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9. Race, ethnicity, heritage and immigration among U.S. Jews
Posted By admin on December 23, 2022
The majority of U.S. Jews identify as White. But in recent years, journalists, scholars and Jewish community leaders have wondered about the percentage of U.S. Jews who are Jews of color, people of color or BIPOC (an acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color), and who should be included in these groups. The new Pew Research Center survey did not contain questions using those terms, and therefore cannot determine how many U.S. Jews consider themselves to be people of color. However, the survey included several other questions that can be used to explore the overlapping connections between race, ethnicity, heritage and geographic origin among Jewish Americans.
The current survey, like most Center surveys in the United States, measures race and ethnicity using categories that mirror the way the U.S. Census Bureau asks about these identities, which is necessary for statistical reasons in order to ensure that surveys are representative of U.S. adults overall. When given these choices, 92% of U.S. Jews describe themselves as White and non-Hispanic, while 8% say they belong to another racial or ethnic group. This includes 1% who identify as Black and non-Hispanic; 4% who identify as Hispanic; and 3% who identify with another race or ethnicity such as Asian, American Indian or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or with more than one race.
The survey also asked respondents about their Jewish heritage: whether they are Askhenazi (which the survey defined as following the Jewish customs of Central and Eastern Europe), Sephardic (following the Jewish customs of Spain) or Mizrahi (following the Jewish customs of the Middle East and North Africa).
Two-thirds of U.S. Jews say they are Ashkenazi; 3% describe themselves as Sephardic and 1% as Mizrahi, although an additional 6% identify with some mixture of these or other categories. (However, some of the 6% identify with unclear categories or do not specify their mixture. A total of 7% of the Jewish adults in the survey clearly identify as Sephardic or Mizrahi, either alone or in combination with other categories.) In addition, 17% say these labels either do not apply to them or that they are just Jewish, while 8% say they follow some other set of Jewish customs, indicate that they are unsure (5%) or otherwise did not answer the question (2%).
Jews by religion are much more likely than Jews of no religion to trace their Jewish customs to Central and Eastern Europe (72% vs. 52%). And most Orthodox (87%), Conservative (73%) and Reform (71%) Jews identify as Ashkenazi, as do half of Jews who dont affiliate with any organized branch or stream of Judaism (52%).
Separately, the survey also asked about the country of birth of all respondents and their parents. Nine-in-ten Jewish adults report that they were born in the United States (90%), including 21% who are adult children of at least one immigrant and 68% whose families have been in the U.S. for three generations or longer. One-in-ten Jewish adults (10%) are immigrants, including 1% who were born in Israel.
Looked at another way, roughly three-in-ten Jewish adults are first- or second-generation immigrants, meaning they were born in another country or they were born in the U.S. but at least one of their parents was born elsewhere (31%). One-in-ten each trace their recent origins to Europe (11%) or the former Soviet Union (10%), and 3% either were born in Israel themselves or have Israeli-born parents.
These overlapping categories of race and ethnicity, Jewish heritage and geographic origin can be combined to explore different definitions of diversity among U.S. Jews. Pew Research Center does not take a position on who should or should not be counted as Jews of color. But the accompanying table can provide a sense of how widely the number of people in that category or in other categories, reflecting various kinds of diversity in the Jewish context would vary depending on ones definition on who counts as diverse.
For example, if one were to take the 8% of U.S. Jews who identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, some other race or multiracial, and then subtract those who identify with the Ashkenazi majority, then the resulting group (approximating a non-White and non-European-background population) would total 5% of adult Jews. And if one were to look only at Jews who do not identify as White in any way subtracting those who say they are White and Hispanic, for example then this group is 3% of U.S. Jewish adults.
On the other hand, if one were to take the 8% who identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, some other race or multiracial and then add White, non-Hispanic U.S. Jewish adults who identify as Sephardic or Mizrahi (or a combination of Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi), the percentage rises to 14%. Or one could take an even broader definition of diversity in the U.S. Jewish population, trying to take into consideration the survey respondents race or ethnicity andJewish heritage and country of origin. For example, if one were to count all Jewish adults who identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, some other race or multiracial; plus those who consider themselves Sephardic or Mizrahi; plus those who were born outside the United States, Canada, Europe or the former Soviet Union, or have a parent born anywhere besides the U.S., Canada, Europe or the former Soviet Union, a combined total of 17% of U.S. Jews would fall into those categories.
Additional kinds of diversity, such as by sexual orientation, are discussed in Chapter 10.
In time, the racial and ethnic profile of U.S. Jews may shift, since Jewish adults under the age of 50 are more likely than older Jews to identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiple races (13% vs. 3%).
Using the broadest definition of diversity offered as an example in this chapter, nearly three-in-ten Jewish adults under 30 (28%) identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, other race or multiracial; identify as Sephardic and/or Mizrahi; or are immigrants or children of immigrants to the U.S. from outside Canada, Europe or the former Soviet Union compared with a total of 7% of Jews ages 65 and older who meet any of those overlapping dimensions of diversity.
Unlike in 2013, the 2020 Pew Research Center survey asked respondents separately about the race and ethnicity of all adults and children living in their household.
Fully 13% of Jewish respondents report that they live in multiracial households, i.e., in multi-person households where at least one adult or child has a different race or ethnicity than the respondent. But most Jewish respondents (87%) either live alone or live in multi-person households where everyone shares the same racial and ethnic identity. This includes 83% who say everyone in their household which may consist of a single adult is White and non-Hispanic, along with 4% who say everyone in their household shares a racial or ethnic identity that is not non-Hispanic White.
Combining the 13% of respondents who live in multiracial households with the 4% who live in single-race, non-White households, the survey finds that 17% of U.S. Jewish adults live in a household where at least one person (adult or child) is Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial.
Compared with Jews by religion, Jews of no religion live in more racially diverse households. Roughly one-quarter of Jews of no religion (23%) say they live in a multi-person household in which at least one other adult or child has a different racial or ethnic identity, compared with 9% of Jews by religion who report that they live in multiracial households.
For an analysis of interracial/interethnic marriage among U.S. Jews, see Chapter 4.
The survey makes it possible to see the degree of partial overlap between the racial and ethnic categories conventionally used in the United States and the heritage categories often used by Jews (Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi). Those heritage categories are a matter of different customs and liturgies, not just ancestry or country of birth. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. Jewish adults say they are both non-Hispanic White and Ashkenazi (63%). Much smaller numbers identify as non-Hispanic White and Sephardic (2%) or non-Hispanic White and Mizrahi (less than 1%).
About 4% of U.S. Jews are Hispanic, including 1% who also say they are Ashkenazi and 1% who identify as Sephardic. About 1% of Jewish adults are non-Hispanic Black and Ashkenazi, though some Black respondents give other answers, such as that the heritage labels dont apply to them or that they are just Jewish. And 3% of Jewish adults identify with other races or ethnicities (such as Asian) or are multiracial, including 2% who also say they are Ashkenazi.
In terms of the overlap between race/ethnicity and region of birth, about one-in-ten of all U.S. Jewish adults are both non-Hispanic White and were born in the former Soviet Union or had a parent born there. A similar share (11%) are non-Hispanic White and were born, or had a parent born, elsewhere in Europe (outside of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus or other former Soviet republics), while 3% are non-Hispanic White and were born or had a parent born in Israel. Fewer than 1% identify as non-Hispanic White and say they were born, or had a parent who was born, in the Americas outside of the United States or Canada.
About 1% of Jewish adults are non-Hispanic Black and were born in the U.S.
Approximately 3% of Jewish adults are Hispanic and were born in the U.S. An additional 2% are Hispanic and were born or had a parent who was born in the Americas but in a country other than the U.S. or Canada.
Finally, when it comes to the overlap between Jewish heritage categories and countries of origin, the survey shows that six-in-ten U.S. Jews (60%) both identify as Ashkenazi and say they were born in the United States. An additional 9% identify as Ashkenazi and say they were born in Europe (excluding the former Soviet Union) or had a parent born there, and 7% were born, or had a parent born, in the former Soviet Union.
Overall, 3% of U.S. Jews say they are Sephardic, including 2% who were born in the U.S., 1% who were born or had a parent who was born in Europe, and fewer than 1% who were born or had a parent who was born in the Middle East-North Africa region.
To provide another window into some of the changes occurring in American Jewish life, Pew Research Center conducted a series of in-depth interviews with rabbis and other Jewish leaders. These conversations were separate from the survey of U.S. Jews. Although the interviewees were not selected in a scientific manner, and hence are not representative of Jewish leaders overall, we sought a diversity of viewpoints and have tried to convey them impartially, without taking sides or promoting any positions, policies or outcomes.
In the 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 8% of U.S. Jewish adults identify as Hispanic, Black (non-Hispanic), some other single ethnicity or race other than White, or as multiracial. The majority (92%) identify as White (non-Hispanic). Age patterns in the survey data indicate that the percentage of Jews who do not identify as White may be growing, and about one-in-six U.S. Jews (17%) already live in households with at least one adult or child who is Black, Hispanic, some other non-White race or ethnicity or multiracial.
Yet, even with this rising diversity, Jews who identify as White and non-Hispanic continue to make up the majority of American Jews, and people of other backgrounds sometimes feel like outsiders at synagogues, community centers, summer camps and other Jewish organizations, according to Jewish community leaders, activists and rabbis who spoke with Pew Research Center in interviews conducted apart from the survey.
Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who in 2021 became the first director of racial diversity, equity and inclusion for Reconstructing Judaism the central organization of the Reconstructionist Movement said she has often been asked if she is Jewish while in synagogue even when she is wearing a tallit (prayer shawl). Lawson, who identifies as Black, said she once noticed a man looking at her during the Amidah prayer. For religious folks, the Amidah is the prayer you dont interrupt people praying. But he kept staring at me, she said. I turned and said, What is the problem with you? Is my presence here bothering you?
Jared Jackson, executive director of a group called Jews in ALL Hues, said he hears stories every year about Black Jews being questioned by synagogue security personnel about their presence at High Holy Day services. Thats been happening for a very long time, he said. In his own life as a Black Jew, he added, there were times in his childhood when he was called racial slurs, both in English and in Yiddish, by other Jews. And while he thinks the situation has gotten better, racist behavior in the Jewish community is not totally gone, Jackson said. Its more covert than overt right now. People still go through it, honestly. Thats why my organization exists.
Indeed, Jews in ALL Hues is one of several national organizations that have arisen to address issues of racial equity and diversity among U.S. Jews. Others include the Jews of Color Initiative and the Jewish Multiracial Network.
The dominance of Ashkenazi heritage (associated with Central and Eastern Europe) in American Judaism can make Jews who dont share that background feel out of place in synagogues and other Jewish settings, said Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative.
Several congregational rabbis who were interviewed for this report said they have become more attuned in recent years to the feelings and needs of people of color in their congregations. While most said their congregants are still predominantly White and Ashkenazi, they also said there is noticeably more diversity now than in previous decades, due to adoptions by Jewish families, marriages by Jews to non-Jews, adult conversions to Judaism, immigration from places outside of Europe and increased openness toward Jews of color at synagogues.
People are finally waking up to the fact that our Jewish community is quite multicultural, said Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in New York, a Reform congregation.
Buchdahl, who was the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi, said it is vital that people of color feel at home in synagogues across the country. I think our community can still behave in a tribal sort of way, where there are a lot of assumptions You dont look Jewish! which I think many Jews dont realize is off-putting to people of color. It makes them feel like a stranger in their own home, like they dont really belong.
Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR in Los Angeles said her congregation recently bolstered the diversity of its board of directors. Four of the five new board members are Jews of diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds, she said.
The boards new makeup is more reflective of what the reality is in the country, she said. We know that, historically, Jewish communal spaces have not felt welcoming for Jews of color too often. Weve worked hard to be a loving and just community, and we realized a few years ago that thats just not enough. We have to actively work to create a space that will feel welcoming.
Some other rabbis said their congregations aspire to be welcoming to all Jews, including intermarried couples and LGBT people as well as Jews of color, but they have not yet experienced much change in the racial or ethnic composition of their members.
We have seen, over the years, changes in some ways, said Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg of United Hebrew Congregation in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. But the vast majority of our congregants are of Ashkenazi descent. I really do believe its a function of our location.
Buchdahl estimated that non-White Jews make up between 10% and 15% of the congregants at her New York synagogue. Many are people of color who convert to Judaism, she said. I would say that being a rabbi of color and I identify that way I think has attracted people who might not have otherwise come. I think increased sensitivity to issues around that has helped make them feel at home here.
One challenge in assessing the diversity of Jewish congregations, some activists and scholars said, is whether the term Jews of color should be applied to people who may not think of themselves that way.
The term Jews of color has been used far and wide these days, and includes a lot of people for whom being a person of color was not part of their identity inside of the United States for the vast majority of their lives, said Jackson, of Jews in ALL Hues, citing Jews from the Middle East as an example.
Mijal Bitton, a scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America who is writing a book on Syrian Jews in the United States, sees a growing gap between how mainstream Ashkenazi Jewish communal organizations think of Jews of color and how many ethnically and racially diverse Jews self-identify.
Part of the issue, she said, is that the traditional Jewish heritage categories Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi do not cleanly map onto U.S. categories of race and ethnicity: Being Ashkenazi doesnt necessarily mean being White, and being Sephardic or Mizrahi doesnt necessarily mean being a person of color.
The idea that the Syrian Jews Ive studied are Jews of color would feel overwhelmingly foreign and even ludicrous to them, Bitton said. Some might identify as White, some as Middle Eastern, some as non-White but not as Jews of color.
Who is or is not a Jew of color is not the right question for Sephardic Jews in America, said Brigitte Dayan, an Orthodox Jew of French Moroccan ancestry in New York City. The relevant question is: Do we see ourselves as occasional victims of discrimination in the organized Jewish world? I think the answer, for many of us, is yes.
Others questioned how well the term person of color applies to Hispanic Jews of Ashkenazi heritage, such as people whose parents or grandparents were refugees from Europe to Latin America during or after World War II.
Would you call a Latin American Jew who moved to the United States from Argentina or Mexico, and whose parents came from Poland or Germany, a Jew of color? asked Judit Bokser Liwerant, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who researches Latin American Jews.
She said she doubted that such a person would self-identify as a person of color.
The concept of Jews of color, though intended to foster inclusion, runs the risk of lumping together people who have singular trajectories into an undifferentiated other, Liwerant said. She added that she thinks many Latin American Jews also would reject the Hispanic label, which is formulated for the overall society but is historically and sociologically irrelevant when applied to the Jewish case.
The 2020 survey did not ask respondents whether they consider themselves Jews of color or people of color, and Pew Research Center consequently does not have an estimate of the share of U.S. Jews who describe themselves in those ways. The 8% estimate in this survey is based on race and ethnicity categories designed to resemble the U.S. census, which the Center uses to weight its surveys to be representative of the U.S. adult population.
The survey also asked respondents, in a separate question, whether they consider themselves Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, some combination, or none of those categories. And it asked respondents about the countries where they were born and where their parents were born, allowing researchers to combine categories of race and ethnicity, Jewish heritage and country of origin in myriad possible ways.
However they identify racially, Jews of Middle Eastern descent bring cultural histories to American synagogues that are often unfamiliar to Ashkenazi Jews, according to two Ashkenazi rabbis. Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles said that Iranian Americans now make up more than half of his Conservative congregation and have been a large presence there since the late 1970s, when many emigrated from Iran. At first, he said, differences between Iranian American Jews and Ashkenazi Jews over food, language, and even attitudes toward sending children to sleepovers and summer camps hindered efforts to bring the congregation together.
It was tense among the two groups, but also there were constant appeals for unity and togetherness, Wolpe said. Its much better now, but it took a long time and a lot of work.
Rabbi Howard Stecker of Temple Israel in Great Neck, New York, also leads a Conservative synagogue with many Iranian Americans. For the Ashkenazi Jews in his congregation, mixing with Jews who are not descended from Europeans has been a learning experience, he said: It has forced us to be more mindful of certain assumptions that we have about what it means to be Jewish.
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9. Race, ethnicity, heritage and immigration among U.S. Jews
Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
The demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnicity, and religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 116 people who have been appointed and confirmed as justices to the Supreme Court. Some of these characteristics have been raised as an issue since the court was established in 1789. For its first 180 years, justices were almost always white male Protestants of Anglo or Northwestern European descent.[1]
Prior to the 20th century, a few Catholics were appointed, but concerns about diversity on the court were mainly in terms of geographic diversity, to represent all geographic regions of the country, as opposed to ethnic, religious, or gender diversity.[2] The 20th century saw the first appointment of justices who were Jewish (Louis Brandeis, 1916), African-American (Thurgood Marshall, 1967), female (Sandra Day O'Connor, 1981), and Italian-American (Antonin Scalia, 1986). The first appointment of a Hispanic justice was in the 21st century with Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, with the possible exception of Justice Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardi Jew of Portuguese descent, who was appointed in 1932.
In spite of the interest in the court's demographics and the symbolism accompanying the inevitably political appointment process,[3] and the views of some commentators that no demographic considerations should arise in the selection process,[4][5] the gender, race, educational background or religious views of the justices has played little documented role in their jurisprudence. For example, the opinions of the first two African-American justices reflected radically different judicial philosophies; William Brennan and Antonin Scalia shared Catholic faith and a Harvard Law School education, but shared little in the way of jurisprudential philosophies. The court's first two female justices voted together no more often than with their male colleagues, and historian Thomas R. Marshall writes that no particular "female perspective" can be discerned from their opinions.[6]
For most of the existence of the court, geographic diversity was a key concern of presidents in choosing justices to appoint.[2] This was prompted in part by the early practice of Supreme Court justices also "riding circuit"individually hearing cases in different regions of the country. In 1789, the United States was divided into judicial circuits, and from that time until 1891, Supreme Court justices also acted as judges within those individual circuits.[7] George Washington was careful to make appointments "with no two justices serving at the same time hailing from the same state".[8] Abraham Lincoln broke with this tradition during the Civil War,[7] and "by the late 1880s presidents disregarded it with increasing frequency".[9]
Although the importance of regionalism declined, it still arose from time to time. For example, in appointing Benjamin Cardozo in 1929, President Hoover was as concerned about the controversy over having three New York justices on the court as he was about having two Jewish justices.[10] David M. O'Brien notes that "from the appointment of John Rutledge from South Carolina in 1789 until the retirement of Hugo Black [from Alabama] in 1971, with the exception of the Reconstruction decade of 18661876, there was always a southerner on the bench. Until 1867, the sixth seat was reserved as the "southern seat". Until Cardozo's appointment in 1932, the third seat was reserved for New Englanders."[11] The westward expansion of the U.S. led to concerns that the western states should be represented on the court as well, which purportedly prompted William Howard Taft to make his 1910 appointment of Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming.[12]
Geographic balance was sought in the 1970s, when Nixon attempted to employ a "Southern strategy", hoping to secure support from Southern states by nominating judges from the region.[1] Nixon unsuccessfully nominated Southerners Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, before finally succeeding with the nomination of Harry Blackmun of Minnesota.[13] The issue of regional diversity was again raised with the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed from the midwestern Seventh Circuit, leaving the court with all but one Justice having been appointed from states on the East Coast.[14]
As of 2022[update], the court has a majority from the Northeastern United States, with five justices coming from states to the north and east of Washington, D.C.: two justices born in New York (two in New York City), one in New Jersey, and two from Washington D.C. itself. The remaining four justices come from Georgia, California, Colorado, and Indiana; until the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana in 2020, the most recent justice from the Midwest had been John Paul Stevens of Illinois who retired in 2010. Contemporary justices may be associated with multiple states. Many nominees are appointed while serving in states or districts other than their hometown or home state. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, was born in Buffalo, New York, but moved to Indiana at the age of five, where he grew up. After law school, Roberts worked in Washington, D.C. while living in Maryland. Thus, three states may claim to be his home state. Justice Barrett is another example; although her commission identifies her as being from Indiana, she was born in New Orleans, raised in the adjacent suburb of Metairie, Louisiana, and did not live in Indiana until law school.
