Over the past thirty-five years, since 1980, since I have been doing demographic research counting Israelis in the US. I've often been asked how is it that the Israeli Consulates, newspapers, politicians claim to such larger numbers. My answer answer is usually that those numbers are taken out of the thin air.
When the well-written piece about Israeli-Americans appeared in the Jewish Journal this week, demographer Ira Sheskin, author of one of many ignored authoritative studies which show the number of Israeli-borns to be closer to one-hundred thousand persons in the U.S., responding to where the Israeli Consul General’s office got their estimate of “250,000 Israelis living in L.A.” Sheshkin was quoted in the article: “said with a laugh, ‘Their tuchis.’”
Once, when I visited the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics in Jerusalem which closely tracks the number of Israelis who have registered exiting Israel and do not return within two years, I asked the demographer who compiled the data how the Prime Minister’s office down the street keeps on putting out numbers of more than a million Israeli having emigrated abroad which was many times the counts he compiled. The ICBS demographer replied something to the effect of:They don’t ask us and I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong.
One of the main tropes of the Israeli American Council (IAC) is that no one counts and no one knows how many Israelis are in the U.S., which after thirty five years of such research, I can say is a statement of hopeful faith rather than an of easily verifiable fact based on multiple studies and data sources..
When the journalist Jared Sichel emailed me asking if I could estimate the number of Israeli-borns, their children and grandchildren, I just went to a publicly available dataset of the 2013 Pew American Jewry Survey and ran the numbers. My estimate base on Jews by religion/no religion/Jewish background who were born in Israel/Palestine is around 140,0000 nationally. The Israeli born Jews have around 40 thousand children under age 18 in their US households. Another estimated 170 thousand Jewish adults not born in Israel have one or both parent who were born in Israel/Palestine and these adults have an estimated 200 thousand children under 18 who have an Israeli born grandparent. An Additional 60 thousand American Jews reported that they had once “lived in Israel.”
So, first Israeli born generation migrants and second and third generation Jews descended from Israeli born migrants is estimated to be 550 thousand in the US. People who may have used Israel as a migration stop or return migrants from the U.S. or students who consider their year or so in Israel as living there may constitute an additional 60 thousand persons.
With a yearly budget of $17 million, the IAC can surely do better than utilizing estimates sourced from “Their tuches.”
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