The history of Jews in America runs from September 1654, when twenty-three Jewish refugees landed in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, to a community today of well over seven million people woven into every part of American life. Across nearly four centuries, that story moves through three great waves of immigration, the founding of the country's oldest congregations, a written promise of religious freedom from George Washington, and outsized contributions to American business, science, law, and culture. This guide walks the whole arc, decade by decade, with the real names, dates, and places behind it.
At a Glance: The American Jewish Story in Brief
- 1654: Twenty-three Jewish refugees arrive in New Amsterdam, founding the first Jewish community in what becomes the United States.
- 1763: The Touro Synagogue is dedicated in Newport, Rhode Island, still the oldest surviving synagogue building in the country.
- 1790: President George Washington's letter to the Newport congregation promises a government that gives bigotry no sanction.
- 1840s to 1870s: A wave of Central European, largely German-speaking, Jews spreads across the country and builds the Reform movement.
- 1881 to 1924: Roughly two million Eastern European Jews arrive, most through New York, until restrictive quotas close the door.
- 1916: Louis Brandeis is confirmed as the first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court.
- 2006: Jewish American Heritage Month is established by presidential proclamation, observed every May.
- Today: More than seven million Jewish Americans live across all fifty states.
It Began With Twenty-Three Refugees in 1654
The Jewish story in what would become the United States begins in September 1654, when a small group of twenty-three Jewish refugees stepped off a ship in New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement later renamed New York. They had fled Recife in Brazil after the Portuguese retook that colony from the Dutch and brought the Inquisition with them. Arriving with almost nothing, the group met immediate hostility from the colony's director, Peter Stuyvesant, who petitioned to expel them. The Dutch West India Company, which had Jewish shareholders in Amsterdam, overruled him and granted the newcomers the right to stay, trade, and live.
That community grew into Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation in North America, which still exists in New York City today. It is worth pausing on the shape of that opening chapter: the very first page of American Jewish history is a story about being allowed to stay over the loud objection of a man who wanted the door shut. That tension, between the promise of the place and the people who would deny it, echoes through the centuries that follow.
The Colonial Foothold: Newport, Savannah, and Washington's Promise
Through the 1600s and 1700s, small Jewish communities took root in the port cities of colonial America. Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent settled in New York, Newport, Savannah, Charleston, and Philadelphia, most of them merchants and traders who made the Atlantic economy run. In Newport, Rhode Island, the community dedicated the Touro Synagogue in 1763. It survives as the oldest synagogue building in the United States and the only one remaining from the colonial era, a landmark now cared for in partnership with the National Park Service.
When the Revolution came, Jewish colonists served the American cause. Haym Salomon, a Polish-born broker in Philadelphia, became a central financier of the Continental Congress, brokering loans and bills of exchange that helped keep the war effort solvent. The tradition of quiet, consistent service to the country traces back this far, a theme we explore in our piece on Jewish-American patriotic traditions.
The defining moment of the era came in 1790. Newly elected President George Washington visited Newport, and Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation there, wrote him a letter hoping the young republic would treat Jews as equals. Washington's reply became a founding statement of American religious liberty. Borrowing Seixas's own words, he promised a government that "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." It was not tolerance offered as a favor but freedom described as an inherent right, and it landed like a thunderclap for a people accustomed to expulsion. The dual belonging it captured is the subject of our reflection on being chosen people and American made.
The German Wave and the Rise of Reform (1840s to 1870s)
The first great wave of Jewish immigration arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Between roughly the 1840s and the 1870s, tens of thousands of Jews from the German states and Central Europe crossed the Atlantic, pushed by economic hardship and restrictive laws at home and pulled by the promise of a growing country. Unlike the earlier Sephardic settlers clustered in eastern ports, these newcomers fanned out across the entire nation, following the railroads and the frontier into the Midwest, the South, and the West.
Peddlers, Merchants, and the Making of American Retail
Many arrived with little and started as peddlers, walking rural routes with packs of goods. A remarkable number built those routes into stores, and some of those stores into institutions. The names still ring familiar: Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant, opened a dry goods business in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and on May 20, 1873, he and Reno tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for riveted work pants, giving the world the blue jean. Department store dynasties and national brands grew from the same immigrant peddler tradition, a story that also runs through our history of Jews and American fashion.
A New Kind of Judaism
This wave also reshaped American religious life. The Reform movement, which adapted traditional Jewish practice to modern American conditions, took hold under leaders like Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, who founded Hebrew Union College in 1875 to train American rabbis. American Judaism began to diversify into the movements recognizable today, and Jewish communities established synagogues in hundreds of towns and cities. To see how those threads of observance and holiday practice took shape, our holidays hub and the broader culture section trace the living traditions that traveled with these families.
