010 ). In contrast to this, we were reminded in the present study that Jewish diaspora communities have been established in the last decennia ( Elo and Vemuri, 2016 ) or consist of members with a more marginalized position ( Glöckner, 2010 ). Jewish diaspora communities appear to have some characteristics which make them different from most studied diaspora communities; they have variously been considered a race, an ethnic group, members of a religion, or a culture. These characteristics lay the foundation of an ongoing scientific debate on the question if Jews can be considered an ethnic minority. However, a comparison of the results of this scoping review with those of Patel et al. (2017) and Flora et al. (2016) suggest that many notions of community resilience are also applicable to the studies on Jewish diaspora communities.

Another important finding of this scoping review is that all three perspectives on resilience – resource-based, outcome-based, and process-based – are found in the research on Jewish diaspora communities world-wide. The process-based perspective appears to be the most common perspective on resilience of Jewish communities living in the diaspora. This finding is in line with the results of Patel et al. (2017) , who also demonstrated that the process-based perspective was adopted in most recent studies on resilience of other (non-Jewish) communities. This could be explained by the fact that the context of Jewish diaspora communities worldwide varies substantially, and that this impacts their resilience resources. As both the resources and the adversities can vary, also the outcomes vary. Therefore, research from a process-based perspective appears to be the most relevant when searching for generalizable ways to strengthen the resilience of Jewish diaspora communities.

In the general literature on community resilience, numerous studies and policy documents address the distinct phases communities go through when dealing with adversities and distinguish four phases of dealing with a disaster: preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery ( Maguire and Hagan, 2007 ; FEMA, 2019 ). In this scoping review comparable phases were identified in articles that describe the aftermath of a natural disaster ( Chalew, 2007 ; Storr et al., 2016 , 2017 ) and in the policy-oriented articles ( Carp, 2007 ; Horwitz, 2007 ; Pollock, 2007 ).

Through this scoping review, we identified that social factors and networks are strong positive influencing factors for the resilience of Jewish diaspora communities. These enablers of community resilience have also been reported by others. Based on interviews with Australian rural community members, Buikstra et al. (2010) reported the presence of social networks and support as a critical factor for community resilience. Faulkner et al. (2018) conducted an empirical review of five interrelated characteristics of community resilience, of which one was community networks. They reported that the residents of two different coastal communities in the UK perceived these characteristics in different combinations of importance for enabling resilience. It was concluded that context is important, that context consists of many factors which are interconnected [e.g., past experiences with crisis events, and that strengthening any one factor in isolation from others will probably not lead to enhanced levels of community resilience ( Faulkner et al., 2018 )]. Based on a group of survivors of an earthquake in China, Wei et al. (2022) reported recently that social capital is the most consistent and positive predictor of perceived community resilience. Liu analyzed the impact of social networks on community resilience in Tianjin (China) and pointed to social trust as a core element, as trust affects the willingness to be involved in communities’ activities and networks ( Liu et al., 2022 ).

The influencing factors for community resilience that were identified in this scoping review were categorized and analyzed using the list of the nine main elements of Patel et al. (2017) and the seven capitals of the Community Capital Framework of Flora et al. (2016) . Both classifications are referred to in many studies and have contributed to the understanding of community resilience. They are based on different perspectives on adversities, one-time disasters, and ongoing stress, respectively. The classifications partly overlap, and partly highlight different elements. Further research is needed to find out how these classifications exactly relate to each other. In addition, it is important to highlight that in our analysis we identified two other influencing factors ‘time’ and ‘technology and internet,’ that could not be classified in any of the categories of Flora and Flora. Patel et al. (2017) mentions technology and social media as a sub-category of the element ‘communication.’ Adding the factors ‘time’ and ‘technology and internet’ as separate categories to the classifications might thus be relevant for an overall contemporary perspective on community resilience.

4.2. Strengths and limitations

4.2.1. strengths.

A rigorous and systematic methodology was applied in the present scoping review. The search strategy was adapted as broadly as possible in databases without controlled vocabularies to obtain the maximum search yield. In addition to the database searches, gray literature was searched. Furthermore, two independent researchers screened and included all articles. Another strength of this review is that it was conducted by a multidisciplinary team with researchers from different backgrounds including public health, philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology. The fact that the research questions were intensively discussed with three members of Dutch and Israeli Jewish communities can also be considered a strength of this study.

4.2.2. Limitations

Although 32% of the Jews currently living in Israel are migrants, many Jews worldwide consider Israel as their home country and regard the Jewish community in Israel as the dominant community and not a diaspora community. Because we specifically aimed to explore the characteristics of the Jewish diasporic community outside their home country, where they are a minority, a considerable number of studies on communities in Israel were thus excluded from this scoping review. Some of these excluded Israeli studies ( Leykin et al., 2013 ; Kimhi, 2016 ; Leykin et al., 2016 ; Shapira, 2022 ; Weinberg and Kimchy Elimellech, 2022 ) may have been relevant for the Jewish diaspora communities. Kimhi, for example, studied the association between individual, community and national resilience and found significant positive but low correlations between community and individual resilience ( R = 0.160). Based on that, Kimhi assumes that each resilience level stands for an independent construction, but both predict individual well-being and successful coping with potentially traumatic events ( Kimhi, 2016 ). Shapira and Leykin conducted some of the few longitudinal studies on community resilience in Israeli communities in response to several adversities. Shapira focused on how perceived community resilience levels change over time and while dealing with different hazards ( Shapira, 2022 ). They concluded that throughout the study period, place attachment, collective efficacy, and preparedness were the strongest contributors to community resilience, while trust in local leadership and social trust were the weakest. Shapira’s study also confirms the notion that different adversities impact psychological demands on exposed populations differently, and in turn, affect coping strategies and resiliency. Leykin and Cohen developed the Conjoint Community Resiliency Assessment Measure (CCRAM), a validated instrument to measure community resilience ( Cohen et al., 2013 ; Leykin et al., 2013 ). Leykin compared community resilience during emergency and routine situations using the CCRAM and confirmed that during an emergency, higher resilience trends will emerge ( Leykin et al., 2016 ). Only one of the five community resilience factors, social trust, stayed constant over time. Weinberg examined the effect of spirituality and perceived community resilience on PTSD and stress of first responders and showed that spirituality, age, and financial situation were negatively associated with PTSD symptoms and stress. However, perceived community resilience was not associated with PTSD symptoms or stress ( Weinberg and Kimchy Elimellech, 2022 ). Summarizing, these insights and instruments are relevant and can contribute to understanding the resilience of Jewish diaspora communities. Another limitation of the present scoping review is that the majority of the reviewed articles were on Jewish diaspora communities living in the United States of America (USA). Therefore, results need to be interpreted with caution and cannot be extrapolated to Jewish diaspora communities worldwide. More research is needed in other countries, specifically because the exploration of the role of history, culture, religion, ethnicity, and antisemitism in and outside the USA may be critical in understanding community resilience and the impact on the individual resilience and health of their members. Lastly, as community resilience is not a well-defined concept ( Kulig et al., 2013 ; Patel et al., 2017 ), it was sometimes up to the personal understanding and interpretation of the authors of this scoping review whether the article dealt with community resilience of the Jewish diaspora. For this reason, some relevant articles or concepts may have been missed.

4.3. Recommendation for practice and further research

As mentioned in the introduction, most Jews worldwide live in the diaspora ( The Jewish Agency for Israel, 2022 ). There are constant migrant movements of Jews, sometimes as refugees, due to wars or antisemitism, and sometimes as regular migrants looking for a better life. One of the most recent Jewish migrant movements is the migration from Ukraine ( McKernan and Kierszenbaum, 2022 ; Schut, 2022 ). Because of the constant migrant movements, Jewish diaspora communities are very diversified. Jewish history is a rich history of constantly investing in and (re-)building their communities. Recently, several programs have been developed ( Gidron, 2019 ; Baker, 2020 ) aiming to strengthen Jewish community resilience within and outside Israel. Our findings in the present scoping review on facilitators and barriers for community resilience are therefore of relevance for these programs and the future support and development of Jewish diaspora communities.

Key gaps in the literature that were identified in this scoping review are that studies on community resilience of Jewish diaspora communities focused on a single crisis only and that none of the included studies applied assessment measures. In addition, no study looked at the association between individual and community resilience, nor described how community resilience affects the health-related quality of life of individuals in this diasporic population. The WHO Health Evidence Network conducted a review of methods to measure health-related community resilience ( South et al., 2018 ) in which different research methods to assess community resilience were evaluated. This study concluded that health-related community resilience is a complex, multidimensional concept. Therefore, research methods should collect data from multiple domains, prioritize social and economic indicators and intersectoral cooperation, combine quantitative and qualitative data or apply a mixed-methods research strategy ( South et al., 2018 ). Infurna and Luthar (2018) and Infurna and Jayawickreme (2019) also show that resilience is a multidimensional construct and expresses the need for a more comprehensive theory and a thorough multidimensional research approach.

Research on community resilience can broadly be divided into two approaches. The first approach studies the collective resilience of communities, whereas the second approach studies the individual resilience of people in communities. Van der Schoor (2020, unpublished, see footnote 1) concluded that hardly any research has been conducted on the interactions between these perspectives. Further research on the lived experiences of members of Jewish diaspora communities can contribute to the understanding of these interactions. Pearson and Geronimus (2011) found that the self-rated health of Jewish Americans was significantly worse than that of other White Americans, and access to co-ethnic social ties was associated with better self-rated health among Jews. None of the reviewed articles in the present study mentioned any relationship between the resilience of Jewish diasporic communities and the health-related quality of life of individuals belonging to the community. In her study on Afghan Jews and their children, Fogel distinguishes eight themes and relates them to the ecological model of Bronfenbrenner ( Frogel, 2015 ). However, she does not analyze the dynamics between these levels. This gap needs further research.

For a better understanding of social support, generally considered to be one of the main contributors to individual resilience, it is recommended that future studies reporting on community resilience focus on the interactions between Jewish diaspora communities and their members, and other diaspora communities.

4.4. Conclusion

Social and religious factors, strong organizations, education, and communication were identified as facilitating factors that increase community resilience. The social factors mentioned were marriage, the family and other social networks, and a sense of belonging and social connections. Religious factors were religious traditions, identity and coping and the role of religious gatherings. The interaction with the hosting country and other communities, characteristics of the community itself, and psychological and cultural issues were specified barriers to the resilience of Jewish communities in the diaspora. The effect of antisemitism in the hosting country as a barrier was mentioned in half of the articles. Community characteristics were its small size and or a lack of unity and dividedness.

The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the meaning of community resilience and the facilitating factors and barriers for Jewish diasporic communities and their members. Research examining the relevance and importance of resilience in the context of diaspora communities is still lacking. A better understanding of the resilience of Jewish diaspora communities can contribute to strengthen the resilience of Jewish and other diaspora communities. Thus, further research on Jewish communities can help Jewish and other diasporic communities, their leaders, policymakers and supporting organizations to strengthen the resilience of these communities and their members to deal with future traumatic stress.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

JM, AM, GS, and MJ: conceptualization and formal analysis. JM, WS, and MJ: data curation. WS and JL: searches. JM and MJ: screening and inclusion. JM and WS: data extraction. JM: project administration and writing – original draft. MJ: validation. MJ, AM, GS, and JM: writing – review & editing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Jonna Lind for critically reading the scoping review protocol to develop the search strategy, and Anne-Vicky Carlier and Sam Johnson for their support in searching the selected databases and retrieving the relevant documents. The authors thank David Gidron, Bart Wallet, and Hanna Luden for providing critical feedback and input to the review questions of this scoping review.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1215404/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: adaption, adversity, community resilience, diaspora, Jewish community, migration

Citation: Meijer JEM, Machielse A, Smid GE, Schats W and Jong MC (2023) The resilience of Jewish communities living in the diaspora: a scoping review. Front. Psychol . 14:1215404. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1215404

Received: 19 May 2023; Accepted: 20 July 2023; Published: 16 August 2023.

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*Correspondence: Judith E. M. Meijer, [email protected]

† ORCID: Judith E. M. Meijer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4385-0852

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• Published: 09 June 2010

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

• Doron M. Behar 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Bayazit Yunusbayev 2 , 3   na1 ,
• Mait Metspalu 2   na1 ,
• Ene Metspalu 2 ,
• Saharon Rosset 4 ,
• Jüri Parik 2 ,
• Siiri Rootsi 2 ,
• Gyaneshwer Chaubey 2 ,
• Ildus Kutuev 2 , 3 ,
• Guennady Yudkovsky 1 , 5 ,
• Elza K. Khusnutdinova 3 ,
• Oleg Balanovsky 6 ,
• Ornella Semino 7 ,
• Luisa Pereira 8 , 9 ,
• David Comas 10 ,
• David Gurwitz 11 ,
• Batsheva Bonne-Tamir 11 ,
• Tudor Parfitt 12 ,
• Michael F. Hammer 13 ,
• Karl Skorecki 1 , 5 &
• Richard Villems 2  

Nature volume  466 ,  pages 238–242 ( 2010 ) Cite this article

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• Genome-wide association studies
• Population genetics

Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions 1 , 2 . Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora 3 , 4 , 5 . This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people 6 . Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the individuals who provided DNA samples for this study, including the National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli Populations; Mari Nelis, Georgi Hudjashov and Viljo Soo for conducting the autosomal genotyping; Lauri Anton for computational help. R.V. and D.M.B. thank the European Commission, Directorate-General for Research for FP7 Ecogene grant 205419. R.V. thanks the European Union, Regional Development Fund through a Centre of Excellence in Genomics grant and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies for support during the initial stage of this study. E.M. and Si.R. thank the Estonian Science Foundation for grants 7858 and 7445, respectively. K.S. thanks the Arthur and Rosalinde Gilbert Foundation fund of the American Technion Society. Sa.R. thanks the European Union for Marie Curie International Reintegration grant CT-2007-208019, and the Israeli Science Foundation for grant 1227/09. IPATIMUP is an Associate Laboratory of the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education and is partly supported by Fundação para a Ciência ea Tecnologia, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

Author information

Doron M. Behar, Bayazit Yunusbayev and Mait Metspalu: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

Molecular Medicine Laboratory, Rambam Health Care Campus, Haifa 31096, Israel

Doron M. Behar, Guennady Yudkovsky & Karl Skorecki

Estonian Biocentre and Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Tartu, Tartu 51010, Estonia

Doron M. Behar, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Mait Metspalu, Ene Metspalu, Jüri Parik, Siiri Rootsi, Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Ildus Kutuev & Richard Villems

Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics, Ufa Research Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ufa 450054, Russia

Bayazit Yunusbayev, Ildus Kutuev & Elza K. Khusnutdinova

Department of Statistics and Operations Research, School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

Saharon Rosset

Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 31096, Israel

Guennady Yudkovsky & Karl Skorecki

Research Centre for Medical Genetics, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow 115478, Russia

Oleg Balanovsky

Dipartimento di Genetica e Microbiologia, Università di Pavia, Pavia 27100, Italy

Ornella Semino

Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto (IPATIMUP), Porto 4200-465, Portugal

Luisa Pereira

Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade do Porto, Porto 4200-319, Portugal

Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), CEXS-UPF-PRBB and CIBER de Epidemiología y Salud Pública, Barcelona 08003, Spain

David Comas

Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

David Gurwitz & Batsheva Bonne-Tamir

Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK

Tudor Parfitt

ARL Division of Biotechnology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA,

Michael F. Hammer

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Contributions

D.M.B. and R.V. conceived and designed the study. B.B.T., D.C., D.G., D.M.B., E.K.K., G.C., I.K., L.P., M.F.H., O.B., O.S., T.P. and R.V. provided DNA samples to this study. E.M., J.P. and G.Y. screened and prepared the samples for the autosomal genotyping. D.M.B., E.M., G.C., M.F.H. and Si.R. generated and summarized the database for the uniparental analysis. B.Y., M.M. and Sa.R. designed and applied the modelling methodology and statistical analysis. T.P. provided expert input regarding the relevant historical aspects. B.Y., D.M.B., K.S., M.F.H., M.M., R.V. and Sa.R. wrote the paper. B.Y., D.M.B. and M.M. contributed equally to the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Doron M. Behar , Karl Skorecki or Richard Villems .

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Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

This file contains Supplementary Notes 1-6, References and Supplementary Tables 1-5. (PDF 1143 kb)

Supplementary Figures

This file contains Supplementary Figures 1 and 3-6 and legends for Supplementary Figures 1-6 (see separate file for Supplementary Figure 2) (PDF 6701 kb)

Supplementary Figure 2

This file shows the Principal Component Analysis of the Old World High-Density Array Data. a, Scatter plot of Old World individuals, showing the first two principal components. Here, the first PC (4.2% of variation, vertical axis) captures primarily differences between sub-Saharan Africans and the rest of the Old World. The second PC (3.4% of variation, horizontal axis) differentiates West Eurasians from South and East Asians. Axes of variation were scaled according to eigenvalues. Each letter code (Supplementary Table 1) corresponds to one individual and the colour indicates population origin. b, Scatter plot of Old World individuals, showing PC1 and PC3. c, Scatter plot of Old World individuals, showing PC1 and PC4. Note that eigenvalues for PC3 and PC4 are ~8 times smaller than for PC1 and 2. (PDF 1892 kb)

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Behar, D., Yunusbayev, B., Metspalu, M. et al. The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature 466 , 238–242 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09103

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Received : 09 December 2009

Accepted : 21 April 2010

Published : 09 June 2010

Issue Date : 08 July 2010

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Judaism: Basic Beliefs

Jewish people believe in the Torah, which was the whole of the laws given to the Israelities at Sinai. They believe they must follow God's laws which govern daily life. 

How did Judaism begin?

Judaism began about 4000 years ago with the Hebrew people in the Middle East. Abraham, a Hebrew man, is considered the father of the Jewish faith because he promoted the central idea of the Jewish faith: that there is one God. At the time many people in the Middle East worshipped many gods. It is said that Abraham and his wife Sarah, who were old and childless, were told by God that their children would be as plentiful as the stars in the sky and that they would live in a land of their own -- the Promised Land. This gradually came true.

Abraham's son, Isaac had a son, Jacob, also called Israel. In this way the descendants of Abraham came to be known as the Israelites. God promised the Israelites he would care for them as long as they obeyed God's laws. While still traveling, the Hebrews lived in Egypt where they were enslaved. Moses, a Hebrew, was chosen by God to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt. Moses led the Hebrew people out of the Sinai Desert toward the promised land. At Mt. Sinai, God gave Moses the Law which would guide the Israelites to today. The laws were called the Ten Commandments and form the basis of the Torah, the book of Jewish law.

It took many years for the Israelites to finally get to what they thought was the Promised Land - Canaan. After some fighting the Jews established the Israelite kingdom. After many years, Canaan was conquered by the Assyrians, the Babylonians and then eventually the Romans. The Israelites once again found themselves enslaved, this time by Babylonians. The Israelites were then taken over by Romans who destroyed much of what had been built in Jerusalem by the Israelites. Most of the Jews were scattered all over the region and eventually moved from place to place to avoid persecution which continues to this day. The dispersion of the Jews is called the Diaspora.

The worst persecution of the Jews was during World War II by the Nazis who murdered more than six million Jews or a third of the world's Jewish population. This was called the Holocaust. Beginning in the 1880's Jews began returning to their homeland in growing numbers, this time to avoid persecution where they lived. After World War II, many Jews believed that for the Jewish people and culture to survive, Jews needed to live in their own country where all Jews from anywhere in the world would have the right to live and be citizens. In 1948, Palestine was divided up and a Jewish state of Israel was formed in the land that was once called Canaan, surrounded by countries with predominantly Muslim populations. Since Muslims also claimed rights to the land where the Jews were living, there was conflict, which continues to this day in the Middle East.

Today nearly fourteen million Jewish people live all over the world. Approximately half of them live in the United States, one quarter live in Israel, and a quarter are still scattered around the world in countries in Europe, Russia, South America, Africa, Asia and other North American and Middle Eastern countries. Anyone born to a Jewish mother is considered a Jew.

What do Jewish people believe?

Jewish people believe in the Torah, which was the whole of the laws given to the Israelities at Sinai. They believe they must follow God's laws which govern daily life. Later legal books, written by rabbis, determine the law as it applies to life in each new place and time.

The Ten Commandments, as written in the Torah, are:

• Worship no other God but Me.
• Do not make images to worship.
• Do not misuse the name of God.
• Observe the Sabbath Day (Saturday). Keep it Holy.
• Honor and respect your father and mother.
• Do not murder.
• Do not commit adultery.
• Do not steal.
• Do not accuse anyone falsely. Do not tell lies about other people.
• Do not envy other's possessions.

There are three basic groups of Jewish people who have a different understanding of the interpretation of the Torah.

Orthodox Jews believe that all of the practices in the Torah which it is practical to obey must be obeyed without question.

Conservative and Reform Jews believe that the ancient laws and practices have to be interpreted for modern life with inclusion of contemporary sources and with more concern with community practices than with ritual practices.

Reform Jews also allow everyone to sit together, men and women, and both Hebrew and the local language are spoken in services.

What are the sacred texts of the Jewish people?

