150 Million Jews!

A friend of mine who works in the civil and human rights field in New York City recently asked a social-work class he was teaching: What percentage of Americans are Jewish? The  students’ answers ranged from 20 to over 50 percent!

The class of would-be social workers and organizers was a mixed lot, about 70 percent white, he reported. Race and ethnicity did not seem to affect their answers; there were even two half-Jews in the class, who also gave preposterously high estimates of America’s Jewish population. (And yes, my friend said, they all understand statistics.)

This is not the first time I have been told about people’s grossly inflated ideas about Jews in the U.S., who actually number about 2 percent of the country’s 330 million or so people. For all the discussions I’ve had with Jews about whether we are really and truly white, the reality is that we are widely perceived as a large plurality of the white majority! What in the world is this phenomenon about?

“Their professors are mostly Jewish,” explained my friend, “and the people they see on television and in the movies are Jewish — or at least my students think they’re Jewish.”

Is that it? Jewish high-achieving and visibility?

“Plus,” my friend says, “I’m teaching New Yorkers. A lot of white people in New York are Jews.”

But a lot of New Yorkers are Italian, too, and I doubt if his class would say that half the white people in America are Italian. And a lot of New Yorkers are Black, but I doubt if his class would guess that half of America is Black . . .

However I might explain this bizarre misapprehension about Jewish numbers in America, I am disturbed by it. It implies that the many people (college-educated!!) who resent the American power structure are resentful of Jews; that the many who resent white racism are thinking that Jews are racist. Maybe they think Uncle Sam is Jewish!! And they must believe that Jews reproduce like hamsters, given that a third of our people were killed by the Nazis only eighty years ago.

So I took my own poll: I asked myself to estimate the size of various ethnic groups in America, without giving it much thought. Here was my off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness list, in which I didn’t even aim for 100 percent:

English background, 36 percent; Irish, 12 percent; German, 30 percent; African-American, 12 percent; Hispanic, 17 percent; Italian, 9 percent; Indian and Pakistani, 4 percent; Scandinavian, 7 percent; Chinese, 4 percent.

Then I looked up the reality.

According to a ten-year old Business Inside article, Americans of German ancestry are the largest group, more than 49 million strong, or 15 percent. I doubled their numbers, I would guess, because of cockeyed associations I make between far-right politics and German Nazism.

People of African background are the next largest, over 41 million strong, or 12.8 percent. Bingo! I knew this because they are the most clearly defined, much-written about and oft-measured ethnic group in America.

Irish come next, with over 35.5 million, or 11 percent. I don’t know how I came so close.

Mexicans come after that, with 31.8 million, almost 10 percent. But if you lump together all Spanish-speakers (which I did but shouldn’t), including Puerto Ricans (nearly 4.6 million, 1.4 percent), Cubans (nearly 1.8 million), Salvadoran (nearly the same in numbers as the Cubans), and Dominican (1.4 million), there are about as many Americans of Spanish-speaking background as there are of African background. Still, I exaggerated their numbers, perhaps based on demographic predictions I’ve read and on my having spent a fair amount of time in California, which is 40 percent Hispanic.

To my surprise, there are only 26.9 million Americans of English ancestry, a little more than 8 percent, although if you count “British” instead of “English” and include Scotland (5.7 million) and Wales (1.9 million) as countries of origin — and Scottish-Irish (5.7 million), too — the numbers get up to 40 million, or over 12 percent. I exaggerated their numbers by 300 percent; I think I readily associate “white” with “WASP.”

Italians log in next at 17.6 million, or 5.5 percent. I added a few percentage points; they’re concentrated in the New York area, and so am I.

Poles come in next at 9.7 million, or 3 percent -— but I didn’t even think of them, or any Central Europeans, in my off-the-cuff counting, as though we Jews finally had left them all behind in Europe.

Indians and Pakistanis in the U.S. collectively number about 6 million, or nearly 2 percent (about the same as Jews). I think of them as rising in numbers via professional visas, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Norwegians number 4.6 million, Swedish 4.2, Danish 1.4, for a combined Scandinavian total of 3 percent. I have no idea why I exaggerated their total in my mind. Chinese? Only 4 million, including Taiwanese. I grew up with close Chinese friends, but I still carry racist images of Chinese neighborhoods swarmed with people, which perhaps caused me to exaggerate.

The Business Insider article did not list the Jewish population (though two of its three authors have Jewish-sounding names) because in America, Jewish is a religion, not a peoplehood or ethnic group. So where are our six million embedded — among the Poles? The Russians? Puh-lease.

There it is, gang, my own catalog of prejudices and misconceptions. However I might interpret the meaning of America’s grossly exaggerated sense of Jewish numbers, the whole exercise leaves me with the nightmarish image of 150 million (or so) American Jews yelling at each other about Israel . . .