ABSTRACT
Jews have lived in the United States since colonial times, always as a very small minority. Statistics vary greatly according to the criteria chosen for identifying individuals as Jews, but by the broadest definition, in 1997 they constituted no more than 2.1 percent of the U.S. population (DellaPergola, 1999).1 The great majority were descendents of immigrants who arrived during the period of mass migration between 1881 and 1914, when Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe accounted for some 9.4 percent of the 22 million new immigrants to the U.S. (Kuznets, 1975; Chiswick, B., 1991).2 The sheer size of this influx made them one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, and the subsequent destruction of European Jewry would make them the largest.3 So while immigrant Jews may have been a tiny minority in their own country, the community that they and their descendents formed has had a very large influence on twentieth century Judaism.
