title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: In interventional radiology, DMSO is used as a solvent for ethylene vinyl alcohol in the Onyx liquid embolic agent, which is used in embolization, the therapeutic occlusion of blood vessels.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: In cryobiology DMSO has been used as a cryoprotectant and is still an important constituent of cryoprotectant vitrification mixtures used to preserve organs, tissues, and cell suspensions. Without it, up to 90% of frozen cells will become inactive. It is particularly important in the freezing and long-term storage of embryonic stem cells and hematopoietic stem cells, which are often frozen in a mixture of 10% DMSO, a freezing medium, and 30% fetal bovine serum. In the cryogenic freezing of heteroploid cell lines (MDCK, VERO, etc.) a mixture of 10% DMSO with 90% EMEM (70% EMEM + 30% fetal bovine serum + antibiotic mixture) is used. As part of an autologous bone marrow transplant the DMSO is re-infused along with the patient's own hematopoietic stem cells.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO is metabolized by disproportionation to dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl sulfone. It is subject to renal and pulmonary excretion. A possible side effect of DMSO is therefore elevated blood dimethyl sulfide, which may cause a blood borne halitosis symptom.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO is marketed as an alternative medicine. Its popularity as an alternative cure is stated to stem from a "60 Minutes" documentary in 1980 featuring an early proponent. However, DMSO is an ingredient in some products listed by the U.S. FDA as fake cancer cures and the FDA has had a running battle with distributors. One such distributor is Mildred Miller, who promoted DMSO for a variety of disorders and was consequently convicted of Medicare fraud.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: The use of DMSO as an alternative treatment for cancer is of particular concern, as it has been shown to interfere with a variety of chemotherapy drugs, including cisplatin, carboplatin, and oxaliplatin. There is insufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that DMSO has any effect, and most sources agree that its history of side effects when tested warrants caution when using it as a dietary supplement, for which it is marketed heavily with the usual disclaimer.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO is commonly used in veterinary medicine as a liniment for horses, alone or in combination with other ingredients. In the latter case, often, the intended function of the DMSO is as a solvent, to carry the other ingredients across the skin. Also in horses, DMSO is used intravenously, again alone or in combination with other drugs. It is used alone for the treatment of increased intracranial pressure and/or cerebral edema in horses.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: The perceived garlic taste upon skin contact with DMSO may be due to nonolfactory activation of TRPA1 receptors in trigeminal ganglia. Unlike dimethyl and diallyl disulfides (which have odors resembling garlic), mono- and tri- sulfides (which typically have foul odors), and similar odiferous sulfur compounds, the pure chemical DMSO is odorless.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO is a non-toxic solvent with a median lethal dose higher than ethanol (DMSO: LD, oral, rat, 14,500 mg/kg; ethanol: LD, oral, rat, 7,060 mg/kg).


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: Early clinical trials with DMSO were stopped because of questions about its safety, especially its ability to harm the eye. The most commonly reported side effects include headaches and burning and itching on contact with the skin. Strong allergic reactions have been reported. DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects. DMSO is thought to increase the effects of blood thinners, steroids, heart medicines, sedatives, and other drugs. In some cases this could be harmful or dangerous.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: In Australia, was listed as a Schedule 4 (S4) Drug, and a company has been prosecuted for adding it to products as a preservative. However, since 2018 it is now Schedule 6 (S6) in certain circumstances, including cosmetic preperations


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: On September 9, 1965, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that a manufacturer of the chemical warned that the death of an Irish woman after undergoing DMSO treatment for a sprained wrist may have been due to the treatment, although no autopsy was done, nor was a causal relationship established. Clinical research using DMSO was halted and did not begin again until the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published findings in favor of DMSO in 1972. In 1978, the US FDA approved DMSO for treating interstitial cystitis. In 1980, the US Congress held hearings on claims that the FDA was slow in approving DMSO for other medical uses. In 2007, the US FDA granted "fast track" designation on clinical studies of DMSO's use in reducing brain tissue swelling following traumatic brain injury. DMSO exposure to developing mouse brains can produce brain degeneration. This neurotoxicity could be detected at doses as low as 0.3mL/kg, a level exceeded in children exposed to DMSO during bone marrow transplant.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO disposed into sewers can also cause odor problems in municipal effluents: waste water bacteria transform DMSO under hypoxic (anoxic) conditions into dimethyl sulfide (DMS) that has a strong disagreeable odor, similar to rotten cabbage. However, chemically pure DMSO is odorless because of the lack of C-S-C (sulfide) and C-S-H (mercaptan) linkages. Deodorization of DMSO is achieved by removing the odorous impurities it contains.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: Dimethyl sulfoxide can produce an explosive reaction when exposed to acyl chlorides; at a low temperature, this reaction produces the oxidant for Swern oxidation.


