If demography is destiny, geography is the stage on which destiny is played out. A new series of high resolution maps, produced by geographer Joshua Comenetz of the U.S. Census Bureau for the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, provide a view of American Jewish life that is seemingly familiar—but, beneath the surface, spread unevenly across the 50 states. What do these maps tells us about where the American Jewish future lies?
Earlier compilations were more limited. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, for example, records languages like Yiddish and Hebrew and birthplaces like Israel, but not religion. Previous maps have relied on more general sources, like the American Jewish Year Book and surveys of communities that identify themselves as including Jews. But Comenetz, using sources like the American Community Survey and the North American Jewish Data Bank, along with his own thoughtful inferences, for the first time reconstructs the distribution of Jews across the United States down to the level of 3,200 counties. His picture of the Jewish population in the United States and Puerto Rico is a pointillist one.
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