The American Jewish Experience in Historical and Contemporary Context

This chapter offers an overview of the historical evolution of American Jews, based on different migratory streams. Most historians trace the origins of the American Jewish community to the arrival of 23 Dutch (Sephardic) Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654. Indeed, for nearly half of the sojourn of Jews in what is today the US, Sephardic Jews dominated (Phase I, 1654–1825). Hundreds of thousands of Central European Jews migrated to the US and overwhelmed the Sephardic character of American Jewry (Phase II, 1825–1880). In turn, this Central European Jewish dominance was surpassed ultimately by the arrival of millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants (Phase III, 1880–1920). Their sheer numbers meant that their offspring would continue, for the most part, to shape American Jewish life through succeeding periods of time: the beginning of the end of massive immigration through the end of World War II (Phase IV, 1920–1945); the post-World War II period with its recognition of the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, and the Six-Day War (Phase V, 1945–1967); the heightened sense of Jewish identity following the Six-Day War through the recognition of the challenges to that identity posed by the findings of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that the recent rate of intermarriage among Jews was very high (Phase VI, 1967–1991); the increased attention of the Jewish community to domestic concerns following the NJPS 1990 findings and culminating in the influential Pew Surveys (2013 and 2020), along with the heightened internal turmoil both within American Jewry and the larger population occasioned by the campaign and subsequent election of President Donald J. Trump, followed by the Capitol Insurrection in January 2021 (Phase VII, 1991–Present), which may highlight a transition point to a newly emergent contemporary period in American Jewish life.