The Tenakh is the ancient collection of writings that are sacred to the Jews. They were written over almost a thousand years from 1000 to 100 BCE. The word Tenakh comes from the three first letters of the three books included in this text: the Torah, plus the Nev'im (prophets) and the Ki'tuvim (writings, which include histories, prophecies, poems, hymns and sayings).

The Torah is written on scrolls and kept in a special cabinet called the aron hakodish, the holy ark, in synagogues. The Torah is read with a pointer called a yad (hand) to keep it from being spoiled. Each week, one section is read until the entire Torah is completed and the reading begins again.

The Talmud is also an important collection of Jewish writings. Written about 2000 years ago, it is a recording of the rabbis' discussion of the way to follow the Torah at that time. Later texts, the Mishnah Torah and the Shulhan Aruch, are recordings of rabbinic discussions from later periods.

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Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas

Judit bokser liwerant.

Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

This paper analyzes the structures and trends of the establishment, growth, and transformation of the Jewish presence in the Americas. After outlining several fundamental characteristics of the general continental societal environment and its internal differentiation, we critically discuss several theoretical approaches to a comparative assessment of the Jewish experience. Conceptual formulations include globalization, diaspora studies, and transnationalism, aiming to highlight their achievements and drawbacks. Selected sociohistorical aspects relevant to the development of Jewish immigration, settlement, and community formation are analyzed. This is followed by the exploration of more recent patterns, outlining emerging configurations and challenges. The article focuses on the differences and commonalities between the North (United States and Canada) and the diverse Latin American experiences. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. Lessons from the past may help outline future paths.

Introductory Remarks

Recurrent conceptual concerns raise a primary question—how should the Americas be approached: as one, two, or many? As a reality, an idea, and a concept, the term “the Americas” is not univocal, since it covers very different regions. As a territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity, it can be outlined with a high level of generalization while also paying concrete attention to its components. The Americas are simultaneously a single ideal entity and many realities.

The Jewish experience in different subregions and countries of the Americas is equally pluralistic. Its internal diversity depends on the variety in contexts, time, and modalities with which it was inserted in the international scenario. Still, it is itself a carrier of an inner diversity it has inherited from its long historical and sociological trajectory in and outside the continent. Significant diversity prevails among and within commonalities—convergences and contradictions arising from the globally interconnected continent and the Jewish ethno-national/transnational diaspora.

Under such a conceptual and thematic umbrella, this article develops in a threefold way. First, it addresses the Americas, reviewing theoretical approaches to the continent and the frameworks for studying Jews as a collective that is territorially dispersed and maintains shared symbolic bonds locally and at a distance .

The second part focuses on Jewish communities in North and Latin America in the context of world Jewry. Migration flows were central in the relocation of Jewish life. Specific interactions between particular societal constraints and opportunities in a given country or region and the unique character of Jewish backgrounds and integration patterns are outlined.

The third part analyzes the current changing patterns of collective life and community, addressing old and new trends. The changes in the perimeters and scope of organized communities and the encounters and intersections they favored in the Americas stimulated convergences and divergences under the impact of globalization, transnationalism, and the changing profile of the diaspora.

Significant and inescapable difficulties consistently hinder the goal of integrating the geopolitical with the socio-communal and cultural dimensions of Jews in the Americas. Indeed, while the importance of national, regional, and transnational axes varies across time and space, their contours point to dynamics that exclude reductionist conceptions, emphasizing only one of them. The combination and juxtaposition of the broader regional/continental and global axis and the axis focused on the particular context of the Jewish ethno-religious group can be expressed in numerous ways. Contradictory situations run through the whole range of options, from, at one end, the complete autonomy of the Jewish experience with respect to the general societal sphere to, at the opposite end, total dependence on it; between the Jewish search for legitimacy, equality, and diversity and conformity with the non-Jewish majority; between the sociability of individual lives of Jewish citizens within national societies and gregariousness in their collective institutions; between a sociocultural identity of the Jews in total synchrony with the national ethos of each country and a specific identity and creativity whose symbolic and intellectual center is elsewhere, rooted in a nation/peoplehood/global Jewish collective (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2011).

This paper aims to offer an analytical and critical reflection upon profound links, convergences and divergences, tensions and encounters, and the vitality and richness of the meeting of a continent and its Jewish diaspora. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. At stake are the modes of incorporation and dialogue of minority groups as owners of their particular history and identity within civil societies driven by their foundational principles and explicit agendas. It thus opens, together with Sergio DellaPergola's following article in this issue, the wide parameters that guided the project Jews in the Americas.

The Americas: Identifying the Object

The Americas' foundational experience emerged as an outcome of the expansive trajectory of European modernity, the configuration of the world system, and the globality of the Jewish trajectory fueled by successive waves of immigration. How did these different universes cross and intercept? How was the transnational character of Jewish migration to the Americas conceived? Was the diasporic extraterritoriality of Jewish immigration seen as convergent or conflictive with the particular founding ethos of the Americas?

The Americas may be thought of from a historical perspective, transitioning from their incorporation into the expanded World Order (or into the West) to a new insertion into contemporary globalization. Although there is no agreement among scholars regarding the Americas’ origins or basic characteristics, a convergent approach identifies radical changes that have upset spatial, geographical, and/or territorial references (Giddens 2002 ; Allen et al. 2012 ; Coleman and Underhill 2012 ).

Over the last 500 years, increasingly dense and intense interactions brought about by capitalist labor markets, commodity production, and the political expansion of the nation-state, as well as large-scale migrations, wars of conquest, and the flow of goods and ideas, lie behind globality and globalization. While today the continent is impacted by the contradictory nature of the world configuration, facing differentially new horizons of opportunity and regional and sectoral backlashes, it cannot be forgotten that it was globally constituted and incorporated into the world configuration by an extension of the European experience (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ; Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Preyer 2013 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ).

Sustained global dynamics developed through either central or peripheral connections to external centers as sources of its “encounter” or “discovery” genesis, which provided the parameters for the institutional creation and the conceptions of nation-building. These original centers were referents to be either followed or disputed. Different experiences and cultures subjected to global immersion and global awareness were embedded in the ways they built their incorporation into expanded world geography into globality (Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ). According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century, when the Americas as a geo-social construct became its constitutive act. There could not have been a capitalist world economy without the Americas. The destruction of indigenous populations and the importation of the labor force from the peripheries of the world did not imply the reconstruction of economic and political institutions but rather their virtually ex nihilo construction. To fully function, the Americas resulted in a mosaic that reinforced extension and inequality among its fragments. Thus, it entailed structural relations between trans-scale poly-centers and poly-peripheries within the space it encompassed. Indeed, the transatlantic axis between Europe and the newly produced Americas was the first zone of the consolidation of the world system (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ).

Shared and differing paths developed in the continent: coloniality in Ibero-America consisted not only of political subordination to the Crown(s) in the metropole, but above all, of European domination over the native populations. On the other hand, in the British-American zone, coloniality meant almost exclusively subordination to the British Crown; that is, the colonies constituted themselves initially as European societies outside of Europe (Quijano 1989 ). The conquest, colonization, and Christianization of America by the Iberians in the late fifteenth century occurred at the beginnings of the world market and capitalism. The arrival of the British to the northern parts of America more than a century later took place when this new historical process was already fully underway. The two Americas began the nineteenth century under unequal conditions and pursued quite distinct paths. The United States followed a pattern of development of the new and unusual Americanness or Americanity , with its inner disjuncture and contradictions—ethnicity, race-racism, the new world. It constituted itself as a nation at the same time as it was developing an imperial role as a hegemonic power. Latin America instead fragmented itself. There were bloody border wars and civil wars all over. Power was organized on a seigneurial–mercantile basis (Quijano 1989 ; Crespo et al. 2018 ). The national boundaries would not prevent the development of a sustained and intense transnationalist path of interaction among them (Roniger 2011 ).

Fernand Braudel devoted important chapters of his work (1982, 1986) to the contrast between the two Americas. Two civilizations: on the one hand, the ensemble of wonderful achievements, “future life,” and the New World par excellence ; on the other, the torn, dramatic ensemble, pitted against itself: the “second America” (Braudel 1986 ). According to him, the North was characterized by strength, activity, independence, and individual initiative; the South by inertia, servitude, the heavy hand of the colonial powers, and all the constraints inherent to the condition of “periphery.”

Indeed, distinct models related to institutional patterns, cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences developed. Eisenstadt's concept of Multiple Modernities underlies profound tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes arising from the different phases of an emerging interconnected global world and the heterogeneity and contingency of different historical developments. There are two main axes around which two broad configurations crystallized in Europe would be projected in the region: those of hierarchy–equality and relatively pluralistic “ ex parte ” versus a homogeneous “ ex toto ” conception of the social order would be extended to the Americas (Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b , 2019 ; Ben-Rafael and Sternberg 2016 ). In the North American colonies, this was carried out by dispersed autonomous groups, many of them Protestant sects and various groups of semi-aristocracy gentry like settlers and merchants, with the Anglican Church and the British government playing only a secondary (although certainly not negligible) role (Eisenstadt 2002 ; Katz 2010 ). In the South, the conquerors' power had to come to terms with and, in fact, destroy and replace impressively developed local civilizations. Therefore, facing the modern West and searching after it entailed a confrontation with an alien culture imposed upon these local cultures from the outside. After the first wave of conquest by the conquistadores , changes were carried out under the centralized aegis of the Crown (or Crowns) and the Church, which monopolized access to the major resources of the colonies (land and labor) and in principle denied the settlers any significant degree of self-government beyond the municipal level (Domínguez Ortiz 1976 ).

In the North, the pre-conquest civilizations were much more decentralized, and their de facto destruction left significantly fewer traces in the body of the new colonial order. Hence, the new rulers only had to deploy a reflexive exercise in coming to terms with their own distinct place within the broader framework of European or Western civilization. This historical bifurcation of experiences ended up shaping in structural and ideational spheres the ways in which Jews were seen and conceived: their admittance, incorporation, social integration, and representation as legitimate dwellers of the public sphere. As displayed in Fig.  1 , the multiple levels that framed these processes draw complex and differing scenarios.

Jews in the Americas

Conceptual Approaches: A Promising Albeit Debated Triad

The Americas represent an exemplary case in which historical paths and changing conditions interact. Globality as a foundational element and globalization processes shaped the changes in the Americas' social and communal structures, while the local and the global intertwined. Dynamic patterns of interaction developed historically between Jewish communities and their societal milieux , shaping Jews' changing status as citizens in nation-states, holders of a transnational condition. Both the continent as a whole and its Jewish presence were defined by human displacements—settlers, conquerors, various sorts of migrants—while modernity and modernization marked them differentially over time. Modernity’s structures and layers generated mixed social formations straddling the past and present and imported, translated, and recreated lifestyles and customs from other places and cultures.

Jewish collective life has historically been displayed in multiple arenas—territorial, communal, religious, national, and cultural—and in different political–ecological settings; the Jewish world is shaped by the parameters of globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora. While by globality we mean the incorporation-foundation of the world system, globalization refers to the radical changes that upset spatial, temporal, geographical, and/or territorial references, without which it would be impossible to think of economic, political, social, and cultural relations in the contemporary world (Robertson 1992 ; Waters 1995 ; Scholte, 1998 ). Time and space cease to have the same influence on the way in which social relations and institutions are structured, owing to the conjunction of technical factors that shape the density and speed of cross-border connections, and involve the de-territorialization of economic, social, cultural, and political arrangements; they depend neither on distance nor on borders, and neither do they have the same influence on the final shaping of institutions and social relations (Giddens et al. 1994 ). Globalization processes are not uniform, as they take place in a differentiated manner, with territorial and sectoral inequalities. They are multifaceted, insofar as they bring together economic, social, political, and cultural aspects, as well as the interdependence and influences between these levels, and contradictory, because the processes can be intentional and reflexive, at the same time not intentional, and of international as well as regional, national, or local scope. Globalization implies the widening, intensifying, accelerating, and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999 ); it links people together across borders more than in the past and confronts them with cultural and ethnic differences (Appadurai 1996 ). It also confronts communities of dispersed people, the Jewish diaspora—a global diaspora, an ethno-national and transnational diaspora—with similar, convergent, and divergent paths, due to the increased circulation of individual and collective social agents and values.

Indeed, globalization processes accelerate migration, owing both to social inequalities and to the opening of opportunities (Urry 2000 ; Kellerman 2006 , 2020 ). Migration and transmigration movements lead to diverse expressions of transnationalism. As a result of the latter’s multidimensional nature, we underscore its contributions to the understanding of past trends, ongoing changes, and of yet uncertain developments (Appadurai 1996 ; Ben-Rafael et al. 2009). The concurrent relevance of transnationalism to the diverse historical times provides a conceptual tool that allows for a better assessment of the social morphology as expressed in the changing character of communal and social formations.

Contemporary social science research in transnationalism focuses mainly on recent migration groups (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Khagram and Levitt 2008 ). Transnational studies examine mainly, if not exclusively, diasporic practices, projects, and attitudes of new diasporas (Moya 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ). However, by conceptualizing historical transnational patterns of shared values and norms, social belonging and collective identities, it is possible to recover cultural, religious, social, institutional, and economic linkages of a more permanent nature. Surpassing individual actors on the move, central common aspects of the Jewish experience may be recovered. There is indeed the challenge of analyzing the foundations of a scattered people committed to its continuity and bound through cohesion and solidarity.

Dispersion has been central to Jewish self-understanding for millennia. Modern Jewish historians took a global stance: from Heinrich Graetz in the nineteenth century to Simon Dubnow and Salo Baron in the twentieth, world histories became the parameter, emphasizing the longue durée and a transnational perspective. Their approach came out of the specificity of Jewish historical studies, where a disciplinary, ethno-national focus became dominant within a general, neo-positivist scientific program that analyzed national minorities in Eastern Europe. However, in the social sciences the study of diasporas arrived late. Before the 1960s, immigrant groups were generally expected to shed their ethnic identity and assimilate to local norms. During the 1970s, when assimilation theories based on the meaning of integration models were factually and conceptually questioned, “diaspora” was increasingly used to describe migrant groups maintaining their ethnic tradition and a strong feeling of collectiveness (Bruneau 1995 ; Shuval 2002 , 2003 ; Anteby-Yemini and Berthomière 2005 ).

As its use became extended, the discussion of its applicability to different groups and the singularity of the Jewish diaspora as archetypal took over academic debates. The continued use of the concept of diaspora exclusively for the Jewish people was questioned or branded as a mistake. However, the extension of its historical experience to other groups often disregards the interwoven character of Jews' associational and organizational networks and the historical and symbolic layers of contact with the homeland (Sheffer 1986 ). Robin Cohen ( 2008 ) suggested that the archetypal Jewish diaspora could be a base for reflection even if it couldn't be a transposable model. William Safran considered that diaspora could be seen as a “metaphoric designation” and could apply to various populations: the rapid spread of the term “African diaspora” in the late decades of the twentieth century, expatriates, political refugees… Hence the concept of diasporas as expatriate minority communities that are dispersed from an original “center” to at least two “peripheral” places; that maintain a “memory,” vision or myth about their original homeland; that “believe they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host country”; that see their ancestral home as a place of eventual return when the time is right; and whose group consciousness and solidarity are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland (Safran 1991 ).

The structures and channels through which continuous relationships are maintained—diaspora building—remained a latent, underdeveloped topic of study. The literature highlighted the dispersion of its members, the orientation toward an ethno-national center—real or imaginary—considered a homeland, and the maintenance of the group's ethno-cultural borders in the host country (Cohen 2008 ; O'Haire 2008 ; Brenner 2008; Esman 2009 ). Sheffer's distinction between state and stateless diasporas and Cohen’s cultural dimension defined diasporas as somewhere between “nation-states” and “traveling cultures.” Long before, Tartakover ( 1958 ) had spoken of “portable states”—dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the space of the nation-state. Indeed, diaspora was also theorized by James Clifford ( 1994 ) as cultures of circulation, which, on par with de-emphasizing the paradigm of the ancestral home-center , rescued from the Jewish model a “virtual and intangible space” between the center and the periphery of dispersion. Diasporas are conceived as communities dispersed across space yet connected through an intangible connection to another time and place; he emphasized the “lateral axes of diaspora,” the “decentered, partially overlapping networks of communication… that connect the several communities of a transnational people.” Although highly fruitful for the interconnections of Jewish life in the Americas, it displayed some surprising reductionism. Following almost exclusively Boyarin’s paradigm of diasporism—not only as a conceptual formulation, but as a meta-theoretical and political stance—it failed to acknowledge the singularity of the Jewish experience as an ethno-national diaspora with a Center—historical, spiritual, national. The strong links and the mutual influences became part of divaricate networks and multidirectional exchange, involving not only people, capital, and political resources but also ideas and cultural values (Levitt 2001 ; Bauböck and Faist 2010 ; Burla 2015 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ). Diasporas’ presence in societies, the multicultural dimension they carry, the relations they create between original and new homelands and their dynamics as interconnected cross-national spaces are part of the transition of societies to a new era (Ben-Rafael 2013a , b ). However, the historical weight of Jewish diaspora's structures that endure both local associations and channels of communication cannot be underestimated.

The necessary mediations between studies on transnationalism, globalization, diaspora and research into contemporary Jewry are still lacking. Despite the plethora of local descriptive studies, Jews are comparatively understudied in contemporary research, where they seem to have lost their historical resonance. Most importantly, there is a relative dearth of discourse about communal foundations in the available literature on national and transnational social relations (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Pries 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

In contemporary Jewish studies in the Americas, the diasporic experience has been approached mainly from the perspective of historical migration and ethnic studies, frequently disregarding the analytical angle of Jewish diasporic formations, where systems of collective organization have accounted for interconnection and world circulation (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ). Thus, researchers relying solely on ethnicity cannot account for the necessary articulations of boundary maintenance and the mechanisms that counterbalance the loose nature of the collective. The limits and pitfalls of the ethno-communal paradigm in times of multiculturalism, postmodernity, and porous ethno-religious borders are analyzed, while national frontiers dilute the interconnection among the diaspora, the center, and the lateral axes. In the study of American Jewry, the notion of a stable ethnicity fixed by religion, language, and genealogy has been challenged by the difference outlook, emphasizing the contextualized and personal shaping of this identity category (Hollinger 1998 ; Lederhendler 2011 ; Magid 2013 ). In Latin America, migration studies have been the dominant approach. The conceptualization of a theoretical framework of diasporas and their current moment may be found in studies of postmodernism, oriented principally by the concept of boundary erosion. At the same time, the ethno-national Jewish diasporic experience has been analyzed from the sociocultural and political perspectives of Otherness (Bokser Liwerant, 2013 ).

We suggest that the dyad “being national–being transnational” provides the conceptual tool required to analyze local contexts, while recovering the commonalities and interconnections derived from transnational Jewish history. It critically questions the currents developed by historians and social scientists that focus on Jews as citizens of the nation-state, disregarding the singularity of a people whose traditions, identities, solidarity, commercial, social, and religious connections crossed borders, regions, and states (DellaPergola 2011 ; Avni et al. 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Kahn and Mendelson 2014 ). This interconnected binary contributes by addressing the current functional imperative of reproduction of local social domains through their interdependent relationship with globalization, implying that the global is localized and the local is generalized, reproduced by significant intercourse among societies and communities.

In the vast Americas, diaspora must be considered at an analytical level that accounts for its strong impact and differing consciousness across Jewish communities. Transnational studies that show an interest in the diasporic practices of new émigré ethnic communities tend to focus on the hybridization of identities and cultural fluidity and religious syncretism, rather than analyzing diasporic patterns derived from the maintenance of ethno-religious borders. They tend to refute diasporic practices that have observed the principle of boundary maintenance . We recognize that efforts to conceptually connect diasporas indeed contribute to outline their commonalities (Ben-Rafael 2016a). However, brought together with diaspora studies, they oscillate between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion (Brubaker 1994 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ).

Boundary maintenance, as a systematic process of diaspora-building, should be analyzed through the lens of the vast associational and institutional foundations of organized collective life, which foster certain levels of mobilization and the organization of exchanges between its members. The individual and communal levels interact through dense and stable Jewish national and transnational organizational channels that enhance informal ethnic and family links and networks. At the collective level, however, associative resources re-elaborate and reorient organized Jewish life (Bourdieu 1986 ; Coleman 1988 ). The degree of formalization or institutionalization is characterized by a solid collective historical experience and memories that bring together temporal dimensions expressed by long-term trends, as expressed in Jewish life in the multiple Americas, notwithstanding its sharp differences in organizational patterns and collective awareness. The historical singularity of the different cases contributes to theory precisely in its communal building dimension, that allows scholars to approach and expand conceptual elaborations in transnational social fields as anchored spaces (Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004 ).

Into the Region: Structures, Obstacles, Trends

A crucial distinction between the basic civilizational premises of the United States and those of Europe and many of the Dominions, Upper Canada and Quebec included, has been the strong emphasis on the metaphysical equality of all members of the community, on egalitarian individualism, and on the almost total denial of the symbolic validity of hierarchy (De Tocqueville 2002 ). These conceptions and premises became components of a new collective identity and a new constitutional order. The transformation was such that it constituted the crux of the American Revolution and set it apart from other wars of independence (Restad 2014 ; Katz 2010 ). A vast variety of immigration flows contributed to the national character. In these contexts, conditions were favorable for the historical arrival and incorporation of the Jews: the belief in and value of immigration and of individualism and individual rights.