Some states have been over-represented, partly because there were fewer states from which early justices could be appointed. New York has produced fifteen justices, three of whom have served as chief justice. Ohio has produced ten justices, including two chief justices; Massachusetts nine (including Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan); and Virginia eight, including three chief justices. There have been six justices each from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Maryland (the latter including current chief justice John Roberts and current associate justice Brett Kavanaugh); and five each from Kentucky and New Jersey.[13] States that have produced four justices include California, Illinois (one chief and three associates each), and Georgia.
Despite the efforts to achieve geographic balance, only seven justices[a] have ever hailed from states admitted after or during the Civil War. Nineteen states have never produced a Supreme Court justice. In order of admission to the Union these are:
Six justices were born outside the United States. These included James Wilson (17891798), born in Ceres, Fife, Scotland; James Iredell (17901799), born in Lewes, England; and William Paterson (17931806), born in County Antrim, then in the Kingdom of Ireland. Justice David J. Brewer (18891910) was born farthest from the U.S., in Smyrna, in the Ottoman Empire, (now zmir, Turkey), where his parents were missionaries at the time.[16] George Sutherland (19221939) was born in Buckinghamshire, England. The last foreign-born justice, and the only one of these for whom English was a second language, was Felix Frankfurter (19391962), born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now in Austria).[17][18] The Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement on federal judges.
All Supreme Court justices were white and of European heritage until the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice, in 1967. Since then, only three other non-white justices have been appointed: Marshall's African-American successor, Clarence Thomas, in 1991, Latina Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, and African-American Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022.
Graphical timeline of non-white justices:
The majority of white justices have been Protestants of British ethnicity. There have been several justices of Irish or Ulster Irish descent, with William Paterson born in Ireland to an Ulster Scots Protestant family and Joseph McKenna, Edward Douglas White, Pierce Butler, Frank Murphy, William J. Brennan Jr., Anthony Kennedy, and Brett Kavanaugh being of Irish Catholic origin. There have been five justices of French ancestry in John Jay, Gabriel Duval, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Joseph Rucker Lamar[19] and Amy Coney Barrett, with all except the Catholic Barrett being Protestants of Huguenot origins. Many justices including John Jay, William Johnson, and Willis Van Devanter have been of Dutch Protestant origin,[19] whilst the only two Scandinavian Americans to serve on the court have been Chief Justices Earl Warren[19] and William Rehnquist.
Up until the 1980s, only eight justices of "central, eastern, or southern European derivation" had been appointed, and even among these justices, five of them "were of Germanic background, which includes Austrian, German-Bohemian, and Swiss origins (John Catron, Samuel F. Miller, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Warren Burger)", with Brandeis and Frankfurter being of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, while only one justice was of non-Germanic, Southern European descent (Benjamin N. Cardozo, of Sephardic Jewish descent).[20] Cardozo, appointed to the court in 1932, was the first justice known to have non-Germanic, non-Anglo-Saxon or non-Irish ancestry and the first justice of Southern European descent.[citation needed] Both of Justice Cardozo's parents descended from Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who fled to Holland during the Spanish Inquisition, then to London, before arriving in New York prior to the American Revolution.[21][pageneeded] At least two, Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg, were of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who served from 1986 to 2016, and Justice Samuel Alito, who has served since 2006, are the first justices of Italian descent to be appointed to the Supreme Court.[citation needed] Justice Scalia's father and both maternal grandparents as well as both of Justice Alito's parents were born in Italy.[22][23][24] Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born to a Jewish father who immigrated from Russia at age 13 and a Jewish mother who was born four months after her parents immigrated from Poland.[25]
Amongst white ethnicities, according to a 1959 article, there had never been a Justice with any Slavic ancestry.[19][needs update]
No African-American candidate was given serious consideration for appointment to the Supreme Court until the election of John F. Kennedy, who weighed the possibility of appointing William H. Hastie of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.[26] Hastie had been the first African-American elevated to a Court of Appeals when Harry S. Truman had so appointed him in 1949, and by the time of the Kennedy Administration, it was widely anticipated that Hastie might be appointed to the Supreme Court.[27] Kennedy gave serious consideration to this appointment, ensuring that this "represented the first time in American history that an African American was an actual contender for the high court".[26]
The first African-American appointed to the court was Thurgood Marshall, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice Tom C. Clark, saying that this was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 6911 on August 31, 1967.[28] Johnson confidently predicted to one biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, that a lot of black baby boys would be named "Thurgood" in honor of this choice (in fact, Kearns's research of birth records in New York and Boston indicates that Johnson's prophecy did not come true).[f]
The second was Clarence Thomas, appointed by George H. W. Bush to succeed Marshall in 1991. Bush initially wanted to nominate Thomas to replace William Brennan, who stepped down in 1990, but Bush decided that Thomas had not yet had enough experience as a judge after only months on the federal bench.[29] Bush nominated New Hampshire Supreme Court judge David Souter (who is not African-American) instead.[29] When Marshall retired due to health reasons in 1991, Bush nominated Thomas, preserving the racial composition of the court.
On February 25, 2022, President Joe Biden announced the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat vacated by the retirement of Stephen Breyer, making Jackson the first African-American woman to be nominated to the court.[30] The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, 2022.[31]
The words "Latino" and "Hispanic" are sometimes given distinct meanings, with "Latino" referring to persons of Latin American descent, and "Hispanic" referring to persons having an ancestry, language or culture traceable to Spain or to the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, as well as to persons of Latin American descent, whereas the term "Lusitanic" usually refers to persons having an ancestry, language or culture traceable to Portugal specifically.
Sonia Sotomayor nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and sworn in on August 8 is the first Supreme Court Justice of Latin American descent. Born in New York City of Puerto Rican parents, she has been known to refer to herself as a "Nuyorican". Sotomayor is also generally regarded as the first Hispanic justice, although some sources claim that this distinction belongs to former Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.
It has been claimed that "only since the George H. W. Bush administration have Hispanic candidates received serious consideration from presidents in the selection process",[32] and that Emilio M. Garza (considered for the vacancy eventually given to Clarence Thomas[33]) was the first Hispanic judge for whom such an appointment was contemplated.[34] Subsequently, Bill Clinton was reported by several sources to have considered Jos A. Cabranes for a Supreme Court nomination on both occasions when a court vacancy opened during the Clinton presidency.[35][36] The possibility of an Hispanic justice returned during the George W. Bush Presidency, with various reports suggesting that Emilio M. Garza,[37] Alberto Gonzales,[38] and Consuelo M. Callahan[39] were under consideration for the vacancy left by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor's seat eventually went to Samuel Alito, however. Speculation about a Hispanic nomination arose again after the election of Barack Obama.[40] In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice.[41] Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice.[42][43] In 2020, President Trump included Cuban-American judge Barbara Lagoa on a list of potential nominees to the court,[44] and Lagoa was reported to be one of several front-runners to fill the vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.[45][46][47] Ultimately, Amy Coney Barrett was nominated.
