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A Jewish American (also commonly American Jew) is an American (a citizen of the United States) of Jewish descent who maintains a connection to the Jewish community, either through actively practicing Judaism or through cultural and historical affiliation. The United States contains the world's largest Jewish population.
History See main article: History of the Jews in the United States
Though Jews arrived in the United States are early as the 17th century, Jewish immigration grew in the 19th century. During the early 19th century, many secular Jews from the former Holy Roman Empire arrived in the United States and primarily became merchants and shop-owners. There were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States by 1880, and many of them were middle class and secular. As a result of persecution in parts of Eastern Europe, Jewish American immigration increased dramatically in the 1880s, with most of the new immigrants coming from the poor rural populations of Russia and Eastern Europe. Over two million Jews arrived between the late 19th century and 1924, when immigration restrictions increased. A large number of these immigrants settled in New York City and its immediate environs, establishing what became one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population.
At the beginning of the 20th century, these newly-arrived Jews lived primarily in urban immigrant neighborhoods, and built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and landsmanschaftn (associations of Jews from the same town or village). Jewish American writers of the time urged assimilation and integration with the wider American culture, and Jews quickly became part of American life. Five hundred thousand American Jews (or half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50) fought in World War II, and after the war, Jewish families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated, as intermarriage rates with non-Jews exceeded 50%. At the same time, new centers of Jewish communities formed, as Jewish school enrollment more than doubled between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, while synagogue affiliation jumped from twenty percent in 1930 to sixty percent in 1960.
Population As of 2005, there are somewhere between 5.1 and 5.8 million Jews in the United States. Jews in the U.S. settled largely in and near the major cities. In descending order, the cities with the highest Jewish populations are: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC. Several other major cities have large Jewish populations per capita, like Cleveland. In many cities the majority of Jewish families have moved to the suburbs.
Culture Several staples of Jewish cuisine have been adopted into mainstream American culture; bagels, lox (smoked salmon) and matzoh ball soup are examples.
Yiddish, a Germanic language spoken by several million European Jews, has donated several loan words to American English, among them chutzpah ("effrontery", "gall"), nosh ("snack"), and shlep ("drag").
Many individual Jews have made significant and diverse contributions to American popular culture. Probably the most famous examples are the early Hollywood moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and the original Warner Brothers and the characteristically Jewish humor of the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner, but the legacy also includes songwriters as diverse as Irving Berlin, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Lou Reed and writers as diverse as Lillian Hellman, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth.
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