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Happy Hanukkah! Let's talk about Jews
Taking a look at Jews in America and how Americans think about us.
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I’m Jewish. That’s not a surprise to the people who know me,¹ and it’s something I talked about publicly when I ran for Congress.²
In large part because of what’s happening in the Middle East, Jewish issues were more top of mind during the 2024 presidential election than in the past.³ But that’s been analyzed every which way already, and it’s not what I’ll focus on here.
Instead, I’ll talk about where Jews live, and how the 100+ million Americans who don’t know someone Jewish think about these issues—Americans like Carter, who I interviewed for this newsletter. He’s an Army Reserve veteran, and until we met, he hadn’t ever met a Jewish person before.
Going into our conversation, my sense had been that Jews are either loved or loathed in the U.S.:
Jewish people are the most favorably viewed religious group in the U.S.
Simultaneously, and paradoxically, Jews are also widely distrusted and are, by far, the target of the most religious hate crimes of any group in America.
But the truth is more nuanced: there are lots of people who don’t think about these issues at all, because they’re not relevant in their communities.⁴
As we do more cultural exchange across religious and cultural groups within America—work I believe is vital—it’s important to keep that in mind.
Jewish Geography
According to recent Pew survey data, 2.4% of U.S. adults are Jewish.⁵ But that doesn’t tell you much about where Jews live, because the population is incredibly concentrated.
There are 3,143 counties in the United States, and Jews are heavily concentrated in just a handful of them: 96% of American Jews live in urban or suburban areas.⁶
What that means is that there are large swaths of the country where there are few or no Jews:⁷
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Using county-level data to estimate whether someone knows a Jew is a highly inexact science, but it does line up—very, very roughly—with surveys that suggests that 34% of American adults don’t know someone who is Jewish.⁸
Why does all of this matter?
For starters, people who know someone who’s Jewish are far less likely to hold antisemitic views.⁹
Personally, it’s a blind spot: by definition, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know a Jew, and that’s 100+ million Americans.¹⁰
All of that informed my conversation with Carter.¹¹
How I got to know Carter
For the last bunch of years, I’ve been involved in a mentorship program called ACP, which helps people leaving the military with resume review, interview prep, etc.
At the beginning of the year, I was paired with Carter, who’s in his mid-20s and who grew up in rural Oklahoma.¹² He served in the Army National Guard for six years and graduated from college in the Texas panhandle. He and his family recently moved away, but for a few years they’d been living about an hour outside of Lubbock, Texas.¹³
When I floated whether he’d be interested in chatting with me about this, I asked if he’d ever met a Jewish person before.
As far as he knew, he had not.
How communities like Carter’s think about Jews
The answer, maybe unsurprisingly, is not much.
I assumed that if I asked him to name a famous Jewish person, he would’ve come up with someone: maybe someone like Adam Sandler, who has widespread appeal, or Ben Shapiro, who’s reasonably well known—especially in conservative circles.¹⁴
But no, when I asked, the answer was probably more predictable: Jesus Christ. That was a lot of the framing of Jewishness for Carter and others in his community.
 Listen now · 0:57 |
What about in school—did Jewish culture ever come up? Again, the answer is no, not really. More on the Holocaust in a moment, but growing up in Oklahoma, to the extent that education had any focus on minority groups, that was centered around the Native American community.
| Listen now · 1:05 |
Antisemitism, racism, and discrimination
I asked Carter whether he knew what antisemitism was. He didn’t. But when I gave him some examples of what anti-Jewishness might look like, he couldn’t remember anything like what I offered.¹⁵
That became a broader discussion of discrimination in the U.S. today, and here’s what he had to say:
| Listen now · 1:14 |
Carter mentioned two things to back up his assertion that white people face discrimination in the U.S. today:
The sense that anything that white people do is perceived as racist.
Affirmative action. (For context: 68% of adults say that race shouldn’t be a consideration in college admissions.¹⁶)
Without taking a position on either issue, he’s hardly alone here.¹⁷ White Americans, and especially white Republicans, say that anti-white racism is increasingly a problem for them.
Holocaust education
There is much more to understanding Jews and Judaism than learning about the Holocaust, but it’s still important. Across the U.S., 23 states mandate Holocaust education.¹⁸
So it was disheartening when Carter didn’t immediately know what the Holocaust was. That’s not an indictment against him; it’s really an indictment of our educational system. And it’s jarring to me, for whom the Holocaust is not just personal but also informs a lot of the way that I see the world.
When reminded, he did remember, basically, the “never again” mantra associated with the atrocities of the Holocaust.
| Listen now · 0:53 |
The challenge, of course, is that for “never again” to mean something, we’d have to know first and foremost what we’re not repeating.
He’s not alone in this, of course; many younger people are unfamiliar with the Holocaust or the particulars of it, and that’s a huge problem we have to grapple with.¹⁹
| Listen now · 1:16 |
Let’s not conflate unfamiliarity with bigotry or dislike
For people who live a state or two away from each other, Carter and I live remarkably different lives. I’m fortunate to know Carter, and I’d encourage anyone who has the opportunity to talk to people way outside of their social circles to do so.
