History Of The Jews In The United States
The history of the Jews in the United States (United States of America), has been part of the American national fabric since colonial times.
Until the 1830s the Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina was the most numerous in North America. With the large scale immigration of Jews from diaspora communities in Germany in the 19th century, they established themselves in many small towns and cities. A much larger immigration of Eastern Ashkenazi Jews, 1880–1914, brought a large, poor, traditional element to New York City. Refugees arrived from diaspora communities in Europe after World War II, and many arrived from the Soviet Union after 1970.
In the 1940s Jews comprised 3.7% of the national population. Today the population is about 5 million—under 2% of the national total—and shrinking because of small family sizes and intermarriage. The largest population centers are the metropolitan areas of New York (2.1 million in 2000), Los Angeles (668,000), Miami (331,000), Philadelphia (285,000), Chicago (265,000) and Boston (254,000).
Read more about History Of The Jews In The United States: Jewish Immigration, Colonial Era, Revolutionary Era, 19th Century, Progressive Movement, Americanization, Philanthropy, Rise To Affluence in The 20th Century, Lynching of Leo Frank, World War I, 1930s, Postwar, Current Situation, Antisemitism in The United States
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“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
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—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the
biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of ... powers not granted by the compact, the States ... are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)