The Changing Shape of World Jewry

1. Consolidation: a people concentrated as never before

At its pre-Holocaust peak in 1939, world Jewry numbered about 16.7 million people, spread across every inhabited continent — roughly half in Eastern Europe alone, with sizable communities across Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Eighty-five years later, the global Jewish population still hasn't recovered to that number, and its geography has changed even more dramatically than its size.

Data: Sergio DellaPergola (2001, 2023); Jacob Lestschinsky (1929, 1948); U.O. Schmelz (1970); compiled by Jonathan D. Sarna.

Eastern European Jewry has essentially disappeared — the Shoah, the postwar exodus from the Soviet Union, and now the Russian-Ukraine war saw to that. Jewish communities across Asia, the Arab world, and Iran have likewise mostly relocated, chiefly to Israel and the U.S. What remains is a Jewish people concentrated in two centers of roughly equal size:

By 2024, roughly 90% of world Jewry lived in just two countries: the United States and Israel. Sarna frames this as a modern echo of Bavel Veyerushalayim — Babylon and Jerusalem in antiquity — two interdependent centers rather than a people scattered across the globe. It also means world Jewry has become, in his words, a people and a faith of the developed world, which shapes how the rest of the world encounters (or fails to encounter) Jews and Judaism firsthand.

2. Bifurcation: one community, dividing in two directions

Even as American Jews consolidate geographically, they are diverging from one another — religiously, educationally, and through marriage.

Sources: Pew Research Center; the Jewish Education Project (via JTA, April 2023).

• Religiously, Pew's research finds two sharply diverging expressions of Jewish identity gaining ground — one deeply religiously engaged, the other largely secular — with the once-large religious middle eroding.
• Educationally, the same split holds: even as the number of Jewish children in the U.S. rose 17% between 2000 and 2020, Hebrew school enrollment fell by at least 45% over roughly the same period. Young American Jews increasingly fall into one of two camps — Jewishly well-educated or largely unschooled — with little remaining in between.
• Maritally, intermarriage has risen sharply among recent generations:

Source: Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

Over 70% of non-Orthodox Jews married since 2010 have a non-Jewish spouse. And that split carries real consequences for communal life:

Source: Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

Jews who identify with no particular denomination or “no religion” — a group heavily overlapping with intermarried households — report markedly lower senses of Jewish peoplehood, mutual responsibility, attachment to Israel, and priority placed on raising Jewish grandchildren than their Orthodox and Conservative counterparts.