The United States

From the country's inception, although perhaps not yet fully, Jews enjoyed the status of what later came to be known as a post-emancipation Jewry, just as even in the colonial era, though not yet completely, the country was a post-emancipation country. Indeed, the nation was built on immigration, which meant Jews were welcomed into the plural design of the collective.

The principal elements defining modernity—i.e., liberal, secular, pluralistic politics; diversity in matters of culture and religion; and a competitive capitalist economic system with free, open markets—were salient factors (Wooldridge and Micklethwait 2005 ). Constitutional freedom and cultural pluralism made a tremendous difference to Jews (Eisen 1986 ); it led to the incorporation of the different groups into a collective higher order, while the right to self-fulfillment viewed normative support as part of the national ethos . Society promoted individual gratification, which in fact led to tolerating communal diversity (Sarna 1997 , 2004 ). A singular constellation defined United States Jewry, whose presence was closely related to the process of nation-building and endowed its visibility in the public sphere. Consequently, the collective organization of Jews favored a decentralized congregational model based on denominational pluralism. Until fairly recently, Judaism as a religion was assumed to be the primary axis of distinction, yet the singular dynamics between religion and ethnicity frequently led to the acceptance of the former as a way of expressing the latter. Individualized Jewish religiosity developed around the synagogue-congregation and was gradually embedded in a public Jewish “civil religion” (Bellah 1967 ) understood either as a set of civic tenets or probably also as a Jewish ethno-national solidarity that, in the view of some observers, attained a quasi-sacralized status (Woocher 1986 ; Fischer 2010 ; Fischer and Last Stone 2012 ).

The United States would be described, especially since the mid-twentieth century, as a country with “three religions”: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism (Herberg 1983 ). Inner religious differentiation, the presence of Reform Judaism, the establishment of the institutions that formed and provided renewed religious personnel, and rabbinical seminaries all cultivated a rich and inner diverse Jewish life.

Society fostered an individualized pattern of incorporation that challenged collective frameworks. Though preceded by the Sephardic presence—individual Sephardic Jewish settlers were recorded in the 1620s preceding the 23 Jews from the Sephardic community in the Netherlands who arrived from Recife, Brazil, in 1654 in what was to become New York—looking at the paradigmatic and exceptional Jewish New York and its foundational organizational pattern, a differentiated subnational/ethnic population was reflected in the patterns of uptown and downtown Jewish immigrants, the former from Germany, the latter from Eastern Europe. The place and role of German Jews on the continent were closely related to their early arrival and the surrounding milieu, both of which reinforced being seen as the epitome of modernity, socioeconomic mobility and assimilation. The term, therefore, didn’t exclusively refer to the territory or the political geographical entity but rather to German culture—immigrants from German-speaking countries were the bearers of the symbology of progressive, acculturated and assimilated Jews (Brinkmann 2014 ). Jewish organizational life outside the synagogue was based largely on local, regional, and national membership associations and social welfare federations, interwoven with the Jews' other associational habits and social connections in a pluralistic and individualized manner (Phillips 2005 ; Waxman 1983 ).

While intense organizations were developed—mainly philanthropic and charitable ones by German and Central European Jews and mutual-aid societies by immigrants from Eastern Europe—the kehillah as a centralized structure developed overseas did not crystallize. (There was a single initiative of this kind; it began in 1915 and only lasted until 1922.) What did succeed—first in Boston, and later in New York—were Federations of Philanthropic Organizations. The Old Home was seen as a past from which to depart. Eastern European Jews did develop a solid Jewish culture brought from and connected to overseas in an intense diasporic dynamic; writers, artists, poets, and a Yiddish press gained strength and simultaneously provided an organizational axis. The strong symbol of the later circulation of culture was epitomized by the YIVO—The Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to the preservation and study of the East European Jewish culture and history. Located in Vilna from 1925 throught 1940, due to World War II it was relocated to New York. Circa 1928, a branch was established in Buenos Aires, as Fundacion IWO. A global diaspora and its changing geographies and histories!

Immersed in the concrete/ideational tension of allegedly cutting ties with the countries and cultures of origin, the Jewish US community has often been represented as exceptional by its history of success. Concomitantly, its self-understanding and history-writing have been focused within the borders of the country (Kahn and Mendelsohn 2014 ). However, comparative research has shed light on various spheres of strong connection to the regions and towns of origin of US Jews, be they commercial, financial, social, or cultural (Kobrin 2012 ). Certainly, Old World attachments were reconfigured, and texts and contexts redefined through mutable and multiple ways fundamental to the new life.

Narrative and reality, national projects and achievements were mutually shaped. Americanness called for Americanization as the path to follow. Simultaneously, Americanization meant a new way of being Jewish, learning a new code derived and defined by the new society (Sarna 2004 ; Diner 2004 ; Lederhendler 2019 ). US Jewry progressively experienced the growing legitimacy of its ethnic assertiveness that reinforced the cultural referents of its collective identity. Americanization as an ideal and a value—with its strong call for a new identity—also explains that immigrants sought in education the clue for adaptation and integration rather than for continuity. Education in private Jewish communal institutions had, until recent decades, been the exception rather than the rule, as most Jewish families had sent their children to public schools.

As far as the civil incorporation of Jews and its relative success are concerned, much depended on the timeline of their presence. Upon arrival, the ideal was no hierarchy in a nation under God; in practice, there were very structured hierarchies by race, ethnicity, region, and country of origin, marked by the succession of large-scale waves of immigration, each of which found its place within the hierarchy. This, of course, affected the place of Jews, who in most cases entered into the lowest ranks. At the same time, the US allowed for a robust upward mobility.

The positive depictions of Jewish immigrants produced by scholars such as Park, Thomas, Wirth, and Stonequist were not representative of general American attitudes toward Jews in the 1910s and 1920s. As historian Tony Michels ( 2010 ) has pointed out, a considerable body of scholarship “shows that American antisemitism increased in intensity and popularity from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century; it extended beyond the social realm into political and governmental spheres; and it turned violent more frequently than we usually recognize” (p. 212). Only after the Second World War did circumstances improve (Alexander 2006 ; Dash Moore 2009 ). During the postwar era, the Federation system served as the primary fundraising and redistributive body of the American Jewish community and progressively the locus of American Jewish power (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Kornfeld 2018 ). This communal system was part of the civil religion that provided extended symbols, rituals, and practices.

Nowhere did the tension between the Center and the diaspora become so early and strongly expressed in the Americas as in the US. Zionism, as an idea and as a movement, had to deal with the challenge to its diagnosis of exile and a diaspora consciousness. Jewish-American intellectuals rejected the equation of the United States with galut and Israel with Zion. While it also provided a collective reference axis, it carried a conflictive dynamic as an identification referent and a principle of legitimization (Eisen 1986 , 2014 ). The impact of the destruction of European Jewry on the general and Jewish political action and agency can be seen in the redefinition of the world Zionist agenda and of US Zionism in its support for a Jewish state. Indeed, the vision of a Jewish state and the possibility of transferring millions of Jews there were the outlines of the program of the Biltmore Conference of May 1942 (Penkower 1985 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 ; Sasson 2015 ). With the establishment of the state, the core opposition developed into a tacit agreement and collaboration. Gradually, it became a functional referent and a central theme for building the Jewish presence in the public sphere. It influenced the conceptualization of the American civil religion of survivalism (Woocher 1986 ) with secular peoplehood as its main religion; secularization, influenced by Protestantism, equated Jewishness with Americanization (Goldscheider 2003 ; Cohen 2003 ), transformationalism, a vibrant communal life (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ; Silberman 1985 ).

United States Jewry developed as a center fostering transnational ties and facing overseas needs; it acquired world relevance precisely through the establishment of structural channels: associations and institutions that advanced joint efforts in addressing worldwide Jewish needs.

A Different North: Canada

While conceived as multicultural from its inception, the founding trajectory of Canadian Jewry was binational, bicultural, and bi-religious. Cultural diversity was implied from the country’s origin with British and French settlers, as well as the ever-present need for increasing immigration into their territory. This diversity was, however, based on Anglo-Canadian Protestant values, which were prevalent at the time, and this was reflected as strict migratory regulation with distinctly racial criteria. It wasn’t until after World War II that a transition was enacted from a restrictive immigration policy that favored white European immigrants toward a universalistic policy in accordance with Canada’s international position as the spearhead of human rights advocacy.

Both the organizational pattern and the arenas to build continuity reflect the position of Jews in society. Although it would seem well situated in terms of integration into Canadian society (Brym 2018 ; Weinfeld 2018 ), at the turn of the twentieth century, as their numbers were increasing, Jews were in many ways acknowledging their outsider status in the country and their ethnic or national independence, their existence as “a third solitude” (Greenstein 1989 ). The community endured legally sanctioned discrimination in accommodation, employment, education, and immigrant admission (Troper and Weinfeld 1988 ). In the words of Elazar and Cohen ( 1985 ), Canadian Jewry from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II behaved as largely segregated Jewish communities had for centuries; in many ways, it was an exemplary multicultural community in a country that was imperfectly multicultural.

From the 1960s onward, the Jewish profile adjusted and benefited from the legitimacy of its transnational dimension. Its institutional density combined and overlapped ethnic, religious, and cultural roots, national Jewish allegiances, and a sustained openness to renewed waves of immigration. Therefore, the inner diversified associational map strengthened the different levels of group cohesiveness; no external claim to erase primordial identities competed with this dynamic. The balanced development and stability of Canadian socioeconomic configuration led the country’s Jews to pursue integration into society through entrepreneurial capitalism, advocacy, and nondiscriminatory government policies. Jews followed the strategy of compartmentalizing private and public spheres of the collective, combined with selective cultural synthesis. Jews turned inward and developed a vibrant communal life of their own (Brown 2007 ). Ethnic cohesion, a national identity less demanding in its plurality as a main referent, and a consequent communal institutional density defined the main parameters of Canadian Jewry.

Education—as a central sphere for social-cultural-institutional underpinning—was a space to build both continuity and difference. Before World War I and beyond, Canadian schools were either Protestant or Catholic (in Quebec, French Catholic). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews in Quebec were legally deemed Protestants for school purposes. Otherwise, they would have had no right to public schooling at all. In Ontario, Protestant schools became “public” after World War I; the publicly funded Catholic schools remain separate, but tax-supported, to this day. The schooling of children and young adults in comprehensive Jewish educational institutions took priority over other needs of the community. In Toronto neighborhoods with a Jewish majority, Jews could and did run for public school director in the early decades of the twentieth century. More than half of the children receiving Jewish education attend Jewish day schools, a substantially greater percentage than in the United States and in most of the community of Latin America, except Mexico (Pomson and Deitcher 2009 ; Miller et al. 2011 ; Tickton Schuster 2019 ). The Jewish educational system indeed provided the structural substratum for cultural singularity amidst other instances of cultural uniqueness. The traditional and Zionist content of education must be highlighted. Zionism found its roots based on both ethnicity and nationality.

The diversity and richness of sub-ethnicity found expression in the literary work of Yiddish writers—a terrain where it could recover an Old World culture and build a secular creative space. The roots and paths of circulation of cultural creation, seeking to build ethnicity on cultural grounds, crossed the Americas from Canada and the US to Latin America and back, in search of a Jewish culture not reducible to religion. While the latter would not be absent, neither was it regarded as normative (Levinson 2009 ).

Canada’s strong Jewish life can be neither explained nor understood if Israel as a concrete, ideological, and mythical center is not sufficiently analyzed. For Canada, as for Latin America—with differing codes of nationalism—the Zionist idea and Israel have been determinant. Various associational and structural spaces were expressed and shaped by spiritual-national-cultural representations of the Center, paralleling the autonomy and vitality of the lateral axes of the diasporic configuration. Lastly, the Canadian dialectic of particularism and universalism can be paradigmatically seen in the shared struggle for Jewish recognition and human rights (Abella 2006 ). If circulation and diaspora influences are analyzed, its tendency to incorporate the struggle for human rights into its agenda developed in a relatively early phase.

Latin America: The Region’s Diversity and Comparative Remarks

The Jewish presence in the more than 20 Latin American countries draws a global diaspora defined by the diversity of its singular contexts. Differing from the nation-building of Americanness and Americanization as a goal in the US and from the multicultural ethnic saga in Canada, Latin America's distinctive search for national identity rejected diversity as a risk to its recurrent aspiration toward uniformity, understood as synonymous with national integration and therefore interpreted as part of its quest for modernity.

The difficulty in seeing Jews as collective actors, as legitimate inhabitants of the public sphere, was built and narrated differently. In the Southern Cone and in Euro-American countries, where mass migration modified the population profile, it took shape in a public sphere that was allegedly neutral vis-à-vis private differences, consistently with the idea of secular and liberal thought of a national identity constructed on the supposedly integrating foundations that homogeneity provides. The national subject was not understood in its diversity; the Latin American liberal narrative turned its back to the latter. In Indo-America, diversity remained a referent and bastion for the mestizos —whose indigenous ancestors interbred with the Catholic Spaniards—who became the essential national subject. The way Jews perceived and internalized this goal became part of the interplay between self-adscription and their social representation (Bokser Liwerant 2008 , 2009 ).

In the Americas, societies offered different structural and legal frames and models of social interaction to ethnic minorities, influencing the integration and continuity of Jewish life. The ideational conception of the nation and the search for the collective were expressed in the foundational constitutional law of the countries, and thus settled the normative profile of the nation. It is important to assess under which general principles—as stated in the national constitutions of the different countries of the Americas—Jews could or could not be allowed to become an integral part of national society. In this regard, North and Latin America adopted entirely different approaches, whose relevance, however, was more symbolic than practical in terms of the effective societal integration of Jews and of their ability to have access to socioeconomic mobility and political participation.

In Argentina, the preamble to the Constitution mentions union, guaranteeing justice, securing domestic peace, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to citizens, to posterity, and to all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil: “Invoking the protection of God, source of all reason and justice: do ordain, decree, and establish this Constitution for the Argentine Nation.” Immediately it decreed that “the Federal Government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion” (adopts it as the state religion). Massive immigration altered the goal of one uniform society; civil society had its own margins of tolerance to diversity, but the ideal representation of the Argentine nation—hence the expectation that Jews would integrate-assimilate to form part of the nation—was deeply rooted.

The Mexican Constitution proclaimed that the Mexican Nation is unique and indivisible. The Nation has a multicultural composition originally based on its indigenous peoples, “who retain their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions, or part of them promoting the awareness of their indigenous identity should be a fundamental criterion in determining to whom the provisions on indigenous peoples apply.” Since the restrictive concept of mestizaje excluded Jews, their enclave character, as stated, excluded them as legitimate components of the national we .

As seen in our previous analysis, these two cases are distant from the Canadian and US constitutions. The former, facing both immigration and multiculturalism (or rather, binationalism) declared that Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law, establishing for its plural minorities the freedom of religion as among the fundamental liberties.

As for the US, it approached immigration through the aspiration to unity, to “the need for oneness,” to become “one People” as conditioned by its past (“to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” Immigration policies were another matter. In the twentieth century the quotas of the 1920s were clearly—although not explicitly—crafted to contain Jewish (and Italian) immigration. Canada followed suit (Abella and Troper 1982 ).

In Latin America, Jewish Otherness was embedded in the conception of the nation and in the policies concerning immigration and exile policy. Otherness was socially represented as foreignness amid debates that resulted in restrictive policies toward Jewish immigration and Jewish refugees and became a prominent sphere in which different hostile and rejectionist expressions were articulated. Their impact on the social representation of the Jew as the Other framed the arrival of Jewish immigration during the 1920–1940s .

Despite the transnational nature of immigration, the diasporic extraterritoriality of immigrant Jews was conflictive for Latin American countries, even for the founding liberalism of the national states that stimulated European migration. The regional institutions of the great ethno-national collectivities of Spanish, Italian, French, and German immigrants, notwithstanding their transnational imprint in the Rio de la Plata or Mexico, were not perceived as diasporas but as legitimate colonies of their motherland protected by the consuls and embassies. The transnational modality of these collectivities was perceived differently—and was different—from the case of the diasporic transnationalism of the Jewish immigrants. It certainly needs to be seen in comparison with the enclave modality of the integration of colonies of foreigners that did not require the “mestization” of white immigrants as happened with the model of the white European-Creole melting pot. The robust hypothesis concerning the Southern Cone is that Italian or Spanish transnationalism was not only legitimized in those transplanted immigration countries but was paradoxically used to legitimize their xenophobic nationalism against other minorities, inside and outside. Furthermore, the Jewish minority was questioned for having managed to organize communally as an ethno-national diaspora-colony, but an extraterritorial one (Senkman 2005 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

The Jewish presence was built in the framework of strong interconnected communal boundaries. Latin American Jewry shaped its communal life along strong transnational solidarity connections and with a dependent or peripheral character. Jews from Eastern Europe succeeded in establishing transnational relations between the original centers of Jewish life and the new periphery that powerfully influenced its construction as a new, though connected, ethno-transnational diaspora. They gave rise to differing models of Jewish kehillot in the region as replicas of original experiences overseas, not seen or interpreted as a referent to be overcome.

A common matrix nourished the Jewish identity of its members: a feeling of ethno-cultural and transnational belonging. Despite associational fragmentation and its ideological, cultural, and socio-occupational heterogeneity, an ethnic diasporic matrix was shared by Jews ideologically identified with a variety of political orientations: Bundists, communists, or Zionists. Its objective was to raise an organic community that would offer services of religious worship, social and medical welfare, burial in a Jewish cemetery, and, fundamentally, formal Jewish education. The kehillah framework transcended the borders of local ethnic association in order to encompass both the will for integration in the country and, simultaneously, the transnational bonds among the entire Jewish people both scattered throughout the diaspora and concentrated in Israel. The Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) became paradigmatic of collective Jewish life.

As in Argentina, the transnational relations that the Jewish community of Mexico forged significantly marked the construction of a new ethno-transnational diaspora that reaffirmed the paths of the old kehillah model. Thus, the diasporic matrix with its changing centers and collateral axes regenerated itself in its traditional models and practices. Continuity seemed to be the overall choice, and integration mediated by communal life was the strategy.

Contrary to what happened in the United States, the collective overshadowed the individual. Differing from the traditionalist-religious imprint of the northern communities, founded by secularists but seeking to answer communal and religious needs, communities were forged in the mold of modern European diaspora nationalism, emphasizing their inner ideological struggles, and organizing as political parties and social and cultural movements. The communal domain, while prompting continuity, became the basic framework for the permanent debates between world visions, convictions, strategies, and instrumental needs.

World Jewish developments gradually turned the Zionist idea and the State of Israel into central axes around which communal life developed and identity was built (Bokser Liwerant 2016c ). Partly convergent with Canadian and US Jewry, and partly singular in its meaning and intensity, Israel brought to the forefront both the feeling and the objective reality of a transnational shared mission and commitment to an ideological, political, and cultural-spiritual center. It also represented a new chapter in solidarity efforts as well as ambiguities surrounding the true meaning of this evolving relationship between an ideological, political, and public center and Latin American Jewish communities. It expressed the inherent tension between the idea of a national project for renewing Jewish national life in a Jewish homeland and that of acting as a spur to foster Jewish life in the circumstances of the diaspora. Being Zionist in Latin America provided Jews with the possibility of having a homeland- madre patria too, either just as other groups of immigrants to the country had or as a substitute for the previous ones that rejected them. It can be defined as a diasporic condition and consciousness that reinforced an ideal one-center (Jerusalem) model with a dependent periphery. Latin America was alternatively seen as undefined and not clearly part of the West, or as part of a peripheral region; a shared perception of a temporary sui generis diaspora called to play a central role in the changing Jewish dispersion. Zionist sectors invigorated the center with both the “national home” and “refuge” qualities that simultaneously nourished and reinforced their own diaspora profile (Avni 1976 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 , 2016b ).

In comparatively accentuated collective patterns, while Eastern European Jews, as hegemonic community builders, established the old/new communal structures, the Sephardic geo-cultural world developed communities of its own based on different countries or even different cities of origin, such as Damascus and Aleppo. This reflected the character of a complex Jewish ethnic group textured by different subgroups, communal links, and family networks. The maintenance of Sephardic trade networks, the circulation of knowledge, marriages contracted or dissolved transnationally, and the other networks of communication, relation, and interaction explored herein enabled the perpetuation of a modern Sephardic diaspora (Mays 2020 ). Sub-ethnicity provided vital inner interactions.

Similar to the case of Canada, education reflected and reinforced political and organizational diversity and a highly developed structural base that became the main domain to transmit, create, and project the cultural profile of Jewish communities; to construct differences between the communities and their host societies as well as inside the communities themselves. It acted as a central field for displaying Jewish collective life while negotiating the challenges of incorporation and integration. The role Israel played in its development gradually expanded, as the center that aimed to set itself as a focus to legitimately influence Jewish life outside its borders.