Some historians contend that Cardozo a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent[48] should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice.[1] Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "among the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans."[20] The National Hispanic Center for Advanced Studies and Policy Analysis wrote in 1982 that the Supreme Court "has never had an Hispanic Justice",[49] and the Hispanic American Almanac similarly reported in 1996 that "no Hispanic has yet sat on the U.S. Supreme Court".[50] However, Segal and Spaeth state: "Though it is often claimed that no Hispanics have served on the Court, it is not clear why Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Spanish heritage, should not count." They identify a number of other sources that present conflicting views as to Cardozo's ethnicity, with one simply labeling him "Iberian." In 2007, the Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History also listed Cardozo as "the first Hispanic named to the Supreme Court of the United States."[51]
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, widely described in media accounts as the first Hispanic nominee, drew more attention to the question of Cardozo's ethnicity.[42][43][52] Cardozo biographer Andrew Kaufman questioned the usage of the term "hispanic" during Cardozo's lifetime, commenting: "Well, I think he regarded himself as Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from the Iberian Peninsula."[42] However, "no one has ever firmly established that the family's roots were, in fact, in Portugal".[43] It has also been asserted that Cardozo himself "confessed in 1937 that his family preserved neither the Spanish language nor Iberian cultural traditions".[53] By contrast, Cardozo made his own translations of authoritative legal works written in French and German.[54]
Asian-American jurists are poorly represented at all levels of federal judicial system, let alone being Supreme Court justices. According to the Center for American Progress (2019),[55] among active federal judges serving on U.S. courts of appeals, only 10 were Asian Americans (5.7 percent). According to the study by the California Justice Goodwin Liu (2017), of the 94 U.S. attorneys, only three are Asian American; and only 4 of the 2,437 elected prosecutors are Asian American.[56][57]
Public opinion about ethnic diversity on the court "varies widely depending on the poll question's wording".[6] For example, in two polls taken in 1991, one resulted in half of respondents agreeing that it was "important that there always be at least one black person" on the court while the other had only 20 percent agreeing with that sentiment, and with 77 percent agreeing that "race should never be a factor in choosing Supreme Court justices".[6]
Of the 116 justices, 110 (94.8 percent) have been men. All Supreme Court justices were males until 1981, when Ronald Reagan fulfilled his 1980 campaign promise to place a woman on the court,[58] which he did with the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor was later joined on the court by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993. After O'Connor retired in 2006, Ginsburg was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who were successfully appointed to the court in 2009 and 2010, respectively, by Barack Obama.[59] In September 2020, following Ginsburg's death, Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her.[60] Barrett was confirmed the following month. Only one woman, Harriet Miers, has been nominated to the court unsuccessfully. Her nomination to succeed O'Connor by George W. Bush was withdrawn under fire from both parties, and also marked the first time when a woman was nominated to replace another woman on the court. The nomination of Barrett was the first successful nomination for a woman to succeed another woman. Joe Biden's 2022 nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat vacated by the retirement of Stephen Breyer makes Jackson the first African-American woman to be nominated to the court.[30] The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, 2022.[31]
Substantial public sentiment in support of appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court has been expressed since at least as early as 1930, when an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor encouraged Herbert Hoover to consider Ohio justice Florence E. Allen or assistant attorney general Mabel Walker Willebrandt.[61] Franklin Delano Roosevelt later appointed Allen to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuitmaking her "one of the highest ranking female jurists in the world at that time".[62] However, neither Roosevelt nor his successors over the following two decades gave strong consideration to female candidates for the court. Harry Truman considered such an appointment but was dissuaded by concerns raised by justices then serving that a woman on the court "would inhibit their conference deliberations", which were marked by informality.[62]
President Richard Nixon named Mildred Lillie, then serving on the Second District Court of Appeal of California, as a potential nominee to fill one of two vacancies on the court in 1971.[58] However, Lillie was quickly deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association, and no formal proceedings were ever set with respect to her potential nomination. Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist were then successfully nominated to fill those vacancies.
In 1991, a poll found that 53 percent of Americans felt it "important that there always be at least one woman" on the court.[6] However, when O'Connor stepped down from the court, leaving Justice Ginsburg as the lone remaining woman, only one in seven persons polled found it "essential that a woman be nominated to replace" O'Connor.[6]
Graphical timeline of female justices:
All but a handful of Supreme Court justices have been married. William H. Moody, Frank Murphy, Benjamin Cardozo, and James Clark McReynolds were all lifelong bachelors.[63] In addition, retired justice David Souter and current justice Elena Kagan have never been married.[64][65] William O. Douglas was the first Justice to divorce while on the court and also had the most marriages of any Justice, with four.[63] Justice John Paul Stevens divorced his first wife in 1979, marrying his second wife later that year. Sonia Sotomayor was the first female justice to be appointed as an unmarried woman, having divorced in 1983, long before her nomination in 2009.[63][65] Of the six women who have been appointed to the Court, O'Connor and Ginsburg were the only two military spouses,[66] both having accompanied their spouses to their service posts, though in both cases their spouses had served for only brief periods, decades prior to their appointments.
Several justices have become widowers while on the bench. The 1792 death of Elizabeth Rutledge, wife of Justice John Rutledge, contributed to the mental health problems that led to the rejection of his recess appointment.[67] Roger B. Taney survived his wife, Anne, by twenty years. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. resolutely continued working on the court for several years after the death of his wife.[68] William Rehnquist was a widower for the last fourteen years of his service on the court, his wife Natalie having died on October 17, 1991 after suffering from ovarian cancer. With the death of Martin D. Ginsburg in June 2010, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman to be widowed while serving on the court.[69]
With regard to sexual orientation, no Supreme Court justice has identified themself as anything other than heterosexual, and no incontrovertible evidence of a justice having any other sexual orientation has ever been uncovered. However, the personal lives of several justices and nominees have attracted speculation.
G. Harrold Carswell was unsuccessfully nominated by Richard Nixon in 1970 and was convicted in 1976 of battery for making an "unnatural and lascivious" advance to a male police officer working undercover in a Florida men's room.[70] Some therefore claim him as the only gay or bisexual person nominated to the court thus far.[71][72] If so, it is unlikely that Nixon was aware of it; White House Counsel John Dean later wrote of Carswell that "[w]hile Richard Nixon was always looking for historical firsts, nominating a homosexual to the high court would not have been on his list".[72]
Speculation has been recorded about the sexual orientation of a few justices who were lifelong bachelors, but no unambiguous evidence exists that they were gay. Perhaps the greatest body of circumstantial evidence surrounds Frank Murphy, who was dogged by "rumors of homosexuality... all his adult life".[73]
For more than 40 years, Edward G. Kemp was Frank Murphy's devoted, trusted companion. Like Murphy, Kemp was a lifelong bachelor. From college until Murphy's death, the pair found creative ways to work and live together. [...] When Murphy appeared to have the better future in politics, Kemp stepped into a supportive, secondary role.[74]
As well as Murphy's close relationship with Kemp, Murphy's biographer, historian Sidney Fine, found in Murphy's personal papers a letter that "if the words mean what they say, refers to a homosexual encounter some years earlier between Murphy and the writer." However, the letter's veracity cannot be confirmed, and a review of all the evidence led Fine to conclude that he "could not stick his neck out and say [Murphy] was gay".[75]
Speculation has also surrounded Benjamin Cardozo, whose celibacy was proposed to suggest repressed homosexuality or asexuality. The fact that he was unmarried and was personally tutored by the writer Horatio Alger (alleged to have had sexual relations with boys) led some of Cardozo's biographers to insinuate that Cardozo was homosexual, but no real evidence exists to corroborate this possibility. Constitutional law scholar Jeffrey Rosen noted in a The New York Times Book Review of Richard Polenberg's book on Cardozo:
Polenberg describes Cardozo's lifelong devotion to his older sister Nell, with whom he lived in New York until her death in 1929. When asked why he had never married, Cardozo replied, quietly and sadly, "I never could give Nellie the second place in my life." Polenberg suggests that friends may have stressed Cardozo's devotion to his sister to discourage rumors "that he was sexually dysfunctional, or had an unusually low sexual drive or was homosexual." But he produces no evidence to support any of these possibilities, except to note that friends, in describing Cardozo, used words like "beautiful", "exquisite", "sensitive" or "delicate."[76]
Andrew Kaufman, author of Cardozo, a biography published in 2000, notes that "Although one cannot be absolutely certain, it seems highly likely that Cardozo lived a celibate life".[77] Judge Learned Hand is quoted in the book as saying about Cardozo: "He [had] no trace of homosexuality anyway".[78]
More recently, when David Souter was nominated to the court, "conservative groups expressed concern to the White House ... that the president's bachelor nominee might conceivably be a homosexual".[79] Similar questions were raised regarding the sexual orientation of unmarried nominee Elena Kagan.[80] However, no evidence was ever produced regarding Souter's sexual orientation, and Kagan's apparent heterosexuality was attested by colleagues familiar with her dating history.[81]
When the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the first members came from among the ranks of the Founding Fathers and were almost uniformly Protestant. Of the 116 justices who have been appointed to the court, 92 have been from various Protestant denominations, 15 have been Catholics (one other justice, Sherman Minton, converted to Catholicism after leaving the court). Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised in the Catholic Church but later attended an Episcopal church, though without specifying the denomination to which he felt he belonged.[82] Eight have been Jewish and one, David Davis, had no known religious affiliation. Three of the 17 chief justices have been Catholics, and one Jewish justice, Abe Fortas, was unsuccessfully nominated to be chief justice.
