OPINION: American Jewry isn’t just bigger – it’s different. Here’s why it still matters

When I was a kid, I was stopped in my tracks when my father told me one day that more Jews were living in New York than lived in Israel. That story says something about how old I am since the core Jewish population of the US (let alone New York) of around 6,300,000 has now been superseded by that of Israel, at 7,153,000. However, it remains true that, in terms of influence within the Jewish world, the US remains enormously important.

As fellow English-speaking Jews, British Jews are often close followers of developments on the other side of the Atlantic. For example, at the beginning of the 1990s, concerns about ‘Jewish continuity’, which led to transformative attempts to renew the British Jewish community, were sparked by similar developments in the late 1980s in the US. The panic about intermarriage rates in America led to similar worries in the UK, even though the rate turned out to be much lower over here.

US-UK comparisons may underestimate the differences between the two Jewish communities and the broader context in which they sit. As much as anything else, this tells us something about the close interconnections between diaspora communities and the constant information flows within a globalised world. The victory of Zohran Mamdani last week in the New York mayoral Democratic primary was greeted by a wave of social media posts and articles from British Jews drawing comparisons with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader in 2015. These parallels were drawn despite enormous differences in the nature of New York mayoral politics and British national politics, to say nothing of the differences between Mamdani, a young Ugandan-born politician, and a middle-aged white Briton like Corbyn.

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One of the things that both the British and American Jewish populations share in common is a common perception of being ‘successful’, in part due to their inhabiting relatively ‘benign’ environments. The US and the UK have never seen large-scale waves of eliminationist antisemitism (at least, in the case of England, since the mediaeval period). However, they have seen much more localised occurrences of antisemitic violence. British and American Jewish populations became prosperous, largely middle-class and highly educated. Jewish prominence and achievements in multiple fields have led us to ‘punch above our weight’. It is something of a compliment that our population sizes are often wildly overestimated (a recent survey by YouGov suggested that many respondents thought 30 percent of the population was Jewish).

There is one key difference that distinguishes American Jewry from UK Jewry and, indeed, from the rest of the Diaspora: the widely shared conviction that US Jewish ‘success’ in the post-war period was integral to the broader flourishing of the country. The close alignment between normative Jewish liberalism and normative political liberalism, the very public Jewishness of a wide range of successful artists and the close political connections forged between Jewish and national leaders were all elements of what Franklin Foer called the ‘golden age of American Jews’ in his much-discussed 2024 article for The Atlantic.

Foer’s article also suggested that this ‘golden age’ was ending. With the rise of right-wing populism and tensions over Israel setting Zionist Jews against their previous liberal-left communities, Foer’s anxiety seems to be widely shared by American Jews. Of course, American Jewry has never been a monolithic entity. The growth of American orthodoxy and its political self-confidence, and the greater prominence of left-wing Jews challenging Zionism, show that the dominance of liberalism always created marginalised ‘others’ and was never shared by all American Jews. And in any case, the ‘golden age’ went hand in hand with Jewish anxieties over intermarriage rates and emptying synagogue pews.

As social scientists, we at JPR have always been close watchers of developments in American Jewry. We are part of a global conversation about what it is to be Jewish today. Yet we have never been more aware of the need to see each Jewish population in its own terms. Thus, on this 4 July, we will be thinking about ‘American exceptionalism’, but we will also be thinking about the exceptional features of other Jewish communities worldwide.

• Keith Kahn-Harris is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and Project Director of the JPR European Jewish Research Archive.