The Great Eastern European Migration (1881 to 1924)
The largest and most transformative wave came next. Beginning in 1881, following waves of violent pogroms and worsening persecution in the Russian Empire, roughly two million Jews from Eastern Europe, from present-day Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, and the Austro-Hungarian lands, emigrated to the United States. Most passed through the port of New York, and after 1892, through the immigration station at Ellis Island. This migration, more than any other, made American Jewry the large, Yiddish-speaking, working-class community that defined the twentieth century.
The Lower East Side
Hundreds of thousands settled first on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the most densely populated places on earth at the time.
Hundreds of thousands settled first on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the most densely populated places on earth at the time. They filled tenements and worked in the garment sweatshops, built synagogues and Yiddish theaters and newspapers, and organized the labor unions that would reshape American industry. The Yiddish these immigrants carried seeped permanently into American speech, the story we tell in how Yiddish snuck into American English. Their food became American food too, from the delicatessen counter to the bagel, a legacy mapped in our guide to the best Jewish delis coast to coast.
The Golden Door Closes
The open era did not last. Rising nativism produced the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and then the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed strict national-origin quotas designed to sharply limit immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The mass Jewish migration effectively ended, with tragic consequences in the decades that followed, when those same closed doors trapped countless Jews attempting to flee Europe.
Building American Institutions and Fighting for a Place
As the community grew, it built institutions to defend and sustain itself. The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 and the Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the latter in the atmosphere of anti-Jewish hostility that culminated in the notorious 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia. Jewish Americans built hospitals, universities, settlement houses, and charitable federations, many of which served the wider public without regard to faith. This was also the era of the great American synagogue building boom, and today's synagogues directory and Jewish museums across the country carry that institutional inheritance forward.
Jews and the American Century: Culture, Science, and the Courts
By the twentieth century, Jewish Americans were shaping the country's imagination and its institutions at every level.
Hollywood, Comedy, and the American Songbook
Jewish immigrants and their children largely built the American film industry, founding the major Hollywood studios in the early 1900s. Songwriters like Irving Berlin, a Russian-born immigrant who wrote "God Bless America" and "White Christmas," composed much of the American songbook. And a distinctly Jewish sensibility reshaped American humor from vaudeville through television, the subject of our look at the comedians who changed American culture.
Science, Medicine, and the Law
The contributions ran just as deep in the sciences and public life. Jonas Salk developed the first effective polio vaccine, announced in 1955, and declined to patent it. Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi Germany, became an American citizen and the century's most famous scientist. In the law, Louis Brandeis was confirmed as the first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court on June 1, 1916, after a bruising, prejudice-tinged confirmation fight, opening a path later walked by justices including Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After the War: Suburbs, Civil Rights, and a Settled Belonging
The decades after the Second World War brought Jewish Americans into the middle-class mainstream. Families moved from urban neighborhoods to the new suburbs, built synagogues and community centers there, and entered professions and universities that had once kept quota limits against them. Many Jewish Americans were prominent in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, working alongside Black leaders in the fight for equality. The story of the newer arrivals, refugees from the Holocaust and later from the Soviet Union and Iran, added fresh chapters to a community that was becoming, by the century's end, one of the most secure and accomplished Jewish diasporas in history.
The Bond With Israel
The twentieth century also forged a lasting connection between American Jews and the movement to establish, and then support, a Jewish state. American Jewish organizations were active in the decades of debate over Zionism, and when the State of Israel was established in 1948, the United States under President Harry Truman was the first country to recognize it. In the years since, a relationship with Israel became a central and sometimes debated feature of American Jewish identity, expressed through philanthropy, advocacy, travel, and family ties, alongside a full spectrum of American Jewish opinion about it.
American Jewish Life Today
Today more than seven million Jewish Americans live in all fifty states, a community that is religiously and culturally diverse, spanning Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular identities, and drawing on Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and other backgrounds. Major population centers remain in and around New York, but sizable communities thrive in Los Angeles, South Florida, Chicago, and dozens of other metros, and Jewish life is sustained by synagogues, day schools, community centers, museums, and cultural institutions in nearly every state. In 2006, the country formalized its recognition of that history when Jewish American Heritage Month was established by presidential proclamation, observed every May, a milestone chronicled at the federal Jewish American Heritage Month site. For the deeper archival record of the whole journey, the Library of Congress exhibition From Haven to Home remains one of the finest public resources available. To see how the identity lives and evolves in the present, our essay on Jewish-American identity in 2026 picks up the thread today.
Carrying the Whole Inheritance
From twenty-three refugees who were nearly turned away, to a written promise of freedom, to two million newcomers who built a culture, to scientists, justices, and artists who shaped the American century, the history of Jews in America is inseparable from the history of America itself. Knowing where it comes from does not make the story heavier. It makes it richer. Explore more of it across our culture pages and carry the whole inheritance proudly.