Jewish Americans

In September 1653, 23 Jewish refugees of Spanish and Portuguese origin fled the Inquisition in the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, and arrived by boat in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York City by the English). They were not warmly received.

Governor Peter Stuyvesant, a vehement antiSemite, wanted to deport them at once, but he was overruled by his superiors at the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam, and the Jews were grudgingly allowed to stay. Thus began the extraordinary saga of the Jewish presence in America, a presence that would prove disproportionately beneficial to every aspect of political, cultural, commercial, academic, philanthropic, and scientific life in the United States. Although the Jewish population of America is small—estimates range between 5.28 and 6.54 million, according to the 2010 North American Jewish Data Bank—their entry into the open and increasingly pluralistic environment of America enabled them to acculturate swiftly and productively.

Educationally, 59 percent of American Jews have completed college or postgraduate education, compared to 27 percent of Americans in general. Approximately 30 percent of all Ivy League students are Jewish, as are 20 percent of all professors at elite universities. After the early years of anti-Jewish restrictions at the university level, many of America's top colleges have been led by Jewish presidents, including Rick Levin at Yale, Judith Rodin and Amy Guttmann at the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Summers at Harvard, James Freeman at Dartmouth, Harold Shapiro at Princeton, Larry Bacow at Tufts, Henry Bienen at Northwestern, Jeffrey Lehman at Cornell, and Stephen Trachtenberg at George Washington.

A total of 47 percent of American Jews report incomes of over $100,000, compared to 19 percent of Americans in general. About 45 percent of the top 40 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans are Jewish, and 40 percent of the partners in leading law firms in Washington and New York are Jewish. A total of 37 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, as are 30 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners in science. Currently, three of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Jewish, the highest number in the history of the court.

There are 13 Jews in the U.S. Senate and 27 Jews in the House of Representatives, a far higher proportion than Jews in the overall American population. However, the road to Jewish success in America was not always easy. Anti-Semitism, discrimination, quota systems, and occasional violence against Jews—most infamously, the mob lynching of Leo Frank in 1915—caused decades of anxiety and frustration in the Jewish community.