It is important that we educate people on different cultures. In this specific context, when so many Americans don’t know much about Jews, and when antisemitism is on the rise, that’s especially important.
At the same time, someone not knowing about antisemitism is not the same thing as being prejudiced.
As ever, in a country as divided as ours, it’s a reminder that people who don’t use what we deem to be the right language, phraseology, or frames of reference are probably still good people. That doesn’t absolve of us of the responsibility to do more in terms of education and cultural exchange, but it’s important to acknowledge nonetheless.
In the new year, I’ll talk more about how the media covers Jews (and issues related to other minorities), what they get right, and where the narrative is wrong. More to come.
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My ability to quote Seinfeld and the entire anthology of Mel Brooks is notable, if entirely useless.
Confusingly, there is a different writer named Ben Samuels who covers Jewish issues in the U.S. He’s a great reporter but I am not him.
Antisemitism in the U.S. is very real, and it’s also deployed as a political weapon by people who don’t really care to address it. Throughout the election, people accused Donald Trump of being an antisemite and accused Kamala Harris of being an antisemite. (I’ve written about how antisemitism came into play in St. Louis politics.)
It’s a few years old now, but this Yair Rosenberg op-ed has always felt pretty astute: “Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews.”
In any event, that tactic—deploying an issue to your gain when you don’t really care about it—is hardly limited to antisemitism. I can say with reasonable certainty, for instance, that Donald Trump doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about cryptocurrency. But he knows that they make good allies, and he’s happy to make friends with them.
It probably reveals a more uncomfortable truth for me too: that I don’t know enough, and don’t think enough about, people whose communities don’t look like mine—especially people who live in more rural areas.
There’s more than a little nuance here, and the question of who is a Jew is so complicated that it commands its own 10,000-word Wikipedia page.
To make things simpler, I tasked ChatGPT to come up with a one-sentence summary of that Wikipedia page: “The question ‘Who is a Jew?’ involves religious, cultural, and legal ideas, with different groups defining it based on ancestry, conversion, and personal identity.”
For context, in 1958, 96% of Jews lived in urban areas. So there’s been some movement away from the cities into the suburbs, like there has been for every population, but there have never been a lot of Jews living in rural areas.
There are a ton of smaller counties that drive up the total, and help explain why 50% of counties in the U.S. have zero Jews, but only 7% of the U.S. population lives in those counties.
There’s interesting survey data from 2022 that suggests that Americans believe that Jews make up 30% of the country. But if you dig into this data, Americans overstate the size of basically every minority group. Most of this just comes down to the fact that it’s really hard to make informed estimates when you start dealing with small numbers.
Of course, this makes sense. One possible parallel: a 2007 poll that has stuck with me since I first read about it, when gay marriage was far less accepted than it is today. Back then, and I’m sure still, people who know someone who’s gay were far more likely to be supportive of gay marriage (more than twice as likely, in fact) than someone who didn’t know a gay person.
This isn’t about people knowing someone who is Jewish, per se, though that’s not unimportant. I think it informs, for instance, why I support state legislation that mandates teaching people about the Holocaust.
But much more broadly, I don’t really know people who live in rural areas where there aren’t any (or many) Jews, and the urban-rural chasm in this country only seems to be growing.
The Oklahoma county he grew up in has zero Jews, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
Jewish population in the county he was living in: zero.
Politically, I suspect he and I probably don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, but until the other day, politics hadn’t ever come up. The two counties he’s lived in most recently both supported Trump with 80%+ of the vote.
Candidly—and this betrays my own prejudices—I worried that the answer might be George Soros. (For context, there’s an entire Wikipedia page titled George Soros conspiracy theories, which is strongly rooted in antisemitism.)
When I asked again if he knew anyone who’s Jewish, in his more thorough answer, Carter said, “I know a guy in the military who kind of jokes about being Jewish.” Which, as a joke, raises an eyebrow or two.
When he asked for examples of what antisemitism might look like, I gave the example—and this is probably too leading on my part as an interviewer—of someone cheap being referred to as a Jew. (This is certainly one that I grew up around.) I appreciated his response: “I can’t think of anything like that. I mean, we were in a small town, so I think everybody was…on the cheaper side.”
This includes majorities of adults across every measured race, including a narrow majority of black adults. (52% of black adults agree with the decision to ban the use of race in college admissions decisions.)
Trump voters, who I will remind readers make up a plurality of this country, say that racism against white Americans is a bigger problem than racism against black Americans.
In Carter’s specific context: that doesn’t include Oklahoma. (Texas is one of the states that mandates it, but he didn’t grow up there.)
I reference this at the end of the audio clip, but Carter’s daughter has a living great-great-grandparent, which is pretty wild.
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