As in the rest of the Jewish world, the June 1967 Six-Day War may be seen as a watershed in terms of solidarity, cohesion, and mutual recognition in world Jewry (Lederhendler 2000 ). The responses it elicited illustrate the way in which a moment in history can become a “foundational event” where different dimensions converge: reality, symbolism, and the imaginary. Discourse and social action came together and stretched the boundaries that define the scope and meaning of us . The threat to the state was seen as a threat to the entire Jewish people—the people of Israel were defined as one undivided entity. Paradoxically, this turning point was progressively and radically reversed by an extreme expression of religious revival and de-secularization. While the “miraculous” experience of the Six-Day War enhanced the links with Israel as the state of the Jewish people, it also reinforced the connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel—a link recovered and channeled by the Orthodox world (Danzger 1989 ). Religious Zionism and the settlers were also nourished by this experience that led to strengthening biblical-mythical beliefs, connections, and symbols (Aran 1991 ; Dieckhoff 2003 ; Don-Yehiya 2014 ; Sagi and Schwartz 2018 ). Over time, this trend grew and reached in the early twenty-first century its utmost expression, in which religious allegiances, ideological worldviews, and instrumental considerations interact in interwoven and complex ways (DellaPergola 2020a ).

Israeli internal discourse shifted its focus from the diaspora to new critical topics: the Occupied Territories and the Palestine question, but also religion-state relations. This political shift not only removed the inherent subject of Israel-Diaspora links from the forefront of the Israeli agenda, but it created inherent tensions because of the different political outlooks and institutional interests at both ends of the dyad.

Further transformations concern the concrete and potential cleavages over patterns of private/public developments and expressions of collective identity that cross both Israel and the diaspora communities in light of the diversified nature of the dimensions, actors, and institutions that interact and divergent political stands. Whereas communal political behavior related to transnational links and support for Israel and the capacity to influence decision-making intensified due to globalization processes, the latter generated new constraints derived from regionalization and the inner differentiation and geopolitical positions of the countries. In this respect, it reflects the complex interplay between a wider public sphere, the prevalence of traditional mechanisms for negotiation, the internationalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the presence of divisions within the Jewish communities.

Surpassing a binary understanding of the diaspora-center relationship, coexistent and even competing cultural, religious, and political referents favor its conceptualization as a pluri-centered or even de-centered matrix that carries intense dynamics of convergences and divergences (Alroey 2008 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ).

The Triad Today: Selected Snapshots

Over recent decades, strong transformative trends crosscut the continent. The Americas lay the groundwork for observing the growing scope and intensity of globalization and transnationalism and their impact on the Jewish Diaspora’s changing profile.

Transnational links became reinforced. Although the country/state of residence continues to be the frame of reference for everyday life, experiences are no longer exhausted in that space. Both the territory and the symbolic horizons of the nation have lost vigor through the multiplication and diffusion of cognitive and normative maps. Introjected globalizing trends in the national spheres have been combined with similar processes at the community level, generating competition between normative guidelines and interpretative schemes and making a single collective frame of reference challenging if not irrelevant. Thus, in the South as in the North, the idea of cultural diversity has distanced itself from assimilationist pretensions.

Jewish culture, as does culture in general, far from being compact and homogeneous, acts as a conductive thread for new scenarios of transnational fluxes of all kinds—immigration, transmigration, tourism; information technology (IT) and electronically transmitted images; postmodern ideas that call into question central educational institutions. The demarcating function of culture has been diluted, causing transfigurations of the traditional “behavioral genders” that kept the social world “in its place” (Yudice 2006 ).

Changes occur in broader foci that encompass emerging civic commonalities and particular transnational links. The Americas are experiencing differentiated transformations in the public sphere, in the criteria of membership, in the spaces and dynamics of identity-building, and in their political expressions. Sociocultural/political parameters and limits to diversity are subject to changes, namely potential xenophobic and antisemitic expressions. Political pluralism, the acknowledgment of difference, and the emphasis on heterogeneity act as a substratum that stimulates and reinforces diversity.

In Latin America, through local differences, citizen participation has broadened, seeking to promote democratic integration, including minorities. Although the project of a civic community and the strengthening of civil society were cemented after the political transitions to democracy, the latter were characterized more by variability in the degrees of achievement than by their full implementation. The region’s changing reality reflects both the increasingly expansive force of democracy and its recessions, regressions, and reconfigurations. Latin America has incorporated global cycles of political opportunities and social conflicts in contradictory ways, as evidenced in democratization and de-democratization processes, centralization of power, civic citizenship and ethnic allegiances, and the simultaneity, as well, of individualization of rights and collective affirmation. Multiculturalism and new claims for recognition of primordial identities seek inclusion based on essentialism, which previously dominated at the national level.

Canada, after the 1970s and 1980s, following the intense mobilization of ethnic minorities, proclaimed a multiculturalist policy; although it did not lack criticism (Guo and Wong 2015 ; Bannerji 2020 ) or inner ethno-national tensions, it followed a path of stability. A variety of elements enrich multiculturalism. Like other minorities, Jews continue to find expressions of their collective life while maintaining their internal ethnic cohesion.

In contrast, in the United States, the very idea of the nation was built upon history, both ideological and material, with a solid racial division that was deeply ingrained in the social structure of the country. Access to the public space (and even the territory) was hierarchized on a racial basis. Nonetheless, one of the ideas that prevailed was that of assimilation, the melting pot, and at least nominally equal opportunity. Changes began slowly in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement gained impetus and the Civil Rights Act was famously passed in 1964, and they developed in different directions. The sustained increase in the recognition of diversity also faced discriminatory nationalist reactions.

Outlined in terms of general trends, the impact of the context may be discerned in the interactions with Jewish community transformations, oscillating between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion. Frontiers bear witness to an epoch defined by underlying complexity. Important sectors have abandoned communal belonging while others have seen a flourishing and resurgence of collective Jewish life. Communal institutional foundations face new equations between being and belonging, religiosity and ethnicity, peoplehood and social stratification, changing hegemonies in the leadership and sources of power and consequent disputes. But scarcity of resources—real or perceived—underlies all of these dualities.

The perimeters of Jewish life have been (and are still being) modified. The limits and traditional functions of the organized Jewish communities evolve both in the rate of conventional affiliation and in the new spaces that emerged or were strengthened as a response to the increasingly integrated profile of Jews in society. In light of changing necessities, a significant turn in the financing of collective life has also taken place. Perhaps a paradigmatic example was the transition to new forms of privatized resources. Partially as an outcome and as a vigorous internalization of the dominant neoliberal patterns in society, US Jewry saw the growth of powerful private funds competing with, and even displacing, the Federations (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Korenfeld 2018 ). The behavior of private funds and banks supporting Jewish institutions shows differing patterns of responsibility. The common denominator of many institutions was the transformation of their past profiles to become similar to nongovernmental organizations, through innovative policies of social support. Both ex ante and ex post, these policies developed as internal fragmentations that reflect the socioeconomic and occupational stratification of the communities.

Simultaneously, the communal dimension is also perceived as just one of the possibilities of the existence of the social subject, whose self-construction takes many forms: as an individual, as a member of civil society, or as a participant in temporary frameworks that create contingent associative identities (Cohen and Eisen 2000 ). The transition from communal models based on a shared past to associative models based on changing shared interests gained impetus, defined by multiple belonging and increased integration, making it necessary for Jews to redefine their organizational axes. The private sphere is growing as a space for experiencing Judaism. While this is significantly marked in the US, it seems to bring the Latin American and the North American experiences closer, in the sense of re-dimensioning the individual realm for the construction of Jewish life. Are collective spheres seen as a guarantee of continuity? And how and where is continuity defined? (Kurtzer and Sufrin 2020 ) The individual-community binary constitutes, indeed, a clue to the alternate referents of structural cohesion and identity-building, even though the two elements differ in dominance. While in Latin America and Canada the community was the grounds for building Jewish life, in the US it emerged as an entity whose centrality was recognized as an alternative resource to religious practices and a means for enhancing Jewish identity precisely when its loosening was enunciated (Cohen 1988 ).

The collective associational dimension is correlated with differing indexes of ethnic cohesiveness such as community affiliation or Jewish schooling. While in the US the main indicators are closer to the Brazilian and Argentine communities at medium intensity, Mexico stands closer to Canada at higher intensity. Institutional orders, national cultures, and socioeconomic structures are projected in it. While the affiliation rate in Canada (70%) and Mexico (85%) is similar, Argentina, Brazil, and the US run between 45 and 50%. Enrollment in day schools accounts for Mexican exceptionality (93%) among the similar rates in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil (45%), while the US oscillates around 25% (DellaPergola 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2015 ; Brym et al. 2018 ; Besser 2020 ).

The structural and functional changes highlighted here take place amidst the porosity of borders which paved the way for the emergence of religion, closely related to the weakening of the culture of its traditional boundaries, and its reconnection to new spatial and temporal configurations. Religion enhanced its role as a resource to address other social problems and as a means to a public ethical discourse (Voyé 2000 ). In parallel to reinstating the normative validity of the public sphere (Casanova 1994 ), the responses of orthodoxy and fundamentalism have become stronger, defending the enclave nature of the collective condition and taking positions as ethical referents in a context of credibility crisis. For its part, and defined by its historical trajectory as a circulation culture, the Jewish religious world in the Americas intensified and widened. The Conservative Movement expanded from the US to the South as a shift away from the original religious models of the immigrant generation. Its Northern congregational character was redefined, and the synagogue was relocated as a community space, which meant new options for building a Jewish identity committed to local society. In the South, specifically in Argentina, it allowed for an interesting de-secularization with no rejection of Zionism, while encouraging a concern for human rights—even preceding or paralleling the agenda of Canadian Jewry. The establishment of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires and its role in training Conservative rabbis, a pattern that reversed the previous absence of religious officials, reinforced the community’s structural foundations. The flux of rabbis from the South to the rest of the continent, particularly to the United States, pioneered a pattern of new transnationalism—the movement of religious personnel as actors and agents of social change (Bokser Liwerant 2013b ).

Subsequently, the Haredi presence expanded both in the North and in the South, in consonance with Israel. The Chabad Lubavitch movement and the opening of its centers across the continent exemplify how changing socioeconomic and cultural conditions were catalysts to the development of social support networks and the reaffirmation of identity borders, addressing the need to reconstruct social tissue. The movement spread an alternative paradigm anchored in belonging and discipline, proposing an ideal moral code and expressing the quest for expectations unfulfilled by the prevailing organized communal life. It further developed following migration movements (Limonic 2019 ).

The modified interplay between historical ethno-national patterns and religious and transnational flows also found expression in new channels and social actors. While the Israeli religious scene has singular traits associated with its national milieu, including the pervasive phenomenon of vicarious religious belonging without necessarily believing and delegated functions (Bokser Liwerant 2002 ; Davie 2007 ; Fischer 2010 ), parallel manifestations of autonomous expression of the religious experience emerge both in Israel and in the diaspora. Religious transnational networks across communities and Israel are erasing the traditional spaces and mechanisms of interaction defined by borders between the voluntary collectives and the sovereign state. Religious frameworks provide the networks through which communities build agreements. Mexico City, New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Jerusalem are all nodes and fluent borderless spaces that define religious and ethnic interactions. Religious revitalization is not just a regional phenomenon: it can be characterized as articulating local and regional communities with a transnational community of believers/practicing Jews under the hegemonic centers located in the US or Israel.

These changes pose several questions, among which the matter of the institutions and their officials' financing is neither marginal nor tangential. Who is paying for them? Who has gradually approached this sort of spiritual framework and why? How and why have phenomena of a magical nature and an oracular character regarding the direction of personal affairs expanded? We could venture a parallelism of paradoxical combinations of the privatization of religious orientations and sensitivities, the weakening of the institutional dimension of religion, and the re-emergence of religious components, orientations, and sensibilities. In turn, movements (and orthodoxies) have been transformed and transposed at the center of national and transnational activities (DellaPergola 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant 2008b ). Thus, America’s communities and Israel need to be seen in their inner and cross-border diversification. Undoubtedly, this connection between competing centers and lateral axes redefined the diaspora matrix.

The complexity of these trends becomes apparent in the parallel growth of cultural or secular patterns of identification and organizational belonging, thereby moving and fixing old/new definition and membership criteria. More than the synagogue, other fields and activities of identity-building have received new impetus. It is worth underscoring literature, theater, and film as privileged terrains where the new trends, expectations, and claims regarding the social imaginary are expressed. They became a meaningful part of social discourse, expressing meanings, narratives, images, and tropes of the changing historical experiences and new social constellations. Paradigmatic of it has been contemporary cultural production, where gender and the search for identity converge. It could even be defined as an extraordinary literary boom of being Jewish in the Americas—the individual problematic of collective belonging, the existential queries derived from the tension between the efforts of privatizing the historical dimension of identity, and the diachronic density of the subjectivity of Jews.

South to North and Beyond

Decades after the founding migrations to the Americas, renewed migration waves became central factors of social change for those who move and those who stay, for the communities in the countries of origin and for the new communities built abroad. The new interconnections are marked by the relocations in the lateral axes and the center(s) of Jewish life. Partly convergent with other ethnic diasporas and partly in their uniqueness, Jews are engaged today in a renewed geography of dispersion and concentration. A complex logic of interdependence between the new homes, the previous ones, and the historical ideational ones widens Jewish social experiences.

The Americas entered the twenty-first century with differing experiences, as part of a single world order in which the US still occupied a top place and Latin America a subordinate one. A more systematic articulation of the Americas emerged under the hegemony of the US, including Canada in a secondary role. Among the visible and significant manifestations of this development is the growing migratory flux from South to North, especially to the US. Latin American migration expresses the interconnection between globalization, diasporas, and transnationalism.

The emigration of Jews from Latin America to the United States is part of this larger, global phenomenon of unexpected scope: the international migrant stock has grown from 153 million in 1990 to 271 million in 2019 (United Nations–Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019 ). In 2017, about 37 million Latin Americans lived outside their country of birth (compared to 35 million in 2010) (Pew Research Center 2019 ). Latin American Jews are part of the cohort of qualified migrants who increasingly move to OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. Over the past few decades, close to 250,000 Jews from Latin American countries have undertaken cross-border migrations. Given the global estimates, it appears that close to 36 or 37% now live outside the region (DellaPergola 2020c ).

Indeed, Latin America has become an exit region for broad social sectors. Societal crises and individual choices converge, determining timing and characteristics (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015c ). As a result, in complex and interrelated ways, Latin American Jews have transitioned from communities of immigrants to communities of citizens and, simultaneously, of emigrants.

Contemporary international and regional migration, integration, and distinctive mobility account for the new scaling of spaces where collective Jewish life is relocated. Diversified waves of migration both reflect and create diverse territorial, cultural, sub-ethnic, and social paths (Sassen 1998 ; Castles 2000 ; United Nations Development Programme 2019 , 2020 ).

The collective dimension implicit in this relocation and the new profile of communities in the making might be analyzed in light of the “migration crises” of the Latin American region, i.e. the worldwide emigration, dispersal, and regrouping of migrant communities generated by macro-level forces of a political and economic nature (Van Hear 1998 ). Successive migration crises affecting Latin Americans took place during the second half of the twentieth century. The first phase began with the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and continued intermittently, chiefly during the 1970s in Chile under Salvador Allende’s socialist government and later under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Emigration also ensued during the era of military dictatorships in Brazil (1964–1985), Argentina (1976–1983), and Uruguay (1973–1985). The later phases (mid-1980s and 1990s) were caused by the combined effects of neoliberal economic policies and globalization affecting Argentina on two occasions, as well as Uruguay. Colombian Jews emigrated during that period due to a generalized atmosphere of violence within the country. More recently (mainly since 2000), the Jews of Venezuela have emigrated under the impact of the populist regime initiated by Hugo Chávez. Emigration from Mexico was relatively more stable, with peaks in the mid-1990s, in 2010, and at the end of the 2010s. The ways in which streams of migration change shed light on moments of transition. Sharp declines in the Jewish population have occurred since the mid-1980s in Central American countries. However, in the case of Guatemala, more than half of its Jewish population decided to stay in their homeland. Neighboring Costa Rica increased its Jewish population by two thirds since 1967 while Panama became a relocation country for Jews fleeing from other Central American countries. Argentina has experienced some of the most acute political and economic crises, yet still hosts the largest Jewish population in the continent (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

Contemporary American Jewry and the encounters that take place within it may be better understood when considering the challenges of integrating newly arrived groups: multiple dynamics of joining/receiving, of being/belonging into the extant reality of the veterans dominated by prevailing self-images and discourses (See Fig.  2 ).

Diversity of transnational processes and its implications

Jews migrating across and out of Latin America simultaneously disperse and regroup. We are witnessing the recovery of the historic trajectory of ethnic and ethno-national patterns of migration and the pluralization of migrant populations. This conjunction between two interrelated aspects implies both an enhancement of Jewish globalization and the reinforcement of particular, local aspects of the Jewish experience. This requires a dual terminology: diaspora and transnationalism are related concepts that are applicable to the contemporary itinerary of Jewish dispersion in the “new global ethnic landscape,” as Appadurai ( 1996 ) calls it. Mobility and relocation set the stage for the potential reconstitution of an enlarged, redefined ethno-religious and national/transnational collective.

Latin American Jews do not simply replicate social relations transferred from country of origin to destination society (Levitt 2001 ; Nonini 2002 ); rather, their subjective and socially expressed experiences are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may be complicated (undercut, refracted, blurred) by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities: a sense of being Latin American may thus coexist with a sense of being Jewish, Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan, Latino or Hispanic, or perhaps a more general awareness of “being immigrant Jews on their way to becoming Americans.”

Jews in the United States live in “stacked social spaces” characterized by high levels of foreign-born residents. These spaces, which share sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts, extend over the noncontiguous geographic spaces in American society, hence questioning what Ludger Pries ( 2008 ) calls the past predominance of “mutual embeddedness of social practices, symbols and artifacts in uni-local geographic containers” and the “complete conjunction of the social and the spatial.” We can thus conceive of these communities as the territorialization of a differential net of diasporic spaces (Brah 2011) which comprise a large number of multiple realities, intertwined with its local, national, and regional circumstances, and still maintain the communication thread through the experience of diaspora in and of itself.

The Latin American Jewish case is an apt choice in that regard, since Latin American Jewish immigrants in the United States have invested strongly in establishing the institutional support structures for a collective identity. The relatively high degree of formalization and institutionalization is supra-local, as it was when establishing Jewish life in the South; that is, group organizations and institutions embrace far more than local communal needs and attachments. Jewish communal life is thus characterized by strong collective historical bonds that transcend national borders and find expression in diasporic and transnational practices. The case at hand can mediate between discourses of national (nation-state and political) migration studies, on the one hand, and individual or family-based migration and transmigration studies, on the other (Portes et al. 1999 ; Beck 2007 ; Amelina et al. 2012 ).

Several paradigmatic fields and patterns can be identified in locations with a strong collective Latin American Jewish presence, where agency and structure interact in a differentiated scenario of places and actors. Their relocation takes place in existing and reconfigured spaces of American Jewry. It occurs largely because unique and shared Jewish dimensions allow for sociocultural embeddedness amidst inner diversity. Paradigmatic of this trend is the array of educational choices. Social integration and encounters between the different and the similar often entail new cultural trade-offs. Social boundaries are maintained, though bifurcation and overlapping occur—as expressed through a revised articulation of social and cultural markers, as in the case of family unity, ideational connectedness with the State of Israel, memorialization of the Shoah, and sensitivity to antisemitism. These values—once perceived as stemming from the Latin American Jewish experience—may now come to be regarded by some as more universally Jewish. Others, to be true, would assertively oppose such an importation of paramount Jewish diasporic values into American Jewish discourse. The institutional map of the educational system accounts for both cultural and socioeconomic factors.

The sub-ethnic axis shapes the strong connectedness among migrants independently of their country of origin and across global cities. Simultaneously, religious differentiation acts as a hard divide in providing affiliation and spaces that also crosscut place of origin. The way national origin overlaps with religious origin is deserving of attention. The inner religious divisions in Judaism and a Latino pan-ethnic identity develop together with both a Jewish comprehensive ethnic belonging and a fragmentary religious one. Countries of origin, cities of destination, and sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts and time frames are variables that influence and shape a diversified world.

Redefining and reconnecting their attachments, migrants are involved in processes of diaspora-making and diaspora-unmaking . Various scenarios emerge as they experience de-socialization from their country and community of origin and re-socialization in the country and community of destination (Van Hear 1998 ). Variability, complexity, and heterogeneity seem to be the rule. Thus, Greater Miami mirrors the cycles of migration crises in the region, starting with the first Jewish Cuban collective migratory/exiled wave and successive crises in the region. The expansion of a transnational community took place in new frontier areas such as Caribbean Florida or the American Southwest where complex dynamics developed, grounded in patterns that are particular to each national group but are generalized also within a large population. A shared sense of living in a community with other Latin Americans, the existence of communal organized spaces that represent group continuity, and the presence of a critical mass enhance new social regrouping by allowing migrants to establish and bolster formal and informal networks based on their common origins.