The table below shows the religious affiliation of each of the justices sitting as of July2022[update]:
Most Supreme Court justices have been Protestant Christians. These have included 33 Episcopalians, 18 Presbyterians, nine Unitarians, five Methodists, three Baptists, two Disciples of Christ, and lone representatives of various other denominations.[84] William Rehnquist and William R. Day were the court's only Lutherans. Noah Swayne was a Quaker. Some fifteen Protestant justices did not adhere to a particular denomination. The religious beliefs of James Wilson, one of the earliest justices, have been the subject of some dispute, as there are writings from various points of his life from which it can be argued that he leaned towards Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, Thomism, or Deism; it has been deemed likely that he eventually favored some form of Christianity.[85] Baptist denominations and other evangelical churches have been underrepresented on the court relative to the population of the United States, and entirely unrepresented since the retirement of Methodist Harry Blackmun in 1994.[84] Conversely, mainline Protestant churches historically were overrepresented.[19]
Following the retirement of John Paul Stevens in June 2010, the court had an entirely non-Protestant composition for the first time in its history.[86][87] Neil Gorsuch was the first member of a mainline Protestant denomination to sit on the court since Stevens' retirement.[88][g] Ketanji Brown Jackson is a non-denominational Protestant.[93][94]:1:49:39
The first Catholic justice, Roger B. Taney, was appointed chief justice in 1836 by Andrew Jackson. The second, Edward Douglass White, was appointed as an associate justice in 1894, but also went on to become chief justice. Joseph McKenna was appointed in 1898, placing two Catholics on the court until White's death in 1921. This period marked the beginning of an inconsistently observed "tradition" of having a "Catholic seat" on the court.[95]
Other Catholic justices included Pierce Butler (appointed 1923) and Frank Murphy (appointed 1940). Sherman Minton, appointed in 1949, was a Protestant during his time on the court. To some, however, his wife's Catholic faith implied a "Catholic seat".[96] Minton joined his wife's church in 1961, five years after he retired from the court.[97] Minton was succeeded by a Catholic, however, when President Eisenhower appointed William J. Brennan to that seat. Eisenhower sought a Catholic to appoint to the courtin part because there had been no Catholic justice since Murphy's death in 1949, and in part because Eisenhower was directly lobbied by Francis Cardinal Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York to make such an appointment.[98] Brennan was then the lone Catholic justice until the appointment of Antonin Scalia in 1986, and Anthony Kennedy in 1988.
Like Sherman Minton, Clarence Thomas was not a Catholic at the time he was appointed to the court. Thomas was raised Catholic and briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Catholic seminary,[99] but had joined the Protestant denomination of his wife after their marriage. At some point in the late 1990s, Thomas returned to Catholicism. In 2005, John Roberts became the third Catholic Chief Justice and the fourth Catholic on the court. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Alito became the fifth on the court, and the eleventh in the history of the court. Alito's appointment gave the court a Catholic majority for the first time in its history. Besides Thomas, at least one other Justice, James F. Byrnes, was raised as a Catholic, but converted to a different branch of Christianity prior to serving on the court.
In contrast to historical patterns, the court has gone from having a "Catholic seat" to being what some have characterized as a "Catholic court". The reasons for that are subject to debate.[100] The fact that most recent Catholic appointees were also ideologically conservative has led some partisan critics to derisively refer to the court as "a Catholic boys club".[101] However in May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated a Catholic woman, Sonia Sotomayor, to replace retiring Justice David Souter.[102] Her confirmation raised the number of Catholics on the court to six, compared to three non-Catholics. With Antonin Scalia's death in February 2016, the number of Catholic justices went back to five. Scalia's replacement, Neil Gorsuch, appointed in 2017, was raised Catholic but attends and is a member of an Episcopal church; it is unclear if he identifies as a Catholic as well as belonging to the Episcopal Church.[82] Following Anthony Kennedy's retirement in July 2018, the number of Catholic justices remained unchanged as he was succeeded by Catholic Brett Kavanaugh. In September 2020, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Donald Trump nominated another Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her.[60]
Graphical timeline of Catholic justices:
In 1853, President Millard Fillmore offered to appoint Louisiana Senator Judah P. Benjamin to be the first Jewish justice, and The New York Times reported (on February 15, 1853) that "if the President nominates Benjamin, the Democrats are determined to confirm him". However, Benjamin declined the offer, and ultimately became Secretary of State for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The first Jewish nominee, Louis Brandeis, was appointed in 1916, after a tumultuous hearing process. The 1932 appointment of Benjamin Cardozo raised mild controversy for placing two Jewish justices on the court at the same time, although the appointment was widely lauded based on Cardozo's qualifications, and the Senate was unanimous in confirming Cardozo.[103] Most Jewish Supreme Court justices were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, with the exception of Cardozo, who was Sephardic. None of the Jewish Supreme Court justices have practiced Orthodox Judaism while on the court, although Abe Fortas was raised Orthodox.[104]
Cardozo was succeeded by another Jewish justice, Felix Frankfurter, but Brandeis was succeeded by Protestant William O. Douglas. Negative reaction to the appointment of the early Jewish justices did not exclusively come from outside the court. Justice James Clark McReynolds, a blatant anti-semite, refused to speak to Brandeis for three years following the latter's appointment and when Brandeis retired in 1939, did not sign the customary dedicatory letter sent to court members on their retirement. During Benjamin Cardozo's swearing in ceremony McReynolds pointedly read a newspaper muttering "another one" and did not attend that of Felix Frankfurter, exclaiming "My God, another Jew on the Court!"[105]
Frankfurter was followed by Arthur Goldberg and Abe Fortas, each of whom filled what became known as the "Jewish seat".[106] After Fortas resigned in 1969, he was replaced by Protestant Harry Blackmun. No Jewish justices were nominated thereafter until Ronald Reagan nominated Douglas H. Ginsburg in 1987, to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Lewis F. Powell; however, this nomination was withdrawn, and the court remained without any Jewish justices until 1993, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg (unrelated to Douglas Ginsburg) was appointed to replace Byron White. Ginsburg was followed in relatively quick succession by the appointment of Stephen Breyer, also Jewish, in 1994 to replace Harry Blackmun. In 2010, the confirmation of President Barack Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the court ensured that three Jewish justices would serve simultaneously. Prior to this confirmation, conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan stated that, "If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats".[107] At the time of his remarks, 6.4 percent of justices in the history of the court had been Jewish. Justice Ginsburg's death in 2020 and Breyer's retirement in 2022 reduced the number to one.
Graphical timeline of Jewish justices:
With Breyer's appointment in 1994, there were two Catholic justices, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, and two Jewish justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Clarence Thomas, who had been raised as a Catholic but had attended an Episcopal church after his marriage, returned to Catholicism later in the 1990s. At this point, the four remaining Protestant justicesRehnquist, Stevens, O'Connor, and Souterremained a plurality on the court, but for the first time in the history of the court, Protestants were no longer an absolute majority.
The first Catholic plurality on the court occurred in 2005, when Chief Justice Rehnquist was succeeded in office by Chief Justice John Roberts, who became the fourth sitting Catholic justice. On January 31, 2006, Samuel Alito became the fifth sitting Catholic justice, and on August 6, 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the sixth. By contrast, there have only been two Catholic U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy (unrelated to Justice Kennedy) and Joe Biden, who was previously the only Catholic to serve as Vice President. There has never been a Jewish U.S. President or Vice President.
At the beginning of 2010, Justice John Paul Stevens was the sole remaining Protestant on the court.[102][108] In April 2010, Justice Stevens announced his retirement, effective as of the court's 2010 summer recess. Upon Justice Stevens' retirement, which formally began on June 28, 2010, the court lacked a Protestant member, marking the first time in its history that it was exclusively composed of Jewish and Catholic justices.[86] Although in January 2017, after seven years with no Protestant justices serving or nominated, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the court, as noted above it is unclear whether Gorsuch considers himself a Catholic or an Episcopalian.[109][82] Following the retirement of Justice Kennedy, the Catholic majority on the court was extended by the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh;[110] the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett increased this majority to six Catholic members of the court, or seven if Gorsuch is classified as a Catholic.[82]
This development led to some comment. Law school professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote that "it's a fascinating truth that we've allowed religion to drop out of consideration on the Supreme Court, and right now, we have a Supreme Court that religiously at least, by no means looks like America".[111]
A number of sizable religious groups, each less than two percent of the total U.S. population,[112] have had no members appointed as justices. These include Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Pentecostals, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and members of Native American religions. George Sutherland has been described as a "lapsed Mormon"[113] because he was raised in the LDS Church, his parents having immigrated to the United States during Sutherland's infancy to join that church.[114] Sutherland's parents soon left the LDS Church and moved to Montana.[114] Sutherland himself also disaffiliated with the faith, but remained in Utah and graduated from Brigham Young Academy in 1881, the only non-Mormon in his class.[115] In 1975, Attorney General Edward H. Levi had listed Dallin H. Oaks, a Mormon who had clerked for Earl Warren and was then president of Brigham Young University, as a potential nominee for Gerald Ford. Ford "crossed Oaks's name off the list early on, noting in the margin that a member of the LDS Church might bring a 'confirmation fight'".[116]
No professing atheist has ever been appointed to the court, although some justices have declined to engage in religious activity, or affiliate with a denomination. As an adult, Benjamin Cardozo no longer practiced his faith and identified himself as an agnostic, though he remained proud of his Jewish heritage.[117]
Unlike the offices of President, U.S. Representative, and U.S. Senator, there is no minimum age for Supreme Court justices set forth in the United States Constitution. However, justices tend to be appointed after having made significant achievements in law or politics, which excludes many young potential candidates from consideration. At the same time, justices appointed at too advanced an age will likely have short tenures on the court.
The youngest justice ever appointed was Joseph Story, 32 at the time of his appointment in 1812; the oldest was Charles Evans Hughes, who was 67 at the time of his appointment as Chief Justice in 1930. (Hughes had previously been appointed to the court as an associate justice in 1910, at the age of 48, but had resigned in 1916 to run for president). Story went on to serve for 33 years, while Hughes served 11 years after his second appointment. The oldest justice at the time of his initial appointment was Horace Lurton, 65 at the time of his appointment in 1909. Lurton died after only four years on the court. The oldest sitting justice to be elevated to Chief Justice was Hughes' successor, Harlan Fiske Stone, who was 68 at the time of his elevation in 1941. Stone died in 1946, only five years after his elevation. The oldest nominee to the court was South Carolina senator William Smith, nominated in 1837, then aged around 75 (it is known that he was born in 1762, but not the exact date). The Senate confirmed Smith's nomination by a vote of 2318, but Smith declined to serve.[118] Smith died three years later.
