10 facts about American Jews

1. A recent poll found that Americans estimate that Jews comprised 30% of the U.S. population — that would be about 100,000,000. In fact, at about 7,000,000, American Jews are only 2.4% of the population. The overwhelming majority of Americans are one or another branch of Christianity, at 91%.[1]

2. Globally, there are about 15 million Jews, or 0.185% (less than 1/5 of 1%) of the world’s population. By comparison, of the planet’s 8.1 billion human population, there are about 2.4 billion (30%) Christians, about 2 billion (25%) Muslims, about 1.2 billion (15%) Hindus, and about 500 million (6%) Buddhists. In the past 100 years, the Muslim population increased 800%, the Hindu population has increased 480%, the Christian population has increased 350%, and the Buddhist population has increased 333%, but the global Jewish population has not experienced even a single percent in population increase.[2]

3. Jews have been a minority and the target of Anti-Jewish segregation, discrimination, and murderous rampages in every country throughout history. This includes the United States, where Anti-Jewish prejudice has always existed and where, for much of its history, Anti-Jewish laws and biases prevented the free exercise of careers, education, politics, property rights, and societal advancement. American Jews have been attacked, murdered, and lynched in the U.S, and these attacks and murders continue.[3]

4. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were murdered, which was more than 40% of the total global Jewish population. To put this into a perspective that might be more personal to you, today this would be equivalent to the murder of about 1 billion Christians, or about 800 million Muslims, or about 500 million Hindus, or about 200 million Buddhists. Jewish Holocaust victims were from Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, all of the former Soviet Union States, Ukraine, and the former Yugoslavia. Before and during the Holocaust, virtually every country, including the U.S., prevented Jews from entering to flee the Holocaust.[4]

5. Beginning during the Holocaust and continuing for decades after, murderous rampages against Jews occurred in virtually every predominantly Arab and Muslim country, where Jews had lived for millennia. About 1 million Jews were forced to leave their homes. Now, very few or no Jews remain where they once lived in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, or Yemen.[5]

6. Today in the U.S., 60% of all American Jewish households are religious intermarriages, and 13% of American Jews are members of multi-racial households.[6]

7. Only 26% of American Jews believe in a biblical God, contrasting with 56% of the general American public who believe in a biblical God. American Jews are the most highly educated distinct group in the United States. American Jews give more to charities than any other group, both by group percentage and by per-person amount of charitable giving.[7]

8. Serious and increasing Anti-Jewish sentiment exists among both the political right and the political left in the U.S. Age-old false tropes on the political right blame American Jews for numerous real or perceived ills: the rise of left-wing politics, the rise of minority-Americans, AIDS, Covid, space lasers, etc., premised on the deliberate false conspiracy that somehow less than 1/5 of 1% of the world’s population both desires to and achieves global control. More recent false tropes on the political left blame American Jews for numerous real or perceived ills: the rise of right-wing politics, the repression of minority Americans, AIDS, Covid, and for Anti-Jewish prejudice itself, premised on the deliberate false conspiracy that somehow less than 1/5 of 1% of the world’s population both desires to and achieves global control.[8]

9. Many on the right and left prejudicially conflate American Jews and Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country, as though each American Jew is responsible for global politics. This error makes no more sense than blaming each American Muslim for everything that happens in the 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world or the 31 countries that recognize Islam as their national religion, or blaming each American Christian for everything that happens in the 108 Christian-majority countries in the world or the 34 countries that recognize Christianity as their national religion.[9]

10. Today, American Jews are extremely disproportionately targeted in attacks in the United States. Despite being only 2.4% of the population, American Jews are the targets of over 60% of all religiously-motivated attacks. Compared to other vulnerable groups, including different nationalities and sexual identities, Jews are between 10 and 500 times more likely to experience an attack than a member of the Asian (17,000,000), Black (40,000,000), Buddhist (4,000,000), Hindu (2,500,000), Hispanic (56,000,000), LGBT (23,000,000), Muslim (4,000,000), or any other vulnerable American minority. In the past several years, 18 Jews have been murdered, dozens more seriously injured, and countless others threatened just in the U.S., and attacks on Jews in the U.S. and internationally occur on a daily basis. The trend continues to worsen: while Anti-Jewish attacks in the U.S. had increased 300% in recent years, since the October 7 murders of over 1200 Jews by Hamas in the largest such mass murder since the Holocaust, there were over 5,000 Anti-Jewish incidents in the U.S. just in October through December 2023, with 2023 tracking over 100% higher and the highest annual rate ever recorded. Anti-Jewish incidents and conspiracies continuing to trend worse in 2024 both in the U.S. and globally. Many Jews have been forced to change their appearance or behavior to avoid being identified as Jewish.[10]

If you were previously uninformed of these facts, you are not alone. Unfortunately, those basic contextual facts are not made readily available, and rarely if ever put into perspective by the media. But this information should be shared and considered, so that every American can participate freely in our national culture.

[1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/11/10-key-findings-about-jewish-americans/; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/06/10-facts-about-atheists/#:~:text=Pew%20Research%20Center%20telephone%20surveys,from%203%25%20a%20decade%20ago.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_religion

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States

[4] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-losses-during-the-holocaust-by-country; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries

[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/race-ethnicity-heritage-and-immigration-among-u-s-jews/; https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/

[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/; https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/12/13/jewish-educational-attainment/#:~:text=With%20an%20average%20of%2013.4,the%20world’s%20major%20religious%20groups; https://nonprofitquarterly.org/americas-jewish-community-leads-per-capita-giving/.

[8] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2019/1231/Why-anti-Semitism-is-surging-across-the-political-spectrum; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

[9] https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/muslim-countries.htm#:~:text=There%20are%20about%2050%20countries,between%2050%25%20and%2080%25; https://www.thearda.com/QL2010/QuickList_42.asp; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Islam.

[10] https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses; Demographics of the United States — Wikipedia; Islam in the United States — Wikipedia; Comments on Tensions in American Buddhism | July 6, 2001 | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly | PBS; Hindu population up in US, becomes fourth-largest faith | Business Standard News (business-standard.com); LGBT demographics of the United States — Wikipedia ; https://www.adl.org/blog/six-facts-about-threats-to-the-jewish-community; https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1049288223/1-in-4-american-jews-say-they-experienced-antisemitism-in-the-last-year; https://www.timesofisrael.com/2021-was-the-worst-year-in-a-decade-for-antisemitism-around-the-world-report-finds/; https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-audit-finds-antisemitic-incidents-in-united-states-reached-all-time-high-in; https://www.jns.org/anti-semitic-incidents-in-us-hit-all-time-high-according-to-new-adl-audit/; Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023 | ADL; Antisemitic Attitudes in America 2024 | ADL; Antisemitism rising dramatically across the world — report — DW — 05/05/2024.