In San Diego, an ethno-national enclave with a transnational character developed among Mexican Jews, leading to what may be termed a secondary diaspora. The migrant experience in the North-East-Midwest triangle and its counterpart in Texas represent individual-professional cases, rather than collective migration patterns. Age, gender, and household composition—selectively younger and nuclear—provide interesting doors of entry and mapping routes into associational connections. It is thus possible to further question and analyze a scenario of de-diasporization that could lead to either individual integration or new prevailing criteria and axes of regrouping.

The US opened a wide spectrum of the legacy Latin Americans bring with them and accounts for the increasing transnationalism of the Jewish world. American Jewish life has been transformed by general social and communal patterns with distinct implications for continued collective communal life: transitions from individualization to collective affirmation, and their subsequent reversal; from congregational to communal models, albeit simultaneously witnessing a growing role for synagogues; from secularization to rising expressions of new forms of religiosity, even as secularism appears to be gaining ground; from privatization to communal revival. These trends are not linear but rather reflect changing moments, fluctuations, and interacting paths and are both cause and effect of a transnational overall interconnection.

Such dynamics may be approached as encounters between peripheral alterities and central alterities. Latin American Jews in particular may be seen as bearers of peripheral identities vis-à-vis the Anglo-Protestant core culture. On their side, American Jews face a certain degree of dissonance between their subjective sense of being “insiders” and those aspects of the Jewish experience that reflect their difference as “outsiders” (Biale et al. 1998 ; Rohrbacher 2016 ). Along a chain of “ otherness ” in American Jewish social spaces, recent immigrants may serve as reminders that American Jewry is to some extent being steadily reconstituted, and thus has not completed its processes of integration . The interplay between “otherness,” distinctiveness, and integration partly reflects previous experiences and partly marks new challenges.

A node in which these different dimensions converge may be seen is the ongoing question of “Jews of Color .” The overlapping of racial, ethnic, and national criteria and their socioeconomic, cultural, and religious connections raises fundamental questions as to the way the inclusion–exclusion dyad in community life is conceptually and practically approached (DellaPergola 2020b ). The undifferentiated incorporation of Hispanic, Sephardic, Mizrachi, Asian, and Middle Eastern—if it occurs—homogenizes an otherwise distinctive population, with its various trajectories and cultures. It may be read as a counterreaction to the racialized ethnicity for Hispanic/Latino which largely excluded Latin American Jews. A twofold dilemmatic ascription of identity and identification emerges—that of Latinos, who are generally seen as non-white in the US, and that of Jews, who are viewed as white (Bokser Liwerant 2015c ).

The initial questions of whether these immigrants should be classified primarily as Jewish, hence white, or whether their national identities as Argentine, Mexican, or Cuban weaken their Jewish ethno-religious identity must be weighed against the more complex issue of equating tout court Jews with whites, equivocally phrased as Ashkenazi hegemony or “whiteness.” Should social scientists show some hesitation at applying categories taken from a racialized reality vis-à-vis universalizing narratives and ethnic divisions? How does the equation of Jews with whites fit into a social and political context that shows signs of white supremacy and antisemitism?

The subjective and socially expressed experiences of Latin American Jews are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may increase in complexity by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities and corresponding organizational structures. Various permutations take place, including reaffirmation, intermingling, and disentanglement, as variegated subgroups deploy in and around concurrent ethno-cultural-national (country of origin) boundaries in common spaces, intergenerational and communal (Brubaker 2006 , 2015c).

Latin American Jewish migration to the US implies an altered stance vis-à-vis the connection to Israel; a geographically diverse transnationalism replaces older binary connections. That does not necessarily imply the weakening of attachments, but rather their re-signification. Israel was historically perceived by Latin American Jews as a vital space for those in need, in addition to its role as a sovereign political center and a focal axis of structural development. In the US, this amalgam may be readjusted as the “need” element makes way for other expressions of attachment and identification. Moreover, North American Jewish institutions become for their country of origin an important source of direct political support and a model for collective organization. This change must also be pondered considering the hypothesis of American Jewish self-distancing from Israel, which has elicited much debate (Cohen and Kelman 2009 ; DellaPergola 2010 ; Goldscheider 2010 ; Sasson et al. 2010 ). New data throw light both on meaningful attachment and on the age differentiation—an expression of prevailing changing dynamics (Pew Research Center 2021 ).

Latin American Jewish youth in the US increasingly participate in Birthright ( Taglit ), which has become an alternative to the study trips and intensive youth programs ( hakhsharot ) common in their countries of origin (Sasson et al. 2010 ). In this context, educational trips to Israel may be seen as fragments of the cultural and institutional practices for which Israel is conceived of as a site for the symbolic encoding of meanings and the formation of a sense of belonging while the awareness of an interconnected Jewish world is strengthened. Interactions between Israel and diaspora Jewish communities and their role in building Jewish identities exhibit complex dynamics—plural meanings of center-home (spiritual, symbolic, material) and transnational ideational motives. In this regard, youth trips may be conceptualized as a praxis that reveals the unique convergence of modern nationalism with the growing practical and conceptual presence of transnationalism in the Jewish world, thus shedding light on the changing role of the center or homeland in guaranteeing the continuity of the diaspora (Kelner 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2016b ). Thus, trips oscillate between links and bonds to the nation-state and diaspora-building as two interdependent pillars of the continuity of the collective. This interaction becomes challenging in the light of the rise of new identities with different levels of aggregation—both primordial and elective—and their renewed importance in the shaping of global, national, and local communal spheres.

A Global Memory

The multiplication, pluralization, and diversification of semantic-ideological and institutional connections between major arenas of Jewish life that develop between community and society—between the public and the private arenas—, as well as the components of collective identities, are defined by Eisenstadt ( 2010 ) as the crystallization of a new civilizational constellation. In this context, new relations between identity referents emerge. As such, the memory of the Shoah has progressively become an identification focus. It can be interpreted as located at the crossroads between collective memory—the memory of personal experiences or those of the group of belonging—and historical memory—which is mediated by its representations, symbols, and sites—as proposed by Halbwachs ( 1980 ). Besides its inherent and essential weight, it implies the culture of circulation, oscillating between Israel and the Shoah. Political developments within the Jewish state initially projected the Shoah as an identity referent, an iconic one, often above even the contents of the national state project. Israel gradually took on the role of collective memory keeper and shares it today with a reconfigured Jewish and non-Jewish world. Indeed, successive wars brought the recovery of its memory; the risk implied reinforced the conception of existential threat. Gradually, the increasing emergence of critical stands against Zionism and the Jewish state led to stripping the Jewish condition of its refugee profile and replacing it with a transfiguration that turned the victim into a victimizer, the refugee into the origin and cause of new exiles.

However, the transformation of the memory of the Shoah into a new identity paradigm was built inside the Jewish world not only as the road traced by the search of the past, but also as a counter-reference to the Jewish nation-state, as part of the claim for its universal over its particular meaning. The ideal of a cosmopolitan Judaism that seeks to construct a common human consciousness based on reducing ethnic or territorial barriers was constructed through the state–exile binomial. Its extreme conception questioned the Jewish national paradigm, seeing it as a threat that could “eradicate the certainty of uprooting, the mere entrenchment of the word, the legacy of the Prophets and the custodians of the books” (Steiner, 1985 ; Butler 2004 ). Exile and memory of destruction thus come together in a simultaneously tragic and heroic exiled figure. Head-on questioning of the State of Israel has emerged from this approach in the most pivotal moments of the Palestinian conflict. Yet, the paradoxical reversal of the centrality and meaning of the memory of the Shoah today finds expression in central arguments of representatives of post- and de-colonial thought, questioning and condemning it as part of the Western effort to displace and reject other genocides. Colonial racism is analyzed within the framework of the Holocaust and colonialism remembrance, and thus represents the Western, Eurocentric remembrance paradigm (Mignolo 2009 ; Grosfogel 2009 ).

The memory of the Shoah has also sought to explain its similarity to other genocides (Bokser Liwerant, Gleizer and Siman, 2016 ). In a world where globalization trends intensify antisemitic expressions, the idea of a universalizing memory sought to counter them. In Argentina, for instance, in light of the repression and antisemitic attacks starting in the late 1980s, the Shoah emerged as the axis of a new paradigm of memory and remembrance which sought to recover a thread of linkages between the traumatic episodes of Argentine reality and the Shoah. The latter connected with the repressive military dictatorship, the desaparecidos, the impunity and lack of justice. The 1994 bombing of the iconic building of AMIA—and two years earlier, the Israeli Embassy—were interpreted as one more link in the long chain of historical hate. They were also incorporated as part of a broad movement that fought for memory and justice, aiming to reconstruct the public sphere and redefine the place of a minority in the legitimate frame of full citizenship (Senkman 2005 , 2008 ). Simultaneously, universalizing the memory of the Shoah also meant shifting emphasis from the mass destruction of a people to the understanding of individual suffering and its moral consequences, as shown by the perspective of the American ethos and the Jewish present of integration.

A full circle of changing patterns of cultural representations and social relations has a direct impact on associational dynamics and institutional formations that shape the structural underpinnings of Jewish life, enhanced by the digitalization of world communications, which has favored transnational ethnic and religious associations and virtual communities. The interpretation of belonging is less ideologically homogeneous while, paradoxically, the emergence of new nationalisms take place. These processes interact with the reconfiguration of communities that are exposed to social and cultural frameworks subject both to boundary erosion and to the organized spheres for boundary maintenance.

Concluding Remarks

The central trends and issues analyzed shed light on the Americas as a diverse territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity—ideally one, in reality diverse. The global Jewish world, for its part, was the carrier of its own diversity: its life parameters in the national and regional spaces were built on commonalities and inner differences that, as analyzed here, found expression on several spheres—from education and communal patterns of organization to the place of Jewish individuals and communities in the public sphere, as well as the role of and links with Israel.

Solid substrata of various forms of associational and institutional underpinnings provided the ground for common challenges and collective cohesion. Diaspora-building emerged as the territory where the collective became shaped and reshaped. Differing interactions between primordial and elective identities—accelerated by globalization processes—varied between North and South and within each region and country. Changes over time and the pluralization and diversification of social life posed new challenges that led to the redefinition of the spaces where collective and individual possibilities develop.

Having analyzed the main conceptual and empirical lenses to account for the experience of Jews in the Americas, several questions emerge before us. We need to cross the national borders where Jewish diasporas dwell in an effort to understand the globality of the Jewish condition and also to understand the current dynamics of transnationalism. Are we going to see more convergence or divergence between the North and the South? Will globalization trends reach a maximum limit, followed by regression? Are the Jewish Americas moving toward a position of isolation or one of continued participation with world Jewry and Israel? Will the Americas and Israel build together a new poly-centered or de-centered matrix, or will fragmentation and antagonism overcome consensus-building? Will our broad field of knowledge—its theoretical, methodological formulations and our epistemic communities—be receptive to the changes required to face increased complexity and uncertainty?

Regarding our first query, no easy assumption or one-dimensional approach seems adequate to produce a serious answer. We may broadly affirm that convergences and divergences display differentially within the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres. While the social sciences have studied the achievements of globalization processes—the growing interconnection between countries, economies and societies, collaboration in science, the circulation of cultures and human mobility itself—new expressions point to increased differentiation and inequalities between regions and countries, as well as within societies and communities. These processes are made evident by the growing paradox of the dynamics of integration–fragmentation, inclusion–exclusion, and dispersion–concentration (Cicchelli 2018 ).

Furthermore, globalization today is confronted by nationalist and isolationist trends. While not only the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic (and its resulting disruptions and imbalances) but also its possible solutions enhance the need for collaboration and global governance, peaks of nationalism are simultaneously looming. Both moments are seen as irreconcilable: the different governments tried to respond in the short term, each with its own profile and capabilities, while at the same time they lost legitimacy within their societies. The picture differed in the US, in Canada, and in the various Latin American societies. It may become enhanced by the fact that the differing scales of poverty and social inequality will probably deepen the gap between the regions, leading to the intensification of migration and bringing new migration crises and movement from the South to the North and from the North elsewhere.

While the Americas are more interdependent than in the past, we are witnessing different paths of restructuring regional and national processes. Democracies in the North and democratization in the South may further lead Jews and Jewish life to a shift from the focus on differences of a center-linked diaspora to a broader focus that encompasses emerging civic commonalities and transnational links as well. However, both this tendency and the renewal of collective affirmation draw challenging scenarios. The prevailing inner divisions are expressed in differing institutional capabilities by the various sectors. Indeed, the sectorialization of Jewish life has seriously challenged the existing forms of organization and of leadership and underlines the need for appropriate spaces where inner differences may be negotiated.

We may think of a scenario of a world Jewish network-society articulated between diverse focal places of Jewish life. A Jewish world might coalesce in global and integral terms based on networks and relationships, links, and interactions that include voluntary and compulsory frameworks, primordial and elective foci of identities, associative and institutionalized structures. It would be a world in which plural identities would claim differentiated approaches to individuals and institutional orders as agents of changes.

However, we must question whether the inner divisions of Jewish life—religious, political, cultural, and socioeconomic—will lead to cross-national and overlapping sectorial relations blurring but not necessarily bringing the diaspora communities and Israel closer. The continental dynamics have been, although differentially, connected to Israel. Will American diaspora communities continue to maintain changing but strong links with Israel, or will the divergences lead to fragmentation?

And again, while the US, Canadian, and Latin American communities developed, as analyzed, differential bilateral functionalities, the importance attributed to the center-home duality by various sectors reflects the changing profile of an ethno-national diaspora entering new transnational dynamics. Future patterns of migration, geographical mobility, and its implications, the reshaping of existing and newly created communities, the expansion of material and symbolic boundaries, and their redefinition in a mobile context are all processes that will influence and modify the links with Israel. The interdependence between the nation-state-home (concrete, ideational, putative) and diaspora-building—strongly conditioned by varying Jewish models of collective life—develops along a diversified world of identities and religious and political allegiances.

The potential dynamics of interdependence, disjuncture, and convergences among these axes are closely related to the developments in Israel. While in the US the liberal sectors’ increased criticism of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its lack of official recognition of all the Jewish religious streams have acted as dispute referents vis-à-vis Israel, the latter has maintained its centrality and unavoidability in the public conversation. How distancing and disaffiliation from the organized Jewish community will interact with the nexus with Israel is an open question. Will it be defined by political and cultural dissent?

Canadian Jewry has been homogeneously closer to Israel, and Latin American Jewish communities may well be able to continue to develop their relation at the crossroads of ideology and needs.

Our triad—globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora—highlights singular patterns defined by the stability and plasticity of the Jewish historical trajectory. However, regarding the epistemic challenges we posed, understanding the triad in the Americas demands that we work on the conceptual and methodological mediations and in-depth complementary relations between differing analytical levels and disciplines.

The former has been approached by Hartman’s analytical model. Though focused on the individual and the family, it may be projected to wider comparative Jewish populations. It characterizes different levels of ecological factors influencing Jewish life cycles and populations at different times in history and in different geographical contexts— microsystem , mesosystem , macrosystem , chronosystem , and exosystem (Hartman 2020 ).

Approaching the challenge from the perspective of the disciplinary interaction, the question arises of which is the space where these articulations are to be formulated in order to favor encounters between various disciplinary logics, each with its own specialized language, methodological resources, topical focuses, and cognitive identity. How do we transition from community to society, from homeland to diaspora, from individual to group, from community to nation and state, from country to region, and from there to new centers of existence or interaction?

We do move from social territory to the de-territorialization of culture; from the everyday existence inside and out of institutions; from the de-privatization of religion to new circuits of circulation, personal forms of lending meaning and significance to belonging; from past to present; and, above all, from concrete particularity to concrete universality between disciplines (see Fig.  3 ).

Epistemological shift

Further conceptual elaborations and research will stimulate the need to transition from the individual Jewish identity focus to the current challenges of continuity. The new individual turn needs to be theoretically connected to the interdisciplinarity of what social sciences call the subjective turn and its intersection with collective memory and values, not just individual but shared, public, and historical as well, and the concrete orders where memory and values are recreated and transmitted.

holds a PhD Cum Laude in Social Sciences (Political Science). She is a Senior Full Time Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM); member of the Mexican Academy of Science and of the National Research System, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2013. She is the Director and Chief Editor of the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales , and Co-editor of the series Jewish Identities in a Changing World ( Brill). She has been the recipient of several national and international awards, including the Marshall Sklare Award. She is the author and editor of 14 books, over 100 book chapters, and over 90 scientific articles. In her research, political science, sociology, history, and contemporary Jewry converge. Among her research axes are Latin American Jewry; Modernity in its concurrent dynamics of homogeneity-diversity; Latin American Multiple Modernities; collective identities in the public sphere; globalization, diaspora and transnationalism. Selected publications: Belonging and Otherness. Jews in/of Latin America (2011); Reconsidering Israel-Diaspora Relations (2014); Israel-Diaspora Relations: Continuities and Discontinuities (2021); Antisemitism (and related expressions of prejudice) in a global world. A view from Latin America (2021).

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At Brooklyn Seder Protest, Jewish New Yorkers Target Schumer Over Aid

Approximately 200 were arrested after pro-Palestinian Jewish groups rallied near Chuck Schumer’s home, as the Senate prepared to authorize billions of dollars in aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

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Pro-Palestinian Jewish Groups Rally Near Schumer’s Brooklyn Home

Approximately 200 people were arrested after protesting one block away from the home of senator chuck schumer of new york..

Crowd: “Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! “Senator Schumer, your Jewish constituents and the vast majority of the U.S. demands stop arming Israel.” “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest. Disclose, divest.” “Let Gaza live, let Gaza live.”

By Camille Baker and Claire Fahy

• April 23, 2024

As Senator Chuck Schumer of New York prepared for a final vote to pass an aid package that would provide $26 billion to Israel and billions more to Ukraine and Taiwan, approximately 200 protesters were arrested, according to the police, after blocking traffic in his Brooklyn neighborhood on the second night of Passover to call for an end to the United States’ military support of Israel.

Though Mr. Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, was in Washington, demonstrators rallied on Tuesday in Grand Army Plaza, one block away from his Brooklyn home, a common site of protests since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. As the sun set, hundreds of people gathered around a circular banner representing a Seder plate, which included the words “Jews say stop arming Israel” alongside images of foods eaten during the Seder meal.

“This will not be a Seder as usual. These are not usual times,” Morgan Bassichis, a member of the progressive group Jewish Voice for Peace, said to attendees.

After a series of speakers addressed the rally, a large portion of the crowd moved into the street between the north edge of Prospect Park and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, blocking the flow of traffic and prompting drivers to lean on their horns. Police officers who had been monitoring the event warned the demonstrators that they would be arrested if they did not move; when they stayed put, officers wielding zip-tie handcuffs moved in and began making arrests. Roughly 200 protesters, some wearing reflective vests over black T-shirts that read “Jews Say Cease Fire Now,” were led away in pairs.

The protest, organized by pro-Palestinian Jewish groups, marked what has been a distinctly different Passover celebration for Jewish people in New York City and beyond, as college campuses and family dinner tables feel the ripple effects of the Israel-Hamas war.

Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said the protest was held during Passover in order to send a message to Mr. Schumer as the Senate moved toward a final vote on aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Roughly $9 billion of that $95 billion package is dedicated to “worldwide humanitarian aid,” including for civilians in Gaza. (The package later passed in a 79-to-18 vote .)

“Everything in our tradition compels us to bring everything we have to stopping these historic atrocities being done in our names and with our tax dollars,” Ms. Fox said in an interview on Monday.

Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States, recently called for elections to replace Benjamin Netanyahu , the Israeli prime minister, once the war winds down. His rebuke of the Jewish state’s leader last month — in a speech in which he also spoke of his love for the state of Israel and his horror at the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 — exposed the widening gap between Israel and the United States, its most important ally, analysts said.

“Senator Schumer just very recently spoke very harshly about Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Senate floor,” Beth Miller, the political director for Jewish Voice for Peace, said at the protest on Tuesday. “For him to do that with one hand, and then on the other hand reward Prime Minister Netanyahu by pushing forward this military funding package, shows that he is not serious about actually shifting U.S. policy to leverage change.”

One attendee, Calvin Harrison, 29, a community organizer who lives in Manhattan, said he was at Grand Army Plaza “because I’m a Jew and I was raised to believe that Judaism is about justice.”

“Passover is a celebration of liberation for the future,” he went on. “We can’t celebrate liberation for ourselves while we’re oppressing Palestinians.”

Camille Baker is a news assistant working for The Times’s Data team, which analyzes important data related to weather and elections. More about Camille Baker

Claire Fahy reports on New York City and the surrounding area for The Times. She can be reached at [email protected]. More about Claire Fahy

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

The tents that failed to keep out the cold when many Gazans first fled their homes have now become suffocating as highs surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Here’s how the heat is exacerbating already dire problems  from Israel’s war in Gaza.

Israel welcomed a U.S. aid package signed by President Biden that will send about $15 billion in military aid to Israel, increasing American support  for its closest Middle East ally despite strains in their relationship over Israel’s prosecution of the war in the Gaza Strip.

The United Nations’ human rights office called for an independent investigation into two mass graves  found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza, including one discovered days ago over which Israeli and Palestinian authorities offered differing accounts.