Of the justices sitting as of December 20, 2022, Amy Coney Barrett is the youngest, at 50years, 326days old, while Clarence Thomas is the oldest at 74years, 180days. The oldest person to have served on the court was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who stepped down two months shy of his 91st birthday.[119] John Paul Stevens, second only to Holmes,[119] left the court in June 2010, two months after turning 90.
The average age of the court as a whole fluctuates over time with the departure of older justices and the appointment of younger people to fill their seats. As of 2022[update], the youngest sitting Justice at the time of appointment is Clarence Thomas, who was 43 years old at the time of his confirmation in 1991. Following the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the average age of the court is between 61 and 62 years old. By contrast, just prior to the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in September 2005, the average age was 71. After Jackson's appointment and confirmation in 2022, the average age of appointment for current justices is between 50 and 51 years old.
The longest period of time in which one group of justices has served together occurred from August 3, 1994, when Stephen Breyer was appointed to replace the retired Harry Blackmun, to September 3, 2005, the death of Rehnquist, totaling 11 years and 31 days. From 1789 until 1970, justices served an average of 14.9 years. Those who have stepped down since 1970 have served an average of 25.6 years. The retirement age had jumped from an average of 68 pre-1970 to 79 for justices retiring post-1970. Between 1789 and 1970 there was a vacancy on the court once every 1.91 years. In the next 34 years since the two appointments in 1971, there was a vacancy on average only once every 3.75 years. The typical one-term president has had one appointment opportunity instead of two.[120]
Commentators have noted that advances in medical knowledge "have enormously increased the life expectancy of a mature person of an age likely to be considered for appointment to the Supreme Court".[121] Combined with the reduction in responsibilities carried out by modern justices as compared to the early justices, this results in much longer potential terms of service.[121] This has led to proposals such as imposing a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices,[122] or predetermined term limits.[123]
Although the Constitution imposes no educational background requirements for federal judges, the work of the court involves complex questions of lawranging from constitutional law to administrative law to admiralty lawand consequently, a legal education has become a de facto prerequisite to appointment on the Supreme Court. Every person who has been nominated to the court has been an attorney.[7]
Before the advent of modern law schools in the United States, justices, like most attorneys of the time, completed their legal studies by "reading law" (studying under and acting as an apprentice to more experienced attorneys) rather than attending a formal program. The first justice to be appointed who had attended an actual law school was Levi Woodbury, appointed to the court in 1846. Woodbury had attended Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut prior to his admission to the bar in 1812. However, Woodbury did not receive a law degree. Woodbury's successor on the court, Benjamin Robbins Curtis, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1832, and was appointed to the court in 1851, was the first Justice to bear such a credential.[124]
Associate Justices James F. Byrnes, whose short tenure lasted from June 1941 to October 1942, and Robert H. Jackson, who served from July 1941 to October 1954, were the last two justices to be appointed without having graduated from law school; Stanley Forman Reed, who served on the court from 1938 to 1957, was the last sitting justice from such a background. In total, of the 115 justices appointed to the court, 49 have graduated from law school, an additional 18 attended some law school but did not graduate, and 47 received their legal education without any law school attendance.[124] Two justices, Sherman Minton and Lewis F. Powell Jr., earned a Master of Laws degree.[125]
In 1970, G. Harold Carswell, was nominated as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to occupy the seat vacated by Abe Fortas. During the debate of the nomination, Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska intoned in a TV interview, "Even if he [Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos."[126]
The table below shows the college and law school from which each of the currently sitting justices graduated:
Not only have all justices been attorneys, nearly two thirds had previously been judges.[7] As of 2022[update], eight of the nine sitting justices previously served as judges of the United States courts of appeals, while Justice Elena Kagan served as Solicitor General, the attorney responsible for representing the federal government in cases before the court. Few justices have a background as criminal defense lawyers, and Thurgood Marshall is reportedly the last justice to have had a client in a death penalty case.[127]
Historically, justices have come from some tradition of public service; only George Shiras Jr. had no such experience.[128] Relatively few justices have been appointed from among members of Congress. Six were members of the United States Senate at the time of their appointment,[129][130] while one was a sitting member of the House of Representatives.[131] Six more had previously served in the Senate. Three have been sitting governors.[129][132] Only one, William Howard Taft, had been President of the United States.[133] The last justice to have held elected office was Sandra Day O'Connor, who was elected twice to the Arizona State Senate after being appointed there by the governor.
Predominantly, recent justices have had experience in the Executive branch. The last Member of Congress to be nominated was Sherman Minton. The last nominee to have any Legislative branch experience was Sandra Day O'Connor.
As of 2022[update], 42 justices have been military veterans.[134] Numerous justices were appointed who had served in the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War (including three who had served in the Confederate States Army), World War I and World War II. However, no justice has been appointed who has served in any subsequent war. The last justice to have served in the military during wartime was John Paul Stevens, who was in naval intelligence during World War II.[135]
The financial position of the typical Supreme Court Justice has been described as "upper-middle to high social status: reared in nonrural but not necessarily urban environment, member of a civic-minded, politically active, economically comfortable family".[124] Charles A. Beard, in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, profiled those among the justices who were also drafters of the Constitution.
James Wilson, Beard notes, "developed a lucrative practice at Carlisle" before becoming "one of the directors of the Bank of North America on its incorporation in 1781".[136] A member of the Georgia Land Company, Wilson "held shares to the amount of at least one million acres".[137] John Blair was "one of the most respectable men in Virginia, both on account of his Family as well as fortune".[138] Another source notes that Blair "was a member of a prominent Virginia family. His father served on the Virginia Council and was for a time acting Royal governor. His granduncle, James Blair, was founder and first president of the College of William and Mary."[139] John Rutledge was elected Governor of South Carolina at a time when the Constitution of that state set, as a qualification for the office, ownership of "a settled plantation or freehold ... of the value of at least ten thousand pounds currency, clear of debt".[140] Oliver Ellsworth "rose rapidly to wealth and power in the bar of his native state" with "earnings... unrivalled in his own day and unexampled in the history of the colony", developing "a fortune which for the times and the country was quite uncommonly large".[141] Bushrod Washington was the nephew of George Washington, who was at the time of the younger Washington's appointment the immediate past President of the United States and one of the wealthiest men in the country.[142]
"About three-fifths of those named to the Supreme Court personally knew the President who nominated them".[98] There have been exceptions to the typical portrait of justices growing up middle class or wealthy. For example, the family of Sherman Minton went through a period of impoverishment during his childhood, resulting from the disability of his father due to a heat stroke.[143]
In 2008, seven of the nine sitting justices were millionaires, and the remaining two were close to that level of wealth.[144] Historian Howard Zinn, in his 1980 book A People's History of the United States, argues that the justices cannot be neutral in matters between rich and poor, as they are almost always from the upper class.[145] Chief Justice Roberts is the son of an executive with Bethlehem Steel; Justice Stevens was born into a wealthy Chicago family;[146] and Justices Kennedy and Breyer both had fathers who were successful attorneys. Justices Alito and Scalia both had educated (and education-minded) parents: Scalia's father was a highly educated college professor and Alito's father was a high school teacher before becoming "a long-time employee of the New Jersey state legislature".[147] Only Justices Thomas and Sotomayor have been regarded as coming from a lower-class background. One authority states that "Thomas grew up in poverty. The Pin Point community he lived in lacked a sewage system and paved roads. Its inhabitants dwelled in destitution and earned but a few cents each day performing manual labor".[148] The depth of Thomas's poverty has been disputed by suggestions of "ample evidence to suggest that Thomas enjoyed, by and large, a middle-class upbringing".[149]
Beginning in 1979, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 required federal officials, including the justices, to file annual disclosures of their income and assets.[150] These disclosures provide a snapshot into the wealth of the justices, reported within broad ranges, from year to year since 1979. In the first such set of disclosures, only two justices were revealed to be millionaires: Potter Stewart[151] and Lewis F. Powell,[152] with Chief Justice Warren Burger coming in third with about $600,000 in holdings.[151] The least wealthy Justice was Thurgood Marshall.[151]
The 1982 report disclosed that newly appointed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was a millionaire, and the second-wealthiest Justice on the court (after Powell).[153] The remaining justices listed assets in the range of tens of thousands to a few hundred-thousand, with the exception of Thurgood Marshall, who "reported no assets or investment income of more than $100".[153] The 1985 report had the justices in relatively the same positions,[154] while the 1992 report had O'Connor as the wealthiest member of the court, with Stevens being the only other millionaire, most other justices reporting assets averaging around a half million dollars, and the two newest justices, Clarence Thomas and David Souter, reporting assets of at least $65,000.[155] In 2011, however, it was revealed that Thomas had misstated his income going back to at least 1989.[156][157][158]
The 2007 report was the first to reflect the holdings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Disclosures for that year indicated that Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy were the only justices who were clearly not millionaires, although Thomas was reported to have signed a book deal worth over one million dollars.[159] Other justices have reported holdings within the following ranges:[160][161]
The financial disclosures indicate that many of the justices have substantial stock holdings.[159] This, in turn, has affected the business of the court, as these holdings have led justices to recuse themselves from cases, occasionally with substantial impact. For example, in 2008, the recusal of John Roberts in one case, and Samuel Alito in another, resulted in each ending in a 44 split, which does not create a binding precedent.[162] The court was unable to decide another case in 2008 because four of the nine justices had conflicts, three arising from stock ownership in affected companies.[163]
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Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States
Palestinian Jews – Wikipedia
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
Jewish inhabitants of Palestine prior to the establishment of the modern State of Israel
Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians were the Jewish inhabitants of the Palestine region (known in Hebrew as Eretz Yisrael, lit.'Land of Israel') prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The common term used to refer to the Jewish communities of Ottoman Syria during the 19th century[1] and British Palestine prior to the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel[1] is Yishuv (lit.'settlement'). A distinction is drawn between the "New Yishuv", which was largely composed of and descended from Jewish immigrants who arrived in the Levant during the First Aliyah (18811903), and the "Old Yishuv", which was the pre-existing Jewish community of Palestine prior to the consolidation of Zionism and the First Aliyah.
