A New York Times map tells America’s immigration story. So where are the Jews? - opinion

“How a Nation of Immigrants Traces Its Roots” is a lovely multimedia feature mapping Americans by their ethnic and immigrant origins. A celebration of diversity, it includes 200 “unique identities” represented across all 50 states: Scandinavians in the upper Midwest, African-Americans clustered in the South and beyond, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Portuguese along the coast of New England, Yemeni immigrants and their descendants in Detroit, and Native Americans living across a country that was once theirs.

But zoom in on the map, and there’s a notable omission: Jews. Hover over Manhattan, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, and you’ll find pockets where 20% or more of residents are Chinese, Puerto Rican, African American, Dominican, German, or Italian. Conspicuously, there is no heading for “Jewish.”

Readers noticed, and the comments section included a number of complaints. “This analysis completely hides descendants of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe,” wrote “AKJersey.”

“I am a Jew descended from immigrants from Germany and what is now Belarus,” wrote “Hannah Banana.” “I think that Jews as a group should be so defined, and not as immigrants from one or another political identity.”

In response, Adelson noted that the map is based on data from the Census Bureau, “which is legally prohibited from asking questions about religion.”

Adelson also anticipated readers who might have asked why they simply didn’t augment the map with another data set. “While there are private surveys that do ask about religion,” he wrote, “those unfortunately do not provide the level of detail we needed for this project.”

By omission, the map project reflects versions of Jewish identity that often confound demographers, and even the Jews themselves. Although millions of Jews emigrated from what was then the Russian Empire (the Times article refers to “pogroms” without identifying their victims), most were more likely to identify themselves as Jews than as Russian — or Polish, or Romanian, or Lithuanian. As Charles Liebman and other Jewish sociologists have explained, a Jew may be Russian or Polish by nationality, but Jewish identity is a parallel, enduring membership in a global people that is not bounded by the nation-state.

Part of that is self-understanding, and part of that is imposed by nation-states that never fully accepted Jews as citizens, or at least citizens with full, inalienable rights.

Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the Russian region where Jewish subjects were required to live for over a century, “were simultaneously subjects of the tsar and members of a corporate body defined by law, residence, and custom,” wrote Benjamin Nathans in his 2010 book, “Beyond the Pale.”

The idea that “Jew” is an identity that persists across states, languages, and borders has always been a source of confusion — and even a cause of persecution. It was used to justify the oppression and disenfranchisement of Jews, and became a vicious circle: Denied full citizenship, Jews embraced their Otherness; in turn, their Otherness was used as a pretext to exclude them.

The confusion persists to this day. When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declares that he can’t support ”any state that privileges one religion over the other,” his Jewish critics see a category error. “Judaism is both a religion and a nation,” the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal wrote in response.  “This distinction matters because reducing Judaism to a religion strips Jews of collective rights.”

To be sure, many Jews have resisted this notion of Jewish nationhood: For decades, German-Jewish immigrants held fiercely to their Germanness and later their Americanness. They preferred to present Judaism as a religion, a set of beliefs and behaviors akin to Protestantism, and rejected movements — especially Zionism — that suggested Jews were a people in any way apart, and not first and foremost citizens of the country in which they lived.

But as the journalist Nicholas Lemann, author of a new memoir about his assimilated German-Jewish family, explains, this version of Jewishness as a faith only worked until it didn’t. The flood of Eastern European Jewish immigrants felt that “the idea of living as fully accepted Americans adhering to universal values was a fantasy that only prosperous German Jews could entertain.“ The rise of Nazism demonstrated, definitively and obscenely, the limits of Jewish belonging, and Israel, as Lemann wrote this week in a New York Times op-ed, “touched a deep collective yearning for self-determination, for self-protection, from freedom from perpetual outsider status.”

America, meanwhile, offered Jews a welcome that they found in few other places, without asking that they renounce what Louis D. Brandeis called their “distinctive nationality.” “Having known the weight of persecution and exclusion, Jews recognized in America’s founding ideals something rare in human history: the possibility of belonging without surrendering our identity,” according to an open letter written to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and signed by prominent American Jewish leaders.

They may have left Russia as Jews, but they arrived at Ellis Island as Americans.

Polling data suggests that most American Jews are comfortable with this sort of blended identity: Jewish in their hearts if not their faith, fully at home in America, and emotionally attached to Israel.

The Times is right that the census data don’t capture these nuances of identity, and that Jews themselves are not sure they want that data readily available.

Still, the map’s blank spots — whether on Manhattan’s Upper West Side or in the condo communities of South Florida — are disconcerting. The Times describes the feature as one that “tells the story of immigration in America.” The distinct contributions of Jews to America’s social, cultural, intellectual and economic life are an indisputable part of that story — even if they resist neat boundaries.