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Exhaustive Study Finds Booming Jewish Population In Brooklyn
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Jan 18, 2013
Modified Jan 18, 2013
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By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Jan 18, 2013
Modified Jan 18, 2013
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Get those Yenta apps ready, Brooklynite members of the tribe: turns out Brooklyn's just full of Jews of all shapes, sizes and socio-economic classes, and the population is climbing! The UJA Federation of New York just released their 2011 Jewish Community Study and found that not only does the Times's favorite borough have the biggest Jewish population in the city, it also has the most diverse, home to more religious, secular and poor Jews than in Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island or the Bronx.
According to the study, in 2011 there were 561,000 Jews—up from 456,000 in 2002, and 371,000 in 1991—in Brooklyn out of a total 1.5 million Jews in the New York area. And while Brooklyn has long played host to Ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic enclaves in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Borough Park and Bensonhurst (94 percent of New York's Hasidic population lives in Brooklyn), the borough's seen an uptick in yuppier, more secular and more ethnically diverse people identifying as Jewish over the past few years, ostensibly drawn to all those bagels and babycinnos. 14 percent of Jews in Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, for instance, identify as being people of color, 11 percent are LGBTQ, and only 25 percent say they belong to a synagogue. Those neighborhoods also have the wealthiest Jewish populations, with 39 percent reporting healthy incomes. 55 percent of Jews in Brooklyn, many of whom live in Williamsburg, have reported extreme financial difficulty.
Meanwhile, the Jewish population in Manhattan, the traif-iest borough of them all, has fallen over the past couple of decades. The borough's got only 239,700 Jews in 2011 as compared to 1991's 308,000, which is great information to have on hand the next time your Nana tells you to move out of Bushwick so you can finally meet a nice Jewish boy in "the city."
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bensonhurst
brooklyn
brooklyn heights
brownstone brooklyn
carroll gardens
jews
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Rebecca Fishbein
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