“No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation ... these émigré Puritans dramatized their own situation as the righteous remnant of the Church corrupted by the‘Babylonian woe,’ and saw themselves as instruments of Divine Providence, a people chosen to build their new commonwealth on the Covenant entered into at Mount Sinai.”
Gabriel Sivan in The Bible and Civilization (Page 236).
American Jewish history began in 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. This fact establishes a period of intense Jewish migration to the USA.
Some Jews, trying to escape from the clutches of the Inquisition in the 16th century took refuge in Netherlands. A century later, hundreds of their descendants crossed the ocean to settle in the new Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil, where Jewsih life community settled for the first time in the new world.
When Portugal regained the colony in 1654, the Jews were dispersed. The refugees went to the Dutch Caribbean, where new Jewish communities were created. A group of approximately 23 Jews sailed to the remote Dutch port of new Amsterdam and asked permission to settle there. This marked the beginning of Jewish community life in North America.
The Judaism of the colonial period as population never exceeded a tenth of one percent of the U.S. population, however, established patterns of Jewish community life which persisted for generations.
The majority of Jews lived in port cosmopolitan cities like New York and Newport where the trading opportunities abounded, and people of diverse backgrounds and faiths lived with each other.
The sephardím maintained its cultural hegemony in Jewish life in the 19th century, although by then the Ashkenazi Jews (from Central and Eastern Europe) were much more numerous.
The American Revolution marked a turning point not only in American Jewish history, but also in modern Jewish history in general. Never before a great nation was committed so deeply with the principles of freedom and democracy in general and religious freedom in particular. Jews and members of other minority religions could dissent of the religious views of the majority without fear of persecution.
The Civil War divided the Jews as well as across the nation. There were Jews in the North and the South, there were Jews who supported slavery and others who condemned it, there were Jews who fought for the Union and there were them who fought for the Confederacy. In many respects the Civil war affected the Jews as it did with other Americans.
The XX century witnessed the emergence of American Jews in the Jewish world. With the passage of time, the Jews of the United States became the third largest community Jewish in the world, after Russia and Austria-Hungary, with approximately one million Jews. Approximately half of Jews lived in New York, which was the most populous, much greater, twice as large Jewish community that which resided in Warsaw, Poland. In the mid-nineteenth century the Jewish population in the United States was only 50,000 Jews while about 16,000 Jews lived in New York.
In 1900, more than 40% of the Jews in the United States were recent immigrants and the largest immigration wave was still to come. Between 1900 and 1924, reached 1,750,000, most of Eastern Europe, in 1930 Jews were the 3 ½ % of the total population.
(WIKIPEDIA quote) During the World War II more than 550,000 Jews served in the U.S. military; about 11,000 were killed and more than 40,000 were wounded. There were three recipients of the Medal of Honor, 157 recipients of the Army Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross or, and about 1600 recipients of the Silver Star. About 50,000 other decorations. citations and awards were given to Jewish military personnel, for a total of 52,000 decorations. During this period, Jews were approximately 3.3 percent of the total U.S. population but constituted about 4.23 percent of the U.S. armed forces. About 60 percent of all Jewish physicians in the United States under 45 years of age were in service as military physicians and medics.
Many Jewish physicists, including project lead j. Robert Oppenheimer, were involved in the Manhattan Project, the secret World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb. Many of these were refugees from Nazi Germany or from antisemitic persecution elsewhere in Europe.
Today Jews are 6.59 million in the USA according to the Jewish Data Bank of 2011. Most of the live in New York, and then Miami, Chicago, Philadelfia and Los Angeles.
Influential jews in USA.
Alan Greenspan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gerald Levin, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Steven Spielberg, Julie Wiener, Ari Fleischer, Michael Bloomberg, Rabbi Herman Neuberger, Steve Ballmer, Rabbis Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz, Brad Turell, Rebbetzin Miriam Feldman, Mortimer Zuckerman, Abraham Foxman, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Jon Stewart, Clark Howard, Robert Wexler, Jay Schottenstein, Calvin Klein, Michael Ovitz, Aaron Sorkin, Mel Brooks, Philip Glass are some of the examples of influential people in every field in the USA.
The american folk music have a lot of examples of this: musicians like Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly and Pete Seeger in the 40´s and 50´s and Bob Dylan in the 60´s.
Important writers, such as JD Salinger, Elie Wiesel, Daniel Stern, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, etc.
Entertainers as Zac Efron, Scarlet Johansson, Jonah Hill, Mila Kunis, Seth Rogen, Zach Braff, Adrien Brody, James Franco, Andy Samberg, Larry David, Albert Brooks, Billy Cristal, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Lauren Bacall, Jerry Lewis, Marx Brothers, etc.