After weeks of delays, negotiations and distractions, Israel appeared to hint that its assault of Rafah  — a city teeming with more than a million displaced persons above ground and riddled with Hamas tunnels below — was all but inevitable. Here’s how it might unfold .

Mourning Nearly 200 Relatives: Adam and Ola Abo Sheriah absorb a loss few can imagine, and scramble to help surviving family members  in Gaza while trying to get their kids to their New Jersey school on time.

A Generational Clash on Seder: At Passover Seders, many families addressed the war in Gaza , leading to rising tensions, while 200 New Yorkers from pro-Palestinian Jewish groups were arrested after rallying  near Chuck Schumer’s home to protest aid to Israel.

PEN America’s Fallout: The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza , which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel.

Fears Over Iran Buoy Netanyahu: The Israeli prime minister lost considerable support after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Tensions with Iran have helped him claw  some of it back.

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• Jewish Americans in 2020

U.S. Jews are culturally engaged, increasingly diverse, politically polarized and worried about anti-Semitism

Table of contents.

• 1. The size of the U.S. Jewish population
• 2. Jewish identity and belief
• 3. Jewish practices and customs
• 4. Marriage, families and children
• 5. Jewish community and connectedness
• 6. Anti-Semitism and Jewish views on discrimination
• 7. U.S. Jews’ connections with and attitudes toward Israel
• 8. U.S. Jews’ political views
• 9. Race, ethnicity, heritage and immigration among U.S. Jews
• 10. Jewish demographics
• 11. Economics and well-being among U.S. Jews
• 12. People of Jewish background and Jewish affinity
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Survey methodology
• Appendix B: Mode experiment

For this report, we surveyed 4,718 U.S. adults who identify as Jewish, including 3,836 Jews by religion and 882 Jews of no religion. The survey was administered online and by mail by Westat, from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020. Respondents were drawn from a national, stratified random sampling of residential mailing addresses, which included addresses from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. No lists of common Jewish names, membership rolls of Jewish organizations or other indicators of Jewishness were used to draw the initial sample.

We first sent letters to the sampled addresses asking an adult (18 or older) living in the household to take a short screening survey (“the screener”) either online or on a printed paper form, which they mailed back to us. The screener collected demographic characteristics and determined eligibility. In households with more than one adult resident, we selected the respondent randomly by some simple method, such as asking the person who most recently celebrated a birthday to fill out the screener.

A total of 68,398 people across the country completed the screener. Respondents who indicated in the screener that they are Jewish were asked to take a longer survey. Three criteria were used to determine eligibility for the extended survey: (1) if the responding adult said their current religion is Jewish; (2) if the responding adult did not identify their religion as Jewish but said that, aside from religion, they consider themselves to be Jewish in any way, such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background; (3) if the responding adult did not identify with the first two criteria but said they were raised in the Jewish tradition or had a Jewish parent. All adults who reported any of these criteria were given the extended survey to complete.

However, this report focuses on the answers given in the extended survey by those who said their present religion is Jewish (Jews by religion), plus those who said they presently have no religion (they identify religiously as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular) but who consider themselves Jewish aside from religion and have at least one Jewish parent or were raised Jewish (Jews of no religion). Together, these two groups comprise the net Jewish population, also referred to as U.S. Jews or Jewish Americans throughout the report.

In addition to the 4,718 respondents who were categorized as Jewish in these two ways, we also interviewed an additional 1,163 respondents who were determined to be eligible for the survey, but who ultimately were not categorized as Jewish for the purposes of this report. Some of these respondents indicated they have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but said they currently have a different religion (many are Christian) or do not consider themselves Jewish today in any way , either by religion or aside from religion. Others indicated that they do not have a Jewish parent, were not raised Jewish and do not identify with the Jewish religion, yet they do consider themselves Jewish in some way, such as because they are married to a Jewish person or are Christian and link Jesus with Judaism.

Both the full sample of all initial respondents (including those who were screened out as ineligible for the extended survey) and the sample of respondents to the extended survey were weighted to align with demographic benchmarks for the U.S. adult population from the Census Bureau as well as a set of modeled estimates for the religious and demographic composition of eligible adults within the larger U.S. adult population.

For more information, see the Methodology . The Methodology also contains detailed information on margins of sampling error and other potential sources of bias. Statistical significance is measured in this report at a 95% confidence level using standard tests and taking into account the effects of a complex sampling design. The questions used in this analysis can be found here.

What does it mean to be Jewish in America? A new Pew Research Center survey finds that many Jewish Americans participate, at least occasionally, both in some traditional religious practices – like going to a synagogue or fasting on Yom Kippur – and in some Jewish cultural activities, like making potato latkes, watching Israeli movies or reading Jewish news online. Among young Jewish adults, however, two sharply divergent expressions of Jewishness appear to be gaining ground – one involving religion deeply enmeshed in every aspect of life, and the other involving little or no religion at all.

Overall, about a quarter of U.S. Jewish adults (27%) do not identify with the Jewish religion: They consider themselves to be Jewish ethnically, culturally or by family background and have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, but they answer a question about their current religion by describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” rather than as Jewish. Among Jewish adults under 30, four-in-ten describe themselves this way.

At the same time, younger Jewish adults are much more likely than older Jews to identify as Orthodox. Among Jews ages 18 to 29, 17% self-identify as Orthodox, compared with just 3% of Jews 65 and older. And fully one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults under the age of 30 are Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox (11%), compared with 1% of Jews 65 and older.

Meanwhile, the two branches of Judaism that long predominated in the U.S. have less of a hold on young Jews than on their elders. Roughly four-in-ten Jewish adults under 30 identify with either Reform (29%) or Conservative Judaism (8%), compared with seven-in-ten Jews ages 65 and older.

In other words, the youngest U.S. Jews count among their ranks both a relatively large share of traditionally observant, Orthodox Jews and an even larger group of people who see themselves as Jewish for cultural, ethnic or family reasons but do not identify with Judaism – as a religion – at all. Many people in both groups participate, at least sometimes, in the same cultural activities, such as cooking traditional Jewish foods, visiting Jewish historical sites and listening to Jewish or Israeli music. Yet the survey finds that most people in the latter group (Jews of no religion) feel they have not much or nothing at all in common with the former group (Orthodox Jews).

There were some signs of this divergence in Pew Research Center’s previous survey of Jewish Americans, conducted in 2013. But it is especially evident in the 2020 survey, conducted during a polarizing election campaign.

Politically, U.S. Jews on the whole tilt strongly liberal and tend to support the Democratic Party. When the new survey was fielded, from late fall 2019 through late spring 2020, 71% said they were Democrats or leaned Democratic. Among Jews of no religion, roughly three-quarters were Democrats or leaned that way. But Orthodox Jews have been trending in the opposite direction, becoming as solidly Republican as non-Orthodox Jews are solidly Democratic. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, 75% of Orthodox Jews said they were Republicans or leaned Republican, compared with 57% in 2013. And 86% of Orthodox Jews rated then-President Donald Trump’s handling of policy toward Israel as “excellent” or “good,” while a majority of all U.S. Jews described it as “only fair” or “poor.”

While these generational shifts toward both Orthodoxy and secular Jewishness have the potential, in time, to reshape American Jewry, the new survey paints a portrait of Jewish Americans in 2020 that is not dramatically different from 2013. Counting all Jewish adults – young and old, combined – the percentages who identify as Orthodox, Conservative and Reform are little changed. The size of the adult Jewish population is also remarkably stable in percentage terms, while rising in absolute numbers, roughly in line with the total U.S. population.

Pew Research Center estimates that as of 2020, 2.4% of U.S. adults are Jewish, including 1.7% who identify with the Jewish religion and 0.6% who are Jews of no religion. By comparison, the 2013 estimate for “net Jews” was 2.2%, including 1.8% who were Jews by religion and 0.5% who were Jews of no religion. (These figures are rounded to one decimal. Given the expected range of precision for two surveys of this size and complexity, it is safer to say that the adult Jewish population has roughly kept pace with change in the U.S. population than to focus on small differences in the 2013 and 2020 incidence rates.)

In absolute numbers, the 2020 Jewish population estimate is approximately 7.5 million, including 5.8 million adults and 1.8 million children (rounded to the closest 100,000). The 2013 estimate was 6.7 million, including 5.3 million adults and 1.3 million children. The precision of these population estimates should not be exaggerated; they are derived from a sample of the U.S. public that is very large compared with most surveys (more than 68,000 interviews) but are still subject to sampling error and other practical difficulties that produce uncertainty. Furthermore, the size of the Jewish population greatly depends on one’s definition of who counts as Jewish. For more details on the 2020 population estimates, including alternative definitions of Jewishness, see Chapter 1 .

The new survey continues to find that Jewish Americans, on average, are older, have higher levels of education, earn higher incomes, and are more geographically concentrated in the Northeast than Americans overall. There is also evidence that the U.S. Jewish population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Overall, 92% of Jewish adults identify as White (non-Hispanic), and 8% identify with all other categories combined. But among Jews ages 18 to 29, that figure rises to 15%. Already, 17% of U.S. Jews surveyed live in households in which at least one child or adult is Black, Hispanic, Asian, some other (non-White) race or ethnicity, or multiracial. 1

Although in many ways the U.S. Jewish population is flourishing, concerns about anti-Semitism have risen among American Jews. Three-quarters say there is more anti-Semitism in the United States than there was five years ago, and just over half (53%) say that “as a Jewish person in the United States” they feel less safe than they did five years ago. Jews who wear distinctively religious attire, such as a kippa or head covering, are particularly likely to say they feel less safe. But the impact on behavior seems to be limited: Even among those who feel less safe, just one-in-ten – or 5% of all U.S. Jews – report that they have stayed away from a Jewish event or observance as a result.

These are among the key findings of Pew Research Center’s new survey of U.S. Jews, conducted from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020, among 4,718 Jews across the country who were identified through 68,398 completed screening interviews conducted by mail and online.

Comparisons between the new survey and the 2013 survey of Jewish Americans are complicated by a host of methodological differences. At the time the 2013 study was conducted, it used the best available methods for selecting a random, representative sample of Jews across the United States: dialing randomly generated telephone numbers and having live interviewers (real people, not recorded voices) ask a series of screening questions to identify respondents who consider themselves Jewish. By 2020, however, response rates to telephone surveys had declined so precipitously that random-digit dialing by telephone was no longer the best way to conduct a large, nationwide survey of a small subgroup of the U.S. public.

Instead, we sent letters to randomly selected residential addresses across the country, asking the recipients to go online to take a short screening survey. We also provided the option to fill out the survey on a paper form and return it by mail, so as not to limit the survey only to people who have access to the internet and are comfortable using it. These methods obtained a response rate (17%) similar to the 2013 survey’s (16%) and much higher than what telephone surveys now typically obtain (approximately 5%).

But, because of the differences between the ways the two surveys were conducted, this report is cautious about making direct comparisons of results on individual questions. For more information on how the new survey was conducted, see the Methodology . For guidance on whether 2020 survey questions can be compared with similar questions in the 2013 survey, see Appendix B .

Because the 2020 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews was conducted by mail and online, the results on many questions are not directly comparable with the Center’s 2013 survey, which was conducted by telephone.

Years of research on survey methods shows that people tend to answer some questions differently when they are responding to a live interviewer on a telephone than when they are providing written answers in privacy, either online or on paper. Social scientists believe the differences are caused by a variety of factors, often including an unconscious tendency to give socially desirable answers when talking to another person.

However, not all survey questions are subject to this “social desirability bias.” To examine the impact of the methodological differences between the 2013 and 2020 surveys, Pew Research Center conducted an experiment with a separate group of 2,290 Jewish respondents, randomly assigning some to be interviewed by phone and others to answer the same questions online.

This experiment was not part of the actual survey; none of the experiment’s participants are counted as respondents in the main survey. But we have used the findings to help assess whether differences between the 2013 and 2020 results on particular questions represent real changes in the views of Jewish Americans over that seven-year period or, on the contrary, may just reflect the different “modes” (live interviewer vs. self-administered) in which the two surveys were conducted.

The mode experiment indicates that several questions about Jewish religious observance are subject to substantial social desirability bias in telephone polls. For example, the share of respondents who say they attend synagogue services at least monthly was 11 percentage points higher among those speaking with a live interviewer by telephone than among those responding on the web or by mail, in line with a pattern among Americans as a whole . The experiment also found differences in the way respondents answered questions about the importance of “being Jewish” and of religion in their lives. In addition, social desirability bias seems to affect the way U.S. Jews answer some questions about Israel, including how emotionally attached they feel toward the Jewish state.

Moreover, these “mode effects” are not the only potentially important difference between the two studies. They also used different strategies to sample Jews. It’s possible that the 2020 web/mail survey may not have been as effective as the 2013 phone survey at reaching segments of the Jewish population who are uncomfortable with going online or lack access to the Internet, while the new survey might have been more effective at reaching tech-savvy groups like young people. Even though all eligible respondents had an opportunity to complete the 2020 survey questionnaire on paper and return it in a postage-paid envelope, this might not have overcome the initial reluctance of some people – such as older Orthodox adults – to participate online. Whether this is actually the case or not is very difficult to determine, but it should be acknowledged as a possibility.

Bearing all these methodological differences in mind, Pew Research Center generally advises against comparing specific numbers or percentage-point estimates from the 2013 and 2020 surveys and assuming that any differences represent real change over a seven-year period.

A few exceptions are noted, where relevant, in this report. For example, there appears to be little or no difference in the way Jewish Americans describe their institutional branch or stream of Judaism (e.g., Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) when speaking on the telephone versus answering online or by mail.

For more information on the mode experiment, see Appendix B .

Branches of American Judaism

The 2020 survey finds that slightly over half of all U.S. Jews (54%) belong to the two long-dominant branches of American Judaism: 37% identify as Reform and 17% as Conservative. Those figures are essentially unchanged from 2013, when a total of 54% identified with either the Reform movement (35%) or Conservative Judaism (18%). 2

The share of all Jewish adults who describe themselves as Orthodox is also about the same in 2020 (9%) as it was in 2013 (10%). Other branches, such as the Reconstructionist movement and Humanistic Judaism, total about 4%, very similar to in 2013 (6%). And the share of Jewish adults who do not identify with any particular stream or institutional branch of Judaism is now 32%, roughly on par with the 2013 survey (30%).

In broad strokes, the characteristics of these groups also are similar in 2020 to what they were in 2013. On average, the Orthodox are the most traditionally observant and emotionally attached to Israel; they tend to be politically conservative, with large families, very low rates of religious intermarriage and a young median age (35 years). 3

Conservative and Reform Jews tend to be less religiously observant in traditional ways, like keeping kosher and regularly attending religious services, but many in these groups participate in Jewish cultural activities, and most are at least somewhat attached to Israel. Demographically, they have high levels of education, small families, higher rates of intermarriage than the Orthodox and an older age profile (median age of 62 for Conservative, 53 for Reform).

There is a fair amount of overlap – though it is far from complete – between the 32% of Jewish adults who do not consider themselves members of any branch or denomination of American Judaism and the 27% who are categorized as “Jews of no religion.” 4 Survey respondents who say their religion is Jewish are categorized as “Jews by religion” no matter what their branch identity or levels of observance. Those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish and say that  aside from religion  they consider themselves Jewish in some way  – such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background – are also fully included in the Jewish population throughout this report. Survey researchers call them Jews of “no religion” because they do not identify with Judaism or any other religion. 5

As in 2013, Jews of no religion stand out in 2020 for low levels of religious participation – particularly synagogue membership and attendance – together with comparatively weak attachments to Israel, feelings of belonging to the Jewish people and engagement in communal Jewish life. They tend to be politically liberal and highly educated, with relatively high rates of intermarriage and a low median age (38 years).

One way to illustrate the divergence between Jews at opposite ends of the religious spectrum is to widen the lens and look at religion in the United States more broadly. Orthodox Jews are among the most highly religious groups in U.S. society in terms of the share who say religion is very important in their lives (86%) – along with Black Protestants (78%) and White evangelicals (76%). Jews of no religion are among the country’s least religious subgroups – even more inclined than unaffiliated U.S. adults (sometimes called “nones”) to say that religion is “not too important” or “not at all important” to them (91% vs. 82%). 6

This 2020 Pew Research Center survey takes the same basic approach to defining Jewishness among U.S. adults and uses the same categories that the Center’s 2013 survey did.

As the earlier report explained, “ Who is a Jew? ” is an ancient question with no single, timeless answer. It is clear from questions in the survey itself that some Jews view Jewishness mainly as a matter of religion, while others see it as a matter of culture, ancestry or some combination of all three traits. Consequently, we sought to cast a wide net, using a screening questionnaire (“the screener”) to determine if respondents consider themselves Jewish in any of those ways.

In 2013, one of the screening questions asked:

Aside from religion, do you consider yourself Jewish or partially Jewish? 

On the recommendation of a panel of academic advisers, researchers modified that question in 2020 to say:

Aside from religion, do you consider yourself to be Jewish in any way (for example, ethnically, culturally or because of your family’s background)?

Questions about the respondent’s spouse and other household members were modified similarly.

Respondents were deemed eligible to take the full, longer survey if they indicated any of the following: (a) their religion is Jewish; or (b) aside from religion, they consider themselves Jewish in any way; or (c) they had a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish.

For the purposes of analysis in this report, however, the definition of Jewishness is narrower. The main categories are:

Jews by religion – people who say their religion is Jewish and who do not profess any other religion

Jews of no religion – people who describe themselves (religiously) as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and who still consider themselves Jewish in any way (such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background)

These two groups together comprise the total or “net” Jewish population – also referred to as U.S. Jews or Jewish Americans throughout this report.

As in 2013, respondents who say they are Jewish and any other religion (such as Christian) are not included in the net Jewish category. Nor are respondents who indicate they have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but who say they do not consider themselves Jewish today in any way.

For more information on the 2020 survey sample, see the box “How we did this” and the Methodology .

Sources of unity and division

While there are some signs of religious divergence and political polarization among U.S. Jews, the survey also finds large areas of consensus. For instance, more than eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say that they feel at least some sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and three-quarters say that “being Jewish” is either very or somewhat important to them.

As in 2013, the 2020 survey asked Jewish Americans whether a list of causes and activities are “essential,” “important but not essential” or “not important” to what being Jewish means to them. Because of methodological differences in the way the survey was conducted and the addition of one item to the list, the results from 2020 on particular items may not be directly comparable to 2013, but the broad pattern of responses is similar in many ways. 7

Seven-in-ten or more U.S. Jews say that remembering the Holocaust (76%) and leading a moral and ethical life (72%) are essential to their Jewish identity. About half or more also say that working for justice and equality in society (59%), being intellectually curious (56%) and continuing family traditions (51%) are essential. Far fewer consider eating traditional Jewish foods (20%) and observing Jewish law (15%) to be essential elements of what being Jewish means to them, personally. However, the observance of halakha – Jewish law – is particularly important to Orthodox Jews, 83% of whom deem it essential.

Views on halakha are just one of many stark differences in beliefs and behaviors between Orthodox Jews and Jewish Americans who identify with other branches of Judaism (or with no particular branch) that are evident in the survey, and that may affect how these groups perceive each other. For example, about half of Orthodox Jews in the U.S. say they have “not much” (23%) or “nothing at all” (26%) in common with Jews in the Reform movement; just 9% feel they have “a lot” in common with Reform Jews.

Reform Jews generally reciprocate those feelings: Six-in-ten say they have not much (39%) or nothing at all (21%) in common with the Orthodox, while 30% of Reform Jews say they have some things in common, and 9% say they have a lot in common with Orthodox Jews.

In fact, both Conservative and Reform Jews are more likely to say they have “a lot” or “some” in common with Jews in Israel (77% and 61%, respectively) than to say they have commonalities with Orthodox Jews in the United States . And Orthodox Jews are far more likely to say they have “a lot” or “some” in common with Israeli Jews (91%) than to say the same about their Conservative and Reform counterparts in the U.S.

U.S. Jews less religious than U.S. adults overall, but some Jewish trends reflect broader American context

When it comes to religion, U.S. Jews are in many ways distinctive from the wider U.S. public – and not just in their engagement with specifically Jewish beliefs and practices.

In general, Jews are far less religious than American adults as a whole, at least by conventional measures of religious observance in Pew Research Center surveys. For example, one-in-five Jews (21%) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 41% of U.S. adults overall. And 12% of Jewish Americans say they attend religious services weekly or more often, versus 27% of the general public.

There are even bigger gaps when it comes to belief in God. A majority of all U.S. adults say they believe in God “as described in the Bible” (56%), compared with about a quarter of Jews (26%). Jewish Americans are more inclined to believe in some other kind of higher power – or no higher power at all.

At the same time, however, the trends playing out among American Jews are similar to many patterns in the broader population. The most obvious of these is growing religious disaffiliation: The percentage of U.S. Jews who do not claim any religion (27%) – i.e., who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” religiously – is virtually identical to the percentage of U.S. adults overall in these categories (28%).

In addition, intermarriage is not just a Jewish phenomenon. Religious intermarriage also appears to be on the rise in the U.S. adult population more broadly. The same is true for rising levels of racial and ethnic diversity, which is happening in most U.S. religious groups as the country’s population as a whole becomes more diverse. Finally, the fact that Orthodox Jews tend to have more children aligns with a general pattern in which highly religious Americans have higher fertility rates than non-religious ones.

