The primary purpose of this project is to develop Jewish population estimates for all 436 (including DC) of the 119th Congress's congressional districts. As part of this project Jewish population estimates were developed for all 3,143 US counties using a “Multimethod Distinctive Jewish Name Guided” procedure which appears here and will be published in the 2024 American Jewish Year Book. (See the methodology report). Geographic Information System (GIS) software was used to combine a range of data sets (including the DJN-based Jewish population estimates, community studies, voter data, and Census Bureau products) gathered at the state, county, zip code, census tract, and other geographic levels. Integrating all these sources made it possible to develop current estimates of the Jewish population of each of the 436 congressional districts.
These data are for the 119th Congress congressional districts and supersede two previous products on the DataBank from 2014 and 2006. The older data sets are based on the congressional district boundaries in place last decade (through 2022) and are not comparable. Almost all congressional district boundaries change each decade.
This project was carried out by Dr. Joshua Comenetz and Dr. Ira M. Sheskin, with support from the non-partisan, non-profit Jewish Electorate Institute (jewishelectorateinstitute.org). The data provided are intended exclusively for non-commercial and non-profit purposes.
All data and other results are completely neutral and non-partisan.
Products available for downloading include four maps of the U.S. Jewish population (two by county and two by congressional district) in PDF format, a Summary Report presented in PowerPoint format, and an Excel file with three internal worksheets summarizing the Jewish population estimates by (1)congressional district, (2)state, and (3)county, and a methodological report.
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Population Estimates:
The estimate of the Jewish population in all Congressional Districts is 7,698,840, approximately 2.3% of the total U.S. population. This estimate is a significant 17.6% increase from the 6.55 million Jewish persons reported in the 2010 The American Jewish Yearbook. Much of the increase from 2010 to 2024 is due to improvements in estimating the Jewish population.
The data file contain estimates of the Jewish population of each of the 436 congressional districts in effect as of the start of the 119th Congress. New York’s 12th district has the largest number of Jewish persons with 181,000, while the least Jewish district is Kentucky’s 5th district with 40 Jewish persons.
There are 13 congressional districts with 100,000 or more Jews, eight in New York and two each in California and Florida and one in New Jersey—the four states with the highest total Jewish populations. The states with the lowest Jewish populations are South Dakota and North Dakota, each with a Jewish population below 1,000.
Congressional districts are supposed to have approximately the same number of people nationwide, most have roughly 765,000 people. This means that the districts with the largest and smallest number of Jews also have the highest and lowest percentages of Jews: 23.3% in New York’s 12th and 0.005% in Kentucky’s 5th.