In addition to applying to Jews who lived in Palestine during the British Mandate era, the term "Palestinian Jews" has been applied to the Jewish residents of Southern Syria, corresponding to the southern part of the Syria region under the Ottoman Empire; there are also historical scholarly instances in which Jews residing in the Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda provinces (4th to 7th centuries CE) of the Byzantine Empire in Late Antiquity were referred to as "Palestinian Jews".[citation needed]
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine became Israeli citizens, and the term "Palestinian Jews" has largely fallen into disuse and is somewhat defunct, in favour of the modern term Israeli Jews.
Prior to dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the population of the area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip was not exclusively Muslim. Under the Empire's rule in the mid-16th century, there were no more than 10,000 Jews in Palestine,[2] making up around 5% of the population. By the mid-19th century, Turkish sources recorded that 80% of the population of 600,000 was identified as Muslim, 10% as Christian Arab and 57% as Jewish.[3]
The situation of the Jewish community in Palestine was more complicated than in neighbouring Arab countries.[4] Whereas in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, communities were largely homogeneous in ethnic and confessional terms, in Palestine in the 19th century, Jewish pilgrims and European Christian colonial projects attracted large numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa.[4] The Jews of Palestine were not exclusively of Iberian origins, and included substantial Yiddish speaking communities who had established themselves in Palestine centuries earlier.[4]
Towards the end of the Ottoman era in Palestine, native Jewish communities lived primarily in the four 'holy cities' of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem.[4] The Jewish population consisted of Ashkenazim (Yiddish speakers), Sephardim (Judeo-Spanish speakers), and Maghrebim (North African Arabic speakers) or Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews, comparable to the Arabic term "Mashriqiyyun", or Easterners). The majority of Jews in the four holy cities, with the exception of Jerusalem, were Arabic and Judaeo-Spanish speakers.[4] The dominant language among Jews in Jerusalem was Yiddish, due to the large migration of pious Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. Still, in 1882, there were registered 7,620 Sephardim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim, in Jerusalem, of whom 1,290 were Maghrebim, from the Maghreb or North Africa. Natives of the city, they were Turkish subjects, and fluent in Arabic.[4] Arabic also served as the lingua franca between the Sephradim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim and Ashkenazim and their non-Jewish Arab counterparts in mixed cities like Safed and Hebron.[4] However, during the Greek and Roman period, the primary language of Palestinian Jews was Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew.[5]
In the narrative works of Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period, as evidenced in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh, "native" Jews were often referred to and described as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country), 'compatriots', or Yahud awlad Arab (Jews, sons of Arabs).[4] When the First Palestinian Congress of February 1919 issued its anti-Zionist manifesto rejecting Zionist immigration, it extended a welcome to those Jews "among us who have been Arabicized, who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own."[4]
European Jews were commonly considered an "Oriental" people in many of their host countries, usually as reference to their ancestral origins in the Middle East. A prominent example of this is Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher who referred to European Jews as "Palestinians living among us."[6]
Official documents released in April 2013 by the State Archive of Israel show that days before the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish officials were still debating about what the new country would be called in Arabic: Palestine (Filastin), Zion (Sahyoun) or Israel (Israil). Two assumptions were made: "That an Arab state was about to be established alongside the Jewish one in keeping with the UNs partition resolution the year before, and that the Jewish state would include a large Arab minority whose feelings needed to be taken into account". In the end, the officials rejected the name Palestine because they thought that would be the name of the new Arab state and could cause confusion so they opted for the most straightforward option: Israel.[7]
The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO's Palestinian National Council in July 1968, defined "Palestinians" as "those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian fatherwhether in Palestine or outside itis also a Palestinian. The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians."[8]
Yaakov Meir (born in 1856 in Jerusalem), the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi appointed in Mandatory Palestine, preferred not to use the term "Palestinian Jew" due to his Zionist affiliations. He spoke fluent Hebrew and encouraged the construction of new Jewish quarters of Jerusalem as well as the re-establishment of an Independent Israeli Jewish State.[9]
Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel (Born in 1880 in Jerusalem), was the Sephardi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine from 1939 to 1948, and of Israel from 1948 to 1954. He served as a Mizrahi delegate to the Zionist Congress from 192546. As a religious Zionist, he strongly believed in the redemption of Israel and bringing the Jewish exiles back to the land to create a religious Jewish state of Israel. As a strong supporter of Israeli nationalism, in his writing The Redemption of Israel he wrote: "We all desire that the in gathering of the exiles should take place from all areas where they have been scattered; and that our holy language will be upon our lips and upon the lips of our children, in building the Land and its flowering through the hands and work of Israel; and we will all strive to see the flag of freedom and redemption waving in glory and strength upon the walls of Jerusalem."[10]
Mordechai Eliyahu (Born in Jerusalem 3 March 1929 7 June 2010) was a prominent rabbi, posek and spiritual leader. He served as the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1983 to 1993. Because Eliyahu was one of the spiritual leaders of the Religious Zionist movement he refused to use the term "Palestinian" and believed all Jews should refrain from using the term. He was an outspoken opponent of the Gaza Disengagement of 2005 and supported Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. He was considered somewhat controversial for his decades-long support of the radical right of the Religious Zionist movement. Eliyahu was a friend of Rabbi Meir Kahane and his family.[11]
Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen, academic, activist and observer-member in the Palestinian National Council living in the Arab town of Sakhnin, identified himself as an "anti-Zionist Palestinian Hebrew". Davis explained, "I dont describe myself as a Palestinian Hebrew, but I actually happen to be a Palestinian Hebrew, I was born in Jerusalem in 1943 in a country called Palestine and the title of my birth certificate is 'Government of Palestine'. That is neither here nor there, though. It is significant only in a political context in which I am situated, and the political context that is relevant to my work, my advocacy of a critique of Zionism. I'm an anti-Zionist."[12] He has since converted to Islam in 2008 to marry a Palestinian Muslim woman Miyassar Abu Ali whom he met in 2006.[13] Since then he no longer considers himself Jewish.
Tali Fahima, an Israeli pro-Palestinian activist, describes her nationality as Palestinian. Fahima was born in Kiryat Gat, a development town in the south of Israel, to a family of Algerian Jewish origin. Fahima lives in the Arab village Ar'ara in northern Israel, and works as a Hebrew teacher. In June 2010, it was reported that she converted to Islam at a mosque in Umm al-Fahm.
Actor, director and activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, the son of an Israeli Jewish mother and a Palestinian father, described himself in a 2009 interview with Israel Army Radio as "100 percent Palestinian Arab and 100 percent Jewish".[14]
Media related to Jewish people of Palestine at Wikimedia Commons
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Ice Cream Factory, The Court Hotel and The Old Synagogue set for thrilling New Years Eve celebrations – PerthNow
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
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Kanye West: I’ve been ‘beat to a pulp’ amid anti-Semitism scandal
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
Kanye West says hes been beat to a pulp after numerous companies ended their partnerships with him in light of his anti-Semitic commentary.
The Yeezy designer kicked off a new message on Instagram by demanding to see the contracts while hes still allowed on Mark Zuckerberg platform.
Lets see the contracts/ The film contracts/ The sports contracts/ The music contracts/ The mortgages, he wrote using a poetry form.
Lets see the contracts/ So we can or better yet will do better business/ Ive been beat to a pulp and theres still no accountability.
Wests statement follows Adidas decision to terminate its long-running partnership with the rapper-turned-designer.
Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech, the athletic company said in a statement. Yes recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the companys values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.
West, 45, appeared to try to quickly pivot from the loss, which cost him his billionaire status, by showing up uninvited to a Skechers corporate office in Los Angeles.
Considering Ye was engaged in unauthorized filming, two Skechers executives escorted him and his party from the building after a brief conversation, a spokesperson for the sneaker company said.
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The Praise God performer has been under fire ever since vowing on Twitter to godeath con3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE. He was suspended from the platform shortly thereafter, but was reinstated Friday seemingly after Elon Musks takeover.
However, Musk quickly said Wests return to the platform took place before he acquired the company.
They did not consult with or inform me, Musk, 51, wrote.
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Kanye West: I've been 'beat to a pulp' amid anti-Semitism scandal
Don Lemon Critiques Dave Chappelle Monologue on SNL
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
CNNs Don Lemon wondered if there was any point to Dave Chappelles jokes about anti-semitism when the comedian hosted Saturday Night Live over the weekend.
CNN This Morning took time on Monday to discuss Chappelles monologue, where he riffed on the recent anti-Semitism controversies of Kanye West and Kyrie Irving. Chappelle is no stranger to controversy, so his monologue included some edgier comedy as he poked fun at common tropes of anti-Semitism while speaking broadly about cancellation and societys reluctance to broach sensitive topics.