Why Jews go, or don’t go, to religious services

Left unanswered by the 2013 study was why many Jewish Americans, particularly in younger cohorts, rarely attend synagogue, and in what ways , if any, they connect with Judaism or other Jews.

The 2020 survey includes some new questions designed to help explore those issues. To begin with, Jews who say they attend services at a synagogue, temple, minyan or havurah at least once a month – 20% of Jewish adults – were asked what draws them to religious services. Those who attend services a few times a year or less were asked what keeps them away; this group makes up nearly eight-in-ten U.S. Jews (79%).

Of nine possible reasons for attending Jewish services offered in the survey, the most commonly chosen is “Because I find it spiritually meaningful.” Nine-in-ten regular attenders say this is a reason they go to services (92%), followed closely by “Because I feel a sense of belonging” (87%) and “To feel connected to my ancestry or history” (83%). About two-thirds (65%) say they feel a religious obligation, and Orthodox Jews are especially likely to give this reason (87%). Fewer Jewish congregants say they go to religious services to please a spouse or family member (42%) or because they would feel guilty if they did not participate (22%).

Of 11 possible reasons for not attending religious services, the top choice is “I’m not religious.”  Two-thirds of infrequent attenders say this is a reason they do not go to services more often. Other common explanations are “I’m just not interested” (57%) and “I express my Jewishness in other ways” (55%). Fewer say “I don’t know enough to participate” (23%), “I feel pressured to do more or give more” (11%), “I don’t feel welcome” (7%), “I fear for my security” (6%) or “People treat me like I don’t really belong” (4%).

The degree to which finances are a barrier seems to vary by age. Although some Jewish leaders believe that synagogue membership fees are keeping away young people, younger Jewish adults (under age 30) are somewhat less likely than those who are older to say they don’t attend religious services because “it costs too much” (10% vs. 19%). For perspective on this question from in-depth interviews with congregational rabbis, see the sidebar, “Most U.S. Jews don’t go to synagogue, so rabbis and a host of new organizations are trying to innovate” in Chapter 3 .

For more analysis of these questions, see Chapter 3 .

Cultural engagement

In addition to traditional forms of religious observance, such as attending a synagogue, many Jewish Americans say they engage in cultural Jewish activities such as enjoying Jewish foods, visiting Jewish historical sites and reading Jewish literature.

Young Jewish adults report engaging in many of these activities at rates roughly equal to older U.S. Jews. Among Jews ages 18 to 29, for example, 70% say they often or sometimes cook or eat traditional Jewish foods, identical to the percentage of Jews 65 and older who do the same. And 37% of the youngest Jewish adults say they at least sometimes mark Shabbat in a way that makes it meaningful to them (though not necessarily in a way that follows Jewish law, such as abstaining from work), as do 35% of Jews who are 65 and older.

Overall, however, it’s not the case that Jewish cultural activities or individualized, do-it-yourself religious observances are directly substituting for synagogue attendance and other traditional forms of Jewish observance. More often, they are complementing traditional religious participation. Statistical analysis indicates that people who are highly observant by traditional measures – on a scale combining synagogue attendance, keeping kosher, fasting on Yom Kippur and participating in a Passover Seder – also tend to report the highest participation rates in the 12 cultural Jewish activities mentioned in the survey, such as reading Jewish publications, listening to Jewish music and going to Jewish film festivals. 8

Those who are low on the scale of traditional religious observance, meanwhile, tend to be much less active in the vibrant array of cultural activities available to U.S. Jews in the 21st century. In fact, no more than about one-in-ten low-observance Jews say they often do any of the dozen things mentioned in the survey.

For example, among highly observant Jews, 31% say they often listen to Jewish or Israeli music, compared with 7% of those with a medium level of traditional observance and just 2% of those who are low on the observance scale. There are similar patterns on other questions: 64% of highly observant Jews often cook or eat traditional Jewish foods, eight times the share of low-observance Jews who say the same (8%).

At the same time, the survey finds that many Jews who answered a different question by saying they don’t go to religious services because they “express [their] Jewishness in other ways” do engage in cultural activities, at least on occasion. About three-quarters report that they sometimes or often enjoy Jewish foods (77%) and share Jewish culture or holidays with non-Jewish friends (74%), while many also visit historic Jewish sites when traveling (55%) and read Jewish literature (47%).

See Chapter 3 for more analysis of these questions.

Most U.S. Jews perceive a rise in anti-Semitism

In the wake of a series of murderous attacks on Jewish Americans – at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018; Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California, in April 2019; and a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey, in December 2019 – the 2020 survey posed many more questions about anti-Semitism than the 2013 survey did.

More than nine-in-ten U.S. Jews say there is at least “some” anti-Semitism in the United States, including 45% who say there is “a lot” of anti-Semitism. Just 6% say there is not much anti-Semitism, and close to zero (fewer than 1%) say there is none at all.

Moreover, three-quarters (75%) say there is more anti-Semitism in the United States than there was five years ago. Just 5% say there is less, and 19% perceive little or no change, saying there is about the same amount of anti-Semitism as there was five years ago.

Among those who perceive an increase in anti-Semitism over the last five years, relatively few (5% of all U.S. Jews) think it has occurred solely “because there are now more people who hold anti-Semitic views.” The vast majority say that anti-Semitism has increased in the United States either because people who hold anti-Semitic views “now feel more free to express them” (35%) or that both things have happened: The number of anti-Semites has grown and people now feel more free to express anti-Semitic views (33%).

The survey also sought to assess, in broad terms, the psychological impact of anti-Semitism on Jewish Americans and its possible chilling effect on Jewish community activities.

Slightly more than half of Jews surveyed (53%) say that, as a Jewish person in the United States, they personally feel less safe today than they did five years ago. Just 3% feel more safe, while 42% don’t sense much change. (An additional 1% say they did not live in the U.S. five years ago.) Jews who usually wear something in public that is recognizably Jewish (such as a kippa or head covering) are especially likely to feel less safe, as are Jewish women.

Those who say they feel less safe now were asked a follow-up question: Have you hesitated to participate in Jewish observances or events because you feel less safe than you did five years ago?

Two-thirds of those who feel less safe (or 35% of all Jewish adults) say they have not hesitated to participate in Jewish activities because of safety concerns. About one-quarter of those who feel less safe (12% of all U.S. Jewish adults) say they have hesitated but still participated in Jewish observances or events. And about one-in-ten Jews who say they feel less safe (5% of all U.S. Jewish adults) say they hesitated and chose not to participate in Jewish observances or events because of safety concerns.

Jewish Americans report that they experience some forms of anti-Semitism much more often than other forms. For example, 37% say they have seen anti-Jewish graffiti or vandalism in their local community in the past 12 months, while 19% say they have been made to feel unwelcome because they are Jewish and 15% say they have been called offensive names. Fewer say that in the 12 months prior to taking the survey they have been harassed online (8%) or physically attacked (5%) because they are Jewish.

While reports of physical attacks are rare across the board, many of the other experiences of anti-Semitism are more common among younger Jews and Orthodox Jews (who often wear recognizably Jewish attire in public). For example, one-quarter of Jewish adults under the age of 30 say that in the past year they have been called offensive names because they are Jewish, compared with 10% of Jews ages 50 and older. And 55% of Orthodox Jews say they have seen anti-Jewish graffiti in their local community in the past year, compared with 37% of Reform Jews; this may be, at least in part, because Orthodox Jews are more likely to live in heavily Jewish neighborhoods.

Most Jewish Americans also have been exposed in the past year to anti-Semitic tropes or stereotypes – though most report these as secondhand experiences, such as something they have seen on social media or read about in news stories. For example, about three-quarters of Jewish adults have heard someone claim that “Jews care too much about money,” including three-in-ten (30%) who say this was said in their presence in the past year and an additional 43% who say they have heard or read about this claim secondhand .

Similarly, 71% of U.S. Jews say they have heard or read about someone claiming in the past year that “the Holocaust did not happen or its severity has been exaggerated.” But most of these experiences have been secondhand (63%) rather than something said in their presence (9%). A smaller share of U.S. Jews have heard someone say that “American Jews care more about Israel than about the United States,” including 36% who have heard or read about this secondhand and 6% who have heard it directly in the last year.

Despite these experiences with anti-Semitism, Jewish Americans tend to say that there is as much – or more – discrimination in U.S. society against several other groups (including Muslim, Black, Hispanic, and gay or lesbian Americans) as there is against Jews. This was true in the 2013 survey and remains the case in 2020. 9

For more analysis of questions on discrimination and anti-Semitism, see Chapter 6 .

Partisanship shapes views on Trump

Surveyed roughly five to 12 months before the 2020 presidential election, U.S. Jews expressed generally negative views of then-President Donald Trump: 73% of all Jewish adults (and 96% of Jews who are Democrats or lean Democratic) disapproved of his performance in office, while 27% gave him positive approval ratings (including 88% of Jews who are Republicans or lean Republican).

Jews were especially scornful of Trump’s handling of environmental and immigration issues: Eight-in-ten Jewish adults said he had done a “poor” or “only fair” job on the environment, and three-quarters said the same about his handling of immigration.

Most U.S. Jews perceived Trump as friendly toward Israel. About six-in-ten overall (63%) said this, including 55% of Jews who are Democrats or lean Democratic as well as 85% of those who are Republicans or lean Republican.

But there was less consensus among Jewish Americans over whether Trump was friendly toward Jews in the United States. About three-in-ten said he was friendly (31%), while 28% said he was neutral and 37% said he was unfriendly toward U.S. Jews. These perceptions, however, were highly partisan: While a large majority of Jewish Republicans (81%) said Trump was friendly toward Jews in the United States, just 13% of Jewish Democrats agreed.

Even though most U.S. Jews perceived Trump as friendly toward Israel, that does not necessarily mean they looked positively on his policies toward the Jewish state. Indeed, most Jewish Americans rated Trump’s handling of U.S. policy toward Israel as “only fair” (23%) or “poor” (35%), while four-in-ten rated his handling of this policy as good (17%) or excellent (23%). 10  Orthodox Jews were particularly inclined to give Trump high marks for his policies toward Israel (69% “excellent”).

In the 2013 survey, which took place during the administration of President Barack Obama, one-in-ten Jewish Americans said U.S. policy was “too supportive” of Israel. Most said U.S. policy was either “not supportive enough” of Israel (31%) or “about right” (54%).

Seven years later, during the final 14 months of the Trump administration, just over half of Jewish adults (54%) still said the level of U.S. support for Israel was about right. But, by comparison with 2013, fewer said the U.S. was not supportive enough (19%), and more said U.S. policy was too supportive of Israel (22%).

Among Jewish adults under the age of 30, about four-in-ten (37%) took the position in 2020 that U.S. policy was too supportive of Israel, and fully half said Trump was handling policy toward Israel poorly.

Levels of connectedness with Israel

More broadly, young U.S. Jews are less emotionally attached to Israel than older ones. As of 2020, half of Jewish adults under age 30 describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel (48%), compared with two-thirds of Jews ages 65 and older.

In addition, among Jews ages 50 and older, 51% say that caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them, and an additional 37% say it is important but not essential; just 10% say that caring about Israel is not important to them. By contrast, among Jewish adults under 30, one-third say that caring about Israel is essential (35%), and one-quarter (27%) say it’s not important to what being Jewish means to them.

The same pattern – lower levels of attachment to Israel among younger Jewish adults than among older ones – also was present in the 2013 survey. Because the 2013 survey was conducted by live interviewers over the telephone and the 2020 survey was self-administered by respondents online or on a paper questionnaire, the results on some questions are not directly comparable. This includes measures of attachment to Israel, and consequently it is difficult to know whether overall levels of attachment to Israel among Jewish Americans have changed over that seven-year period.

Racial and ethnic diversity among U.S. Jews

Being Jewish is an interconnected matter of religion, ethnicity, culture and ancestry. The survey sought to explore this dynamic by including questions about race and ethnicity ( questions that are also intertwined with ancestry and culture), Jewish customs and geographic origin. 11

In the 2020 survey, roughly nine-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults identify as White non-Hispanic (92%), while 8% identify with all other categories combined. This compares with 94% White non-Hispanic and 6% in all other categories in the 2013 survey. In addition, there are other good reasons to think that the U.S. Jewish population, like the country’s population as a whole, is growing more racially and ethnically diverse over time, including a pattern of rising diversity by age.

Among Jewish adults under age 30, 85% identify as White (non-Hispanic), while 15% identify with all other categories, including 7% Hispanic, 2% Black (non-Hispanic) and 6% other or multiple races. That is much more racial and ethnic diversity than the survey finds among Jews ages 50 and older (97% White non-Hispanic).

Unlike in 2013, the 2020 survey also asked about the race and ethnicity of other adults and children in Jewish households. The data indicates that 17% of U.S. Jews live in households where at least one person – adult or child – is Hispanic, Black, Asian, another (non-White) race or ethnicity, or multiracial; this includes household members who may not be Jewish.

The survey also asked whether Jews think of themselves as Ashkenazi (following the Jewish customs of Central and Eastern Europe), Sephardic (following the Jewish customs of Spain), Mizrahi (following the Jewish customs of North Africa and the Middle East) or something else. 12 Fully two-thirds of Jewish Americans consider themselves Ashkenazi, while relatively few consider themselves to be Sephardic (3%) or Mizrahi (1%). An additional 6% say they are some combination of these or other categories.

Despite the fact that most American Jews identify as following Jewish customs from Europe, nine-in-ten were born in the United States (90%), including 21% who are the adult children of at least one immigrant and 68% whose families have been in the U.S. for three generations or longer. One-third of Jewish adults (32%) are first- or second-generation immigrants, including 20% who were born in Europe or had a parent born in Europe and 4% who are first- or second-generation immigrants from the Middle East-North Africa region (including Israel).

Intermarriage and child rearing

Rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the United States are higher among Jews who have married in recent years than among those who married decades ago, a pattern broadly similar to what the 2013 survey found, though there is some variation between the decade-by-decade figures in the two surveys. 13

Among Jewish respondents who got married in the past decade, six-in-ten say they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among Jews who got married between 2000 and 2009, fewer (45%) are intermarried, as are about four-in-ten who got married in the 1990s (37%) or 1980s (42%). By contrast, just 18% of Jews who got married before 1980 have a non-Jewish spouse.

Intermarriage is almost nonexistent in the Orthodox Jewish community. In the current survey, just 2% of married Orthodox Jews say their spouse is not Jewish. By contrast, among married Jews outside the Orthodox community, about half (47%) say their spouse is not Jewish. And among non-Orthodox Jews who got married in the last decade, 72% say they are intermarried – virtually the same as the 2013 survey found in the decade prior to that study.

Intermarriage rates also have an intergenerational component: Adult Jews who are themselves the offspring of intermarriages are especially likely to intermarry. In the new survey, among married Jewish respondents who have one Jewish parent, 82% are intermarried, compared with 34% of those with two Jewish parents. Similarly, intermarried Jews who are currently raising minor children (under age 18) in their homes are much less likely to say they are bringing up their children as Jewish by religion (28%) than are Jewish parents who have a Jewish spouse (93%), although many of the intermarried Jews say they are raising their children as partly Jewish by religion or as Jewish aside from religion.

The 2020 survey included a new question aimed at helping to assess the importance to Jewish Americans of passing along their Jewish identity. Asked to imagine a time in the future when they have grandchildren of their own (if they do not currently have any), roughly six-in-ten U.S. Jews say it would be very important (34%) or somewhat important (28%) for their grandchildren to be Jewish. Smaller proportions say it would be very (22%) or somewhat (22%) important for their grandchildren to marry someone who is also Jewish.

The answers to these questions tend to vary by age, with older Jews generally assigning greater importance to Jewish continuity and in-marriage than younger Jews do. But, as previously noted in this report, there is also a kind of divergence taking place in the U.S. Jewish population, with a rising percentage of young Jewish adults who are Orthodox as well as a rising share who describe themselves – in terms of religion – as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.

The question about future grandchildren captures one element of this divergence. Three-in-ten Jewish adults under the age of 30 (31%) say it would be “not at all” important for their future grandchildren to be Jewish, which is significantly higher than the share who say this in any other age group. At the same time, 32% of the youngest Jewish adults say it would be “very important” for their grandchildren to be Jewish, which is on par with the share who say the same among older age groups. Among the Orthodox, 91% say it is very important for their grandchildren to be Jewish, compared with 4% among Jews of no religion.

The survey estimates that roughly 8 million U.S. adults were raised Jewish or had a Jewish parent. Six-in-ten were raised Jewish by religion (58%), while 7% were raised as Jews of no religion; another 35% had at least one Jewish parent but say they were not raised exclusively Jewish (if at all), either by religion or aside from religion. 14

Overall, 68% of those who say they were raised Jewish or who had at least one Jewish parent now identify as Jewish, including 49% who are now Jewish by religion and 19% who are now Jews of no religion. That means that one-third of those raised Jewish or by Jewish parent(s) are not Jewish today, either because they identify with a religion other than Judaism (including 19% who consider themselves Christian) or because they do not currently identify as Jewish either by religion or aside from religion.

Among all respondents who indicate they have some kind of Jewish background, those who were raised Jewish by religion have the highest retention rate. Nine-in-ten U.S. adults who were raised Jewish by religion are still Jewish today, including 76% who remain Jewish by religion and 13% who are now categorized as Jews of no religion. By comparison, three-quarters of those raised as Jews of no religion are still Jewish today; roughly half are still Jews of no religion and about one-in-five are now Jewish by religion. Among those who had at least one Jewish parent but who say they were not raised exclusively Jewish (either by religion or aside from religion), far fewer are Jewish today (29%).

Among people who were raised with a Jewish background, the share who identify as Jewish today is similar across age groups. However, older adults who were raised Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent are more likely to identify as Jewish by religion , while larger shares of young adults say they are Jewish aside from religion . For instance, among those ages 50 and older with a Jewish background, 57% identify as Jewish by religion, compared with 37% among adults under 30.

The data also shows that people with two Jewish parents are more likely than those with just one Jewish parent to retain their Jewish identity into adulthood. However, among people who have just one Jewish parent, younger cohorts are more likely than those ages 50 and older to be Jewish as adults, suggesting that the share of intermarried Jewish parents who pass on their Jewish identity to their children may have increased over time. Or, put somewhat differently, the share of the offspring of intermarriages who choose to be Jewish in adulthood seems to be rising. 15

The vast majority of adults who were raised with a Jewish background and who now are married to a Jewish spouse identify as Jewish today (95%). By contrast, far fewer of those who have a non-Jewish spouse are Jewish today (56%). However, this does not necessarily mean that marrying a non-Jewish spouse pulls people away from their Jewish identity. The causal arrow could just as easily point in the other direction: People whose Jewish identity is relatively weak may consider it less important to marry a Jewish spouse.

The survey also makes it possible to examine the retention rate of various institutional branches or streams of Judaism in America. Orthodox and Reform Judaism exhibit the highest retention rates of the major streams; 67% of Americans raised as Orthodox Jews by religion continue to identify with Orthodoxy as adults. Similarly, most people raised as Reform Jews by religion also identify as Reform today (66%). The retention rate for those raised within Conservative Judaism is lower; four-in-ten people (41%) raised as Conservative Jews by religion continue to identify with Conservative Judaism as adults, although fully nine-in-ten (93%) are still Jewish.

In some ways, these patterns resemble the findings from the 2013 study . In both surveys, adults who no longer identify with their childhood stream tend to have moved in the direction of less traditional forms of Judaism rather than in the direction of more traditional streams. For example, roughly half of people raised within Conservative Judaism now identify with Reform Judaism (30%), don’t affiliate with any particular branch of Judaism (15%) or are no longer Jewish (7%), while just 2% of people raised as Conservative Jews now identify with Orthodox Judaism. Similarly, about one-quarter of people raised within Reform Judaism now either have no institutional affiliation (14%) or are no longer Jewish (12%), while just one-in-twenty now identify with Conservative Judaism (4%) or with Orthodox Judaism (1%).

However, the share of adults raised within Orthodox Judaism who continue to identify as Orthodox is higher in the new study (67%) than it was in the 2013 survey (48%). This may be due (at least in part) to the fact that, in the new study, the sample of adults who say they were raised as Orthodox Jews includes a larger percentage of people under the age of 30. The 2013 study indicated that the Orthodox retention rate had been much higher among people raised in Orthodox Judaism in recent decades than among those who came of age as Orthodox Jews in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The new survey included too few interviews with those raised as Orthodox Jews to be able to subdivide them by year or decade of birth.

Like other Americans, Jews have been hit hard by coronavirus

Because the survey was designed in 2019 and most of the interviewing was completed before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, the results by themselves do not paint a clear picture of the pandemic’s impact on Jewish Americans. However, subsequent polls conducted by Pew Research Center in August 2020 and February 2021 asked more than 10,000 Americans – including 348 and 265 Jews by religion, respectively – about their experiences in the pandemic. 16

In August 2020, Jews by religion were substantially more likely than U.S. adults overall to say they knew someone who had been hospitalized or died as a result of COVID-19 (57% vs. 39%), likely because many Jews are concentrated in the New York City area, which had the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the country during the first few months of the pandemic. But both numbers had increased and the gap virtually disappeared by February 2021, when 73% of Jews and 67% of all U.S. adults said they personally knew someone who had been hospitalized or died from the coronavirus (the gap between these two figures is not statistically significant due to sample size limitations).

