Research Topics. Racial and ethnic diversity in Jewish households Unlike in , the Pew Research Center survey asked respondents separately about the race and ethnicity of all adults and children living in their household.
Sidebar: Jews of many racial and ethnic backgrounds To provide another window into some of the changes occurring in American Jewish life, Pew Research Center conducted a series of in-depth interviews with rabbis and other Jewish leaders.
One definitional complication is that the traditional Jewish categories of Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi do not squarely align with racial and ethnic categories conventionally used in the United States.
For example, some Hispanic Jews in the U. On the other side of the ledger, although the Census Bureau historically has classified people of Middle Eastern background as White, organizations representing Jews of color contend that some immigrants from the Middle East-North Africa region and their descendants should be counted as Jews of color.
Evinger and S. Saperstein, Aliya, Jessica M. Kizer, and Andrew M. Porter, Sonya R. Matthew Snipp. Luquis, Raffy R. In many cases, the geographic connections are remote in time. Sephardim, for example, trace their customs to Spain before the expulsion of the Jews from that country in Household members were not asked directly how they identify racially or ethnically. In cases where they are not the respondent, they may or may not be Jewish.
Pagination Next: About the report: Answers to frequently asked questions Mail screening questionnaire Extended mail questionnairee Web questionnaire Mode study topline 10 key findings about Jewish Americans.
Table of Contents Jewish Americans in 1. The size of the U. 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. Race, ethnicity, heritage and immigration among U. Jews Racial and ethnic diversity in Jewish households Sidebar: Jews of many racial and ethnic backgrounds Jewish demographics Economics and well-being among U. Jews Related Publications Apr 25, Publications Nov 3, As the authors write: …perhaps most of the characteristic Ashkenazi genetic diseases fall into this category.
Francis Collins, head of the American Human Genome Project, recently commented in The Economist : The downside of using race, whether in research or in the practice of medicine, is that we are reifying it as if it has more biological significance than it deserves.
As Albert Einstein pointed out a long time ago: If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.
Take Home Message Don't confuse racial categories with scientific ones. About the Author. Declaration This is my original unpublished work; it has not been submitted for publication elsewhere. References 1. Murray C, Herrnstein R. The bell curve. New York: The Free Press; Murray C. Jewish Genius. Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science. Gelfand T. Bulletin of the History of Medicine. The Economist. Gould SJ.
The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton; Concise Dictionary of Quotations. MacDonald K. A people that shall dwell alone: Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers; Gilman SL. Smart Jews: the construction of the idea of Jewish superior intelligence at the other end of the bell curve. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press; Support Center Support Center. External link. Please review our privacy policy.
In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness. Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian-speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million-strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent.
This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage. For almost two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant community in the face of what they see as targeted discrimination.
In cases of marriage, Farber acts as a type of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a case for his clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges.
He fears that DNA testing will place even more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian-speaking community. Despite public outrage and protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA testing, and reports continue to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used. One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for genetic material to prove that she was not adopted.
Another man was asked to have his grandmother, sick with dementia, take a test. Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian-speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame.
But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this. What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian-speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. As well as being deeply humiliating, Shindler told me that there is confusion around what being genetically Jewish means. But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used.
He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry test, but one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA — DNA that is passed down through the mother — that can be found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in that states that this specific DNA test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues have been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
But others would disagree. As DNA sequencing becomes more sophisticated, the ability to identify genetic differences between human populations has improved. Geneticists can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mountain range. In recent years, a number of high-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade.
In his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences between those groups.
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