Since the monologue was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, Lemon turned to Audie Cornish for her thoughts, and she argued that Chappelles tangent was constructed to play-act out the idea of cancellation. This led to Lemon asking if it would be hypocritical to get offended by Chappelles comments about Jews if people arent offended by his jokes about trans people and others.
Heres how Cornish made sense of it:
I dont want to police how people hear things because people have the right to be offended and jokes always have a person who is a victim of the joke. That is a fact. Comedians are struggling with the fact that the victims can now speak out and back so theyre accountable for the laughter. But you know, Chappellehes on a pedestal in terms of his position in the culture. SNL puts him after big elections and his show was known basically for straddling the line with spiky commentary on race, et cetera. I think the problem right now is that hes sort of dragging into the limelight a kind of black strain of anti-Semitism from the 90s, but hes not reckoning with it with the same precision that he does with, say, Trump voters.
Cornish eventually arrived at the point that Chappelle, at this moment, didnt exhibit the same kind of social responsibility he felt in the past when people laughed at his material on touchy subjects. As a result, Lemon questioned, Is it culturally productive?
Cornish answered by suggesting a different question of some ironic detachment at play: Is [Chappelle] exposing some cultural truth to your ear, or is he white-washing, echoing, amplifying toxic ideas and laundering them through his own reputation as a comedian?
Is he excusing what Kanye West or Kyrie said or did? Lemon followed up.
I almost think thats not the point, said Cornish. For the jokes, its easy for us to focus on those things, but were reckoning with anti-semitism more broadly in the culture. And this is a very specific cultural platform, and I think how we hear it is in that contextReally its about, are we back to a point its okay to talk in the manner in every sector of life and not expect there to be a social penalty.
Watch above via CNN.
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Anti-Semitic incidents in US hit all-time high, according to new ADL …
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
(April 26, 2022 / JNS) A record-high number of anti-Semitic incidents were recorded across the United States last year, according to the just-released 2021 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents by the Anti-Defamation League.
More than 2,715 instances of Jew-hatred, including assaults, were reported last yearan increase of 34 percent from 2020 and the highest number of incidents since the ADL began keeping records in 1979.
Every state reported at least two incidents of anti-Semitism, though New York charted the highest number of cases nationally. More than 400 incidents were recorded in New York in 2021, up from 336 in 2020, with more than 60 percent occurring in the five boroughs of New York City.
California and New Jersey both saw more than 300 cases of anti-Semitic incidents in 2021. Florida documented nearly 200 cases, while Michigan and Massachusetts had around 110 cases each.
Nearly 400 instances of Jew-hatred were recorded last May during the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. November and December also saw significant hikes in anti-Semitism with 242 and 275 instances, respectively.
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Among the other nationwide findings were:
The latest Anti-Defamation League audit shows a 10-year trajectory of incidents against Jewish residents in the United States. Credit: ADL.
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Anti-Semitic incidents in US hit all-time high, according to new ADL ...
Potato pancake – Wikipedia
Posted By admin on December 21, 2022
Shallow-fried pancakes of grated or ground potato
Potato pancakes are shallow-fried pancakes of grated or ground potato, matzo meal or flour and a binding ingredient such as egg or applesauce, often flavored with grated garlic or onion and seasoning. They may be topped with a variety of condiments, ranging from the savory (such as sour cream or cottage cheese), to the sweet (such as apple sauce or sugar), or they may be served plain. The dish is sometimes made from mashed potatoes to make pancake-shaped croquettes.[1] Some variations are made with sweet potatoes.[2][3]
Potato pancakes are associated with various European cuisines, including Irish (as Boxty) German and Austrian (as Kartoffelpuffer, Reibekuchen, Reiberdatschi, Erdpfelpuffer and Erdpfellaibchen), Dutch (as aardappelpannenkoek, reifkoeken, reifjes), Belarusian (as draniki), Bulgarian (as patatnik), Czech (as brambork, cmunda or voouch), Hungarian (as tcsni, lapcsnka and other names), Jewish (as latka, Yiddish: ,[4] Hebrew: levivah, plural levivot), Latvian (as kartupeu pankkas), Lithuanian (as bulviniai blynai), Luxembourg (Gromperekichelcher), Polish (as placki ziemniaczane), Romanian (as tocini or tocinei), Russian (as draniki), Slovak (as zemiakov placky), Ukrainian (as deruny) and any cuisine that has adopted similar dishes.
It is the national dish of Belarus and Slovakia. In Germany, potato pancakes are eaten either salty (as a side dish) or sweet with apple sauce,[5] or blueberries, sugar and cinnamon; they are a very common menu item during outdoor markets and festivals in colder seasons. In Swiss cuisine, rsti is a variation that never contains egg or flour. American hash browns are also without eggs and flour. Potato pancake is a traditional favorite in the southern parts of Indiana during holiday festivities.[6]
There are four Swedish versions of potato pancakes.
All four variants are traditionally served with fried bacon and lingonberry jam.
Potato cakes are common in the United Kingdom. In the North-East of England (particularly County Durham), there is a dish known as tattie fish, because the pancake resembles a deep fried piece of fish. The pancake consists of flour, eggs, shredded potatoes and onions. Some people add tomato or cheese to the mix, depending on taste.
The British also brought the potato pancake to former colonies such as Zimbabwe. They are still eaten today, where they are an affordable dish.
A form of potato pancake known as boxty (Irish: bacsta) is a popular traditional dish in most of Ireland, particularly north Connacht and southern Ulster. It is made similarly to the British type, with more starch and often with buttermilk and baking soda. It has a smooth, grained consistency.
Latkes (, sometimes spelled latka) are potato pancakes that Ashkenazi Jews have prepared as part of the Hanukkah festival[11] since the mid-1800s,[12] when a series of crop failures in Poland and Ukraine led to mass planting of potatoes, which were easy and cheap to grow. The potato dish is based on an older variant made with cheese instead of potatoes that goes back to at least the Middle Ages.[13]
Latkes need not necessarily be made from potatoes. Prior to the introduction of the potato to the Old World, latkes were and in some places still are made from a variety of other vegetables, cheeses, legumes, or starches, depending on the available local ingredients and foods of the various places where Jews lived.[14] Numerous modern recipes call for the addition of ingredients such as onions and carrots.[15][16] Daily variations on a simple potato latka might include zucchini, sweet onion and gruyere (for French onion flavor) and some variations made with sweet potatoes.[17]
The word latke itself is derived (via Yiddish) from the East Slavic word ladka, oladka, a diminutive from oladya (), "small pancake". The word levivah (), the Hebrew name for latke, refers in the Book of Samuel to a dumpling made from kneaded dough, as part of the story of Amnon and Tamar.[18]Some interpreters have noted that the homonym levav () means "heart", and the verbal form of l-v-v occurs in the Song of Songs as well. In the lexicon of Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia and Tatarstan there are recorded versions of the kosher-style appellation of latkes (draniki, dranki, krezliki, kremzliki, kakorki, etc.) during the eight-day Hanukkah holiday.[19]
Gamja-jeon (; lit."potato pancake") is a Korean pancake made by pan-frying in oil the mixture of grated potato and potato starch. It can be made without additional ingredients, but is sometimes mixed with onion, chilli and perilla leaf. Generally, it is seasoned with a small amount of salt and served with soy sauce.
Potato pancakes, literally translated in Polish as placki ziemniaczane, are often served in Poland topped with meat sauce, pork crisps or goulash, as well as sour cream, apple sauce, mushroom sauce,[20] and cottage or sheep's cheese or even fruit syrup. Placki ziemniaczane was a food staple at the 17th-century Polish monasteries according to written recipe from Stoczek Warmiski with one onion, two eggs and a spoonful of wheat flour per each kilogram of potatoes, served only with salt and pepper.[21] In the 19th century,[22] especially in times of economic difficulty during the foreign partitions, potato pancakes often replaced missing bread among the peasants. The lower-quality crops given to field laborers were sometimes turned by them quickly into pancakes to improve taste and prolong freshness.[23] Also, their popularity is closely associated with the historic presence of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world flourishing in Poland.[22]
The largest potato pancake (possibly in the world), measuring 2 meters and 2 centimeters, was made during the annual two-day celebrations of wit Plinzy (Plinza Dawn festival) in Rzechta, Poland (see photo). The tongue-in-cheek games in Rzechta include the throwing of bad potato pancake, with the record of 29 meters.[24]
A derived dish consists of thick goulash laid on a potato pancake. It has origins in or near Tatra mountains, on either Polish or Slovak side. The dish bears a variety of names:
A Czech potato pancake is called brambork (from brambor, potato) and it is made of grated potatoes with egg, breadcrumbs or flour and seasoning (salt, pepper, most importantly garlic and marjoram; sometimes ground, cracked or whole caraway seeds) and is served as it is (see recipe). Some regional versions blend in dough, sauerkraut or sliced smoked meat. The same potato dough is used also as coating of fried pork chop called kaplick zek. It is sometimes deep fried.
In Iranian cuisine, kuku sib-zamini (Gilaki: , 'potato kuku') is made with shredded potatoes, eggs, onion, saffron, sometimes garlic chives and sometimes cinnamon. Frequently, potato kuku is cooked as smaller patties, but it is also cooked in a larger pancake-style or baked.[25] This dish has been compared[by whom?] to the latke, rsti and tortilla Espaola (Spanish omelette).
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