In February, Jews remained twice as likely as U.S. adults overall to say they had tested positive for COVID-19 or for antibodies to the disease (23% vs. 11%). But when looking at the combined share of people who say they have tested positive for the illness and those who say they are “pretty sure” they had it, even if they did not test positive, the difference between Jews (29%) and all U.S. adults (25%) is not statistically significant.

Other findings from Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey include:

• Nearly four-in-ten U.S. Jews feel they have a lot (4%) or some (34%) in common with Muslims. Fewer say they have a lot (2%) or some (18%) in common with evangelical Christians. Jews who do not identify with any denominational branch are more likely to say they have at least some in common with mainline Protestants and Muslims than to say the same about Orthodox Jews.
• Nearly two-thirds of U.S. Jews (64%) say rabbis should perform marriage ceremonies for interfaith couples (that is, between someone who is Jewish and someone who is not), and an additional 25% say “it depends.” Just 9% flatly object to rabbis performing interfaith weddings. Among Orthodox Jews, however, 73% say rabbis should not officiate at such weddings.
• Seven-in-ten U.S. Jews (71%) say rabbis should officiate at same-sex weddings, while 13% say it depends. Just 15% oppose rabbis performing marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. But among Orthodox Jews, 82% object.
• About one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults identify as gay or lesbian (4%) or bisexual (5%); 88% say they are straight, 1% say they are something else, 1% say they don’t know and 1% declined to answer the question.
• Just under half of U.S. Jewish adults (45%) have been to Israel. Among Jews in the survey ages 25 to 34, one-quarter say that they have been on a trip to Israel sponsored by Birthright, an organization that provides free travel to Israel for young U.S. Jews.
• Nearly one-in-five Jews say they often (5%) or sometimes (12%) participate in activities or services with Chabad. This is especially common among Orthodox Jews; 46% say they participate in Chabad activities at least sometimes, compared with 25% of Conservative Jews, 12% of Reform Jews and 8% of Jews who do not identify with any particular branch of Judaism.
• Jews continue to have high levels of educational attainment. Nearly six-in-ten are college graduates, including 28% who have earned a postgraduate degree. By way of comparison, about three-in-ten U.S. adults overall are college graduates, including 11% who have earned a postgraduate degree.
• One-in-four American Jews say they have family incomes of $200,000 or more (23%). By comparison, just 4% of U.S. adults report household incomes at that level. At the other end of the spectrum, one-in-ten U.S. Jews report annual household incomes of less than $30,000, versus 26% of Americans overall.
• At the time of the survey (which was mostly fielded before the coronavirus outbreak in the United States), half of U.S. Jews described their financial situation as living “comfortably” (53%), compared with 29% of all U.S. adults. At the same time, 15% of Jewish adults said they had difficulty paying for medical care for themselves or their family in the past year, 11% said they had difficulty paying their rent or mortgage, 8% said they had a difficult time paying for food, and 19% had trouble paying other types of bills or debts.

Roadmap to the report

The remainder of this report explores these and other findings in more detail. Chapter 1 provides estimates of the size of the U.S. Jewish population using various definitions of Jewishness. Chapter 2 examines Jewish identity and beliefs, including affiliation with various branches of Judaism, what U.S. Jews consider essential to being Jewish, and where they find meaning and fulfillment. Chapter 3 explores Jewish practices and customs, including some traditional religious practices (such as synagogue attendance) and some more “cultural” Jewish activities. Chapter 4 looks at marriage and families, including rates of intermarriage, how Jewish survey respondents say they are raising their children, and whether respondents attended Jewish day schools or camps. Chapter 5 delves into measures of community and connectedness, such as how much responsibility U.S. Jews feel toward fellow Jews around the world and how much they say they have in common with other Jews. Chapter 6 describes experiences and perceptions of anti-Semitism, as well as perceived levels of discrimination against other groups in U.S. society. Chapter 7 analyzes U.S. Jewish attitudes toward Israel, prospects for a peace settlement with Palestinians, and the BDS movement. Chapter 8 focuses on U.S. Jews’ political affiliations and views, including on former President Donald Trump, who was still in office when the survey was conducted. Chapter 9 explores measures of race, ethnicity, Jewish heritage and country of origin among U.S. Jews. Chapter 10 describes how Jewish adults answered other demographic questions, including about their age, education, region of residence, fertility and sexual orientation. Chapter 11 looks at measures of economic well-being and vulnerability, including employment status and occupation. And Chapter 12 summarizes the survey’s findings on people of Jewish background and Jewish affinity – two groups that have a connection to Judaism but that are not classified as Jewish for the purposes of this report.

• The household is defined as everyone living with the Jewish respondent, including people who may not be Jewish. See Chapter 9 for additional analyses on this topic. ↩
• The terms branch, stream, movement and Jewish denomination are used interchangeably in this report. They include Orthodox (and subgroups within Orthodox Judaism), Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and others (including Humanistic Judaism, Jewish Renewal, etc.). The survey also included a separate question about participation in services or activities with Chabad (see Chapter 3 ). ↩
• Orthodox Jews, of course, are not a monolithic group. There are many different traditions within Orthodoxy. However, the survey did not include enough interviews with subgroups of Orthodox Jews (such as Modern Orthodox, Hasidic and Yeshivish) to analyze their responses separately. ↩
• Fully 79% of “Jews of no religion” do not identify with any particular branch of Judaism, and two-thirds (65%) of Jewish adults who do not identify with any particular branch of Judaism fall into the “Jews of no religion” category. ↩
• The term “Jews of no religion” (or, sometimes, “Jews not by religion”) has been in use by demographers and sociologists for decades. More colloquial terms include cultural Jews, ethnic Jews and secular Jews. However, those terms mean different things to different people and might also apply to Jews by religion who consider themselves culturally and ethnically Jewish or broadly secular in outlook. Seeking a more positive and affirming label for Jews of no religion, some sociologists recently have suggested “Jews for other reasons.” For consistency’s sake, this report uses the same terminology as the 2013 study. ↩
• These two groups – Orthodox Jews and Jews of no religion – are categorized through different survey questions, although there is virtually no overlap between them. Fewer than 1% of Jews of no religion identify as Orthodox, while 99% of Orthodox Jews identify as Jewish by religion. ↩
• The 2020 question includes a new item – “Continuing family traditions” – that was not part of the question in 2013. ↩
• Cronbach’s alpha for this scale is 0.66. ↩
• These questions were asked slightly differently in 2013 and 2020. The 2013 survey asked whether there is “a lot” of discrimination against various groups, and respondents could say yes or no. The 2020 survey asked respondents how much discrimination there is against various groups, and respondents could say “a lot,” “some,” “not much” or “none at all.” Despite these differences, the broad patterns in responses are similar. ↩
• The survey was conducted from Nov. 19, 2019, through June 3, 2020, which was  after  the Trump administration moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem but  before  the administration announced agreements for the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalize relations with Israel. ↩
• Race and ethnicity were measured in this way partly for methodological purposes. To ensure that the sample of respondents is representative of the broader U.S. population, all respondents (not just the respondents who qualify in the screener as Jewish in some way) are asked questions about their demographic characteristics, including age, gender, education, race, ethnicity and more. The data is then weighted so that the demographic profile of respondents matches the demographic profile of the overall U.S. population as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. See the Methodology . ↩
• Because of the long diasporic history of Jews, many customs are difficult to trace with precision. Nevertheless, these categories reflect the migration and settlement patterns of Jews over many centuries. Sephardic Jews trace their heritage to the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal) before the expulsion of Jews from that region in 1492. Ashkenazi Jews follow customs and liturgies that developed among Jews who lived in Central and Eastern Europe, though many moved elsewhere to escape pogroms and persecution. Mizrahi Jews have ancestral ties to North Africa and the Middle East, including the areas now called Iraq and Iran; many moved to Israel or the United States in the second half of the 20th century. ↩
• This analysis is based on current, intact marriages. It does not include past marriages that ended in either divorce or the death of a spouse. It reflects how Jewish respondents describe the religion of their spouses at present, not at the time of marriage. Variation between the two studies may reflect relatively small samples of respondents who got married in each decade. ↩
• Most people in this category were not raised Jewish at all, but some say they were raised in another religion and also as Jewish aside from religion. ↩
• This pattern was also found in the 2013 survey data. Sasson, Theodore. Nov. 10, 2013. “ New Analysis of Pew Data: Children of Intermarriage Increasingly Identify as Jews. ” Tablet. ↩
• These polls were conducted online from Aug. 3-16, 2020, and Feb. 16-21, 2021, each among more than 10,000 members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel . Jews are defined in these surveys solely on the basis of their present religion. ↩

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‘Stop Arming Israel’ Passover Protest in Brooklyn Harkens Back to 1969 Freedom Seder

FILE PHOTO: A collective of groups organised by Jewish students at Columbia and Barnard in solidarity with Gaza and the protest encampment host Passover Seder at Columbia University, during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in New York City, U.S., April 22, 2024, REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs/File Photo

By Aurora Ellis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gathered around a banner emblazoned with the words “stop arming Israel,” thousands of protesters joined with Jewish-led peace groups in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday evening to attend a Passover protest that recalls the "Freedom Seder" held in the tumultuous year of 1969.

Organizers said they drew inspiration for Tuesday’s demonstration from ties forged between Jewish organizers and African-American civil rights activists to create a multiracial interfaith “Freedom Seder” on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's 1968 assassination as the Vietnam War raged. The Seder is a Passover celebration and ceremony that commemorates the story of Exodus - Moses leading enslaved Jews out of Egypt.

The event was organized by the left-leaning Jewish Voices for Peace and the If Not Now movement, who said they saw the Seder protests as part of Jewish tradition that they traced back to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who held the first Freedom Seder.

War in Israel and Gaza

“Passover is our story of liberation, and we are commanded to tell it every year,” said Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director Stefanie Fox, who flew in from Seattle to make the event at Grand Army Plaza. “We take our prayer and our ritual and our communal heart to the streets.”

The holiday, Fox said, urges us to think about “what are the issues of freedom in our day, and there is none more salient than what is happening to Palestinians right now.”

Protesters at the event were urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish member of Congress, not to back military aid to Israel.

The event saw young activists encouraged by elders, some of whom sat on lawn chairs and with canes. It also featured Syrian and Moroccan Jewish speakers who reflected on memories of sharing traditions with their Muslim neighbors during seders past.

Prominent author Naomi Klein addressed the crowd, speaking in support of the latest wave of U.S. university protests calling for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000, saying it amounts to genocide, a charge Israel denies.

Hundreds of protesters were reported arrested while blocking the streets of Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza.

Critics of the protests say demonstrators often ignore reports of antisemitism that have skyrocketed since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 people and took over 200 hostage, sparking Israel's massive retaliation.

Rosalind Petchesky, 81, a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at CUNY and MacArthur Genius who was arrested last year during a protest at the White House, said she does not deny that there were Jewish students who have faced antisemitic remarks. But she added that it was important for Jewish students and individuals who speak up for Palestinian safety to be heard.

“Progressive Jewish students are very aware and they have learned about the indivisibility of justice,” said Petchesky. “We know that all these struggles are linked.”

(Reporting by Aurora Ellis; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Tags: Judaism , United States , Israel , Middle East

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‘Not like other Passovers’: hundreds of Jewish demonstrators arrested after New York protest seder

About 300 people were detained near Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home

Hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder that doubled as a protest in New York , as they shut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.

The 300 or so arrests took place on Tuesday night at Grand Army Plaza, on the doorstep of Schumer’s Brooklyn residence, where thousands of mostly Jewish New Yorkers gathered for the seder, a ritual that marked the second night of the holiday celebrated as a festival of freedom by Jews worldwide.

The seder came just before the US Senate resoundingly passed a military package that includes $26bn for Israel.

The protesters called on Schumer – who is among a minority of Democrats to recently criticize the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – to stop arming Israel’s military, which relies heavily on US weapons, jet fuel and other military equipment.

“We as American Jews will not be used, we will not be complicit and we will not be silent. Judaism is a beautiful, thousands-year-old tradition, and Israel is a 76-year-old colonial apartheid state,” Morgan Bassichis, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, told the crowd.

“This is the Passover that we take our exodus from Zionism. Not in our name. Let Gaza live.”

The mass arrests came after the seder rituals. Speakers included journalist and author Naomi Klein, Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour, and several Jewish students suspended from Columbia University and Barnard College over the protests that have rocked US campuses in recent days .

Rabbi Miriam Grossman, from Brooklyn, led a prayer before the first cup of ritual wine. “We pray for everyone besieged, for everyone facing starvation and mass bombardment.”

“This Passover is not like other Passovers,” said Klein. “So many are not with their families but this movement is our family,” she added in reference to political disagreements that have divided Jewish families since the start of the war.

Klein spoke after eating the bitter herbs that represent the bitterness of slavery at the seder. “Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews.”

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Jewish communities have often used Passover to protest about global injustice. Tuesday’s protest, organizers said, was inspired by the 1969 Freedom Seder , organized by Arthur Waskow on the anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s death. The original Freedom Seder sought to connect the Jewish exodus story with the struggle for civil rights in the US and against the war in Vietnam.

One protester, a 31-year-old Jewish woman who asked not to be named for security reasons, said: “Passover is about liberation. In our family, Palestinians have always been part of our celebration and mourning. The call for liberation is more important now than ever … As Americans, the billions of our tax dollars in the Israeli military bill is outrageous and horrifying.”

Jewish groups have staged a number of high-profile antiwar actions in the US since 7 October, shutting down sites from the Capitol to the Statue of Liberty . Jewish activists held another seder on Monday, the first night of Passover, at Columbia’s protest encampment.

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza including 13,000 children. The 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel. Tuesday marked 200 days since the war began.

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Columbia to hold classes virtually as Jewish leaders warn about safety amid tensions over pro-Palestinian protests

A growing number of leaders and organizations have called on Columbia University and its president to protect students amid reports of antisemitic and offensive statements and actions on and near its campus, which has been the site this week of a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest .

The protest and encampment on campus have drawn attention to the right of free speech and the rights of students to feel safe from violence, with a campus rabbi recommending Jewish students return home for their own safety.

Early Monday, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik said that classes would be held virtually Monday and that school leaders would be coming together to discuss a way to bring an end to “this crisis.”

For live coverage of the student protests, follow here.

In a statement to the university community, Shafik said she was “saddened” by the events on campus, and denounced antisemitic language, and intimidating and harassing behavior.

“The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days. These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas,” she said. “We need a reset.”

Shafik's announcement followed mounting calls for action.

In a letter shared on social media Sunday, Chabad at Columbia University said students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to “go back to Poland” and “stop killing children.” 

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement Sunday that protesters in and around Columbia cross the line if they say violence should befall Jewish students. 

“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous — they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America,” he said. 

“Echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable,” Bates continued, referring to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, where 1,200 were killed.

Protesters have decried Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip , which has displaced over 75% of the estimated 2.3 million people in the enclave and killed over 34,000 people there, according to Gaza health officials. They have also called on Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel.

One of the groups at the center of campus protests, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, released a statement Sunday night on X seeking to distance its participants from unlawful agitators and imagery that would cast the movement to end attacks on civilians in Gaza as one of violence.

The group called some of those getting attention for threats and aggression “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us” and said its members “have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob.”

“We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry,” the statement said.

Safety concerns

In a letter to Jewish students earlier Sunday, Rabbi Elie Buechler, of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, recommended they return home and stay there, saying it was clear the university and city police “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.” Buechler declined requests for an interview. 

The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association on Sunday sent a letter to Shafik noting the rabbi’s concerns and claiming that the environment on campus has been hostile for Jewish students, including those it said have been “openly threatened and harassed.”

Alleging lax enforcement, the group urged Columbia to “enforce the university rules with regard to protests and harassment and restore order and safety on campus.”

Nicholas Baum, a freshman at Columbia, said he’s weighing the rabbi's invitation to leave.

“I feel disturbed but I feel it is completely indicative of the horrible disturbances that Jews on campus have been feeling,” he said. “As a Jew, I no longer feel welcome on campus. I no longer feel safe on campus.”

At the same time, he joined a counterargument gaining volume: Staying put is a statement of strength. “It would only appease campus protesters who call supporters of Israel Zionists who are not welcome at Columbia,” Baum said.

Columbia senior Sonya Pozansky said protests on campus have been transformed from political statements to “incitement to violence and Jew hatred.”

Columbia/Barnard Hillel said in a post on X that it doesn’t believe Jewish students should have to leave, but that the university and city should do more to protect students.

In a letter Sunday night , it said Columbia “must put an end to the on-campus protests that violate the University’s events policies. Off-campus protests need to be moved if the protestors will not end their harassment of students.” 

Columbia on Sunday responded to concerns with a plan to beef up security. It includes hiring 111 additional security personnel; improved ID checks; extra security during Passover, which begins Monday; and heightened security around the perimeter of campus, the university’s office of the chief operating officer said in a letter to the campus community.

Columbia said through a spokesperson earlier Sunday that students have a right to protest “but they are not allowed to disrupt campus life or harass and intimidate fellow students and members of our community.”

“We are acting on concerns we are hearing from our Jewish students and are providing additional support and resources to ensure that our community remains safe,” the spokesperson said. 

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a Columbia alum whose name is on the Jewish student center he helped to fund, said in a statement Monday that he no longer supports the university.

"I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken," Kraft posted to social media .

Arrests on campus

On Thursday, 113 people were arrested after Shafik sent a letter to New York police requesting its help to break up the encampment that had been set up on campus in support of Gaza. 

Shafik said in the letter to police that the group was violating university rules and that the encampment "and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University." In a news conference about the arrests, police described those arrested as peaceful and said they offered no resistance. 

Columbia student Maryam Alwan, who helped organize the pro-Palestinian protest and was suspended and arrested, told MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin , “It feels like it’s part of a repressive campaign against pro-Palestine advocacy that has been going on for months now.” 

She added, “We are being criminalized on our own campus.”

Also arrested was Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who said she was suspended from Barnard College. Hirsi said the encampment has been community-centered, with students taking meals and praying together.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who grilled Shafik at a congressional hearing last week over antisemitism on campus, said Sunday that Shafik's response to the rhetoric has been ineffective and called on her to resign.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has been unwaveringly pro-Israel, slammed the protests on Columbia’s campus and said he agreed with the White House, calling the protests “antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous.” He also called on Shafik to “do your job or resign.” 

Video shared on social media captured a protester Saturday holding a sign that said “Al-Qasam’s next targets,” referring to Hamas’ military wing. An arrow on the sign pointed up to counterprotesters waving Israeli flags. New York Mayor Eric Adams described the sign in a statement Sunday and said the display, which he characterized as antisemitic, had him “horrified and disgusted.” He also described chants of “We don’t want no Zionists here” as “hate speech.” 

Adams said police would enforce the law where it could, but in many cases law enforcement is limited because Columbia is on private property.

“Hate has no place in our city, and I have instructed the NYPD to investigate any violation of law that is reported,” Adams said in the statement. “Rest assured, the NYPD will not hesitate to arrest anyone who is found to be breaking the law.”

In a news conference Monday morning, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Michael Gerber said “any sort of criminality is not going to be tolerated” and “that includes harassment, or threats or menacing or stalking or anything like that. That is not protected by the First Amendment.” 

But “absent some ongoing crime, we cannot just go on into Columbia as we see fit,” as Columbia University is private property, he said.

Gerber said there have been a “small number of instances with some protests on campus where there was a request for police presence” by the university.

Police went onto campus Thursday because the university contacted the NYPD and asked for assistance as students had trespassed, but when it comes to university rules, such as those about setting up tents on campus, “we are not the enforcers of those rules.”

The NYPD has received reports of instances such as flags’ being snatched away from Israeli students walking on campus and “hateful things” said to some Israeli students, but “we haven't received any reports of any physical harm against any student,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry said.

Universities protest in solidarity

Columbia is one of a growing number of American universities to erupt in discord amid the Israel-Hamas war.

A protest encampment has cropped up at the New School in Manhattan in solidarity with pro-Palestinian voices at Columbia. The institution on Sunday called the encampment “unauthorized,” but said it was planning on meeting with students to “resolve the situation.”

Following a week of protests at Yale University, some of its students established a 24-tent encampment in New Haven, Connecticut, in solidarity with Columbia’s protesters over the weekend.

The Yale protesters want the private university to divest from criminal defense contractors as a way of reducing warfare against people in Gaza.

Boston-area institutions Tufts University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Emerson College hosted protest encampments over the weekend in solidarity with Columbia protesters, organizers said.

The University of Southern California in Los Angeles was criticized last week after it canceled the speech of a valedictorian whose social media account had a link to a document expressing support for Palestinians in Gaza. USC said it decided based on concerns over security and possible disruption .

George Solis is a national correspondent with NBC News.

Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.