PewReserach.org
The majority of U.S. Jews identify as White. But in recent years, journalists, scholars and Jewish community leaders have wondered about the percentage of U.S. Jews who are “Jews of color,” “people of color” or “BIPOC” (an acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color), and who should be included in these groups. The new Pew Research Center survey did not contain questions using those terms, and therefore cannot determine how many U.S. Jews consider themselves to be people of color. However, the survey included several other questions that can be used to explore the overlapping connections between race, ethnicity, heritage and geographic origin among Jewish Americans.
The current survey, like most Center surveys in the United States, measures race and ethnicity using categories that mirror the way the U.S. Census Bureau asks about these identities, which is necessary for statistical reasons in order to ensure that surveys are representative of U.S. adults overall. When given these choices, 92% of U.S. Jews describe themselves as White and non-Hispanic, while 8% say they belong to another racial or ethnic group. This includes 1% who identify as Black and non-Hispanic; 4% who identify as Hispanic; and 3% who identify with another race or ethnicity – such as Asian, American Indian or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander – or with more than one race.
The survey also asked respondents about their Jewish heritage: whether they are Askhenazi (which the survey defined as following the Jewish customs of Central and Eastern Europe), Sephardic (following the Jewish customs of Spain) or Mizrahi (following the Jewish customs of the Middle East and North Africa).
Two-thirds of U.S. Jews say they are Ashkenazi; 3% describe themselves as Sephardic and 1% as Mizrahi, although an additional 6% identify with some mixture of these or other categories. (However, some of the 6% identify with unclear categories or do not specify their mixture. A total of 7% of the Jewish adults in the survey clearly identify as Sephardic or Mizrahi, either alone or in combination with other categories.) In addition, 17% say these labels either do not apply to them or that they are just Jewish, while 8% say they follow some other set of Jewish customs, indicate that they are unsure (5%) or otherwise did not answer the question (2%).
Jews by religion are much more likely than Jews of no religion to trace their Jewish customs to Central and Eastern Europe (72% vs. 52%). And most Orthodox (87%), Conservative (73%) and Reform (71%) Jews identify as Ashkenazi, as do half of Jews who don’t affiliate with any organized branch or stream of Judaism (52%).
Separately, the survey also asked about the country of birth of all respondents and their parents. Nine-in-ten Jewish adults report that they were born in the United States (90%), including 21% who are adult children of at least one immigrant and 68% whose families have been in the U.S. for three generations or longer. One-in-ten Jewish adults (10%) are immigrants, including 1% who were born in Israel.
Looked at another way, roughly three-in-ten Jewish adults are first- or second-generation immigrants, meaning they were born in another country or they were born in the U.S. but at least one of their parents was born elsewhere (31%). One-in-ten each trace their recent origins to Europe (11%) or the former Soviet Union (10%), and 3% either were born in Israel themselves or have Israeli-born parents.