title: Dimethyl sulfoxide

text: DMSO can decompose at the boiling temperature of 189 °C at normal pressure, possibly leading to an explosion. The decomposition is catalyzed by acids and bases and therefore can be relevant at even lower temperatures. A strong to explosive reaction also takes place in combination with halogen compounds, metal nitrides, metal perchlorates, sodium hydride, periodic acid and fluorinating agents.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Ethel Merman (born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann, January 16, 1908 – February 15, 1984) was an American actress and singer, known for her distinctive, powerful voice, and for leading roles in musical theatre. She has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage". Over her distinguished career in theater she became known for her performances in shows such as "Anything Goes", "Annie Get Your Gun", "Gypsy", and "Hello, Dolly!"


title: Ethel Merman

text: She is also known for her film roles in "Anything Goes" (1936), "Call Me Madam" (1953), "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954), and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963). Among many accolades, she received the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in "Call Me Madam", a Grammy Award for "Gypsy" and Drama Desk Award for "Hello, Dolly!"


title: Ethel Merman

text: Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm" (from "Girl Crazy"); "Everything's Coming Up Roses", "Some People", and "Rose's Turn" (from "Gypsy"—Merman starred as Rose in the original 1959 Broadway production); and the Cole Porter songs "It's De-Lovely" (from "Red, Hot and Blue"), "Friendship" (from "Du Barry Was a Lady"), and "I Get a Kick Out of You", "You're the Top", and "Anything Goes" (from "Anything Goes"). The Irving Berlin song "There's No Business Like Show Business", written for the musical "Annie Get Your Gun", became Merman's signature song.


title: Ethel Merman

text: An only child, Merman was born in her maternal grandmother's house at 359 4th Avenue (today 33rd Street just off 36th Avenue) in Astoria, Queens in New York City in 1908, but later insisted that the year was 1912. Her father, Edward Zimmermann (1879–1977), was an accountant with James H. Dunham & Company, a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods company, and her mother, Agnes (Gardner) Zimmermann (1883–1974), was a schoolteacher. Edward Zimmermann had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and his wife was Presbyterian. Shortly after they married, they joined the Episcopal congregation at Church of the Redeemer, where their daughter was baptized. Merman's parents were strict about church attendance and she spent every Sunday attending morning services, Sunday school, afternoon prayer meetings, and evening study groups for children. Merman's parents insisted she have an education with training in secretarial skills, so she would have something to fall back on if her dreams of stardom didn't pan out. Merman attended P.S. 4 and William Cullen Bryant High School (which later named its auditorium in her honor), where she pursued a commercial course that offered secretarial training.


title: Ethel Merman

text: She was active in numerous extracurricular activities, including the school magazine, the speakers' club, and student council, and she frequented the local music store to peruse the weekly arrivals of new sheet music. On Friday nights, the Zimmermann family took the subway into Manhattan to see the vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre, where Merman saw Blossom Seeley, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and Nora Bayes. At home, she tried to emulate their singing styles, but her own distinctive voice was difficult to disguise.


title: Ethel Merman

text: After graduating from Bryant High School in 1924, Merman was hired as a stenographer by the Boyce-Ite Company. One day during her lunch break, she met Vic Kliesrath, who offered her a job at the Bragg-Kliesrath Corporation for a $5 increase above the weekly $23 salary she was earning, and Merman accepted the offer. She eventually was made personal secretary to company president Caleb Bragg, whose frequent lengthy absences from the office to race automobiles allowed her to catch up on the sleep she had lost the previous night when she was out late performing at private parties. During this period, Merman also began appearing in nightclubs, first hired by Jimmy Durante's partner Lou Clayton. At this time, she decided the name Ethel Zimmermann was too long for a theater marquee. She considered combining Ethel with Gardner or Hunter, which was her grandmother's maiden name. These considerations provoked her father's ire, and she abbreviated Zimmermann to Merman to appease him.


title: Ethel Merman

text: During a two-week engagement at a club in midtown Manhattan called Little Russia, Merman met agent Lou Irwin, who arranged for her to audition for Archie Mayo, a film director under contract at Warner Bros. He offered her an exclusive six-month contract, starting at $125 per week, and Merman quit her day job, only to find herself idle for weeks while waiting to be cast in a film. She finally urged Irwin to try to cancel her agreement with Mayo; instead, he negotiated her a better deal allowing her to perform in clubs while remaining on the Warners' payroll. Merman was hired as a torch singer at Les Ambassadeurs, where the headliner was Jimmy Durante, and the two became lifelong friends. She caught the attention of columnists such as Walter Winchell and Mark Hellinger, who began giving her publicity. Soon after, Merman underwent a tonsillectomy she feared might damage her voice, but after recovering, she discovered it was more powerful than ever.


title: Ethel Merman

text: While performing on the prestigious Keith Circuit, Merman was signed to replace Ruth Etting in the Paramount film "Follow the Leader" (1930), starring Ed Wynn and Ginger Rogers. Following a successful seven-week run at the Brooklyn Paramount, she was signed to perform at the Palace for $500 per week. During the run, theatre producer Vinton Freedley saw her perform and invited her to audition for the role of San Francisco café singer Kate Fothergill in the new George and Ira Gershwin musical "Girl Crazy". Upon hearing her sing "I Got Rhythm", the Gershwins immediately cast her, and Merman began juggling daytime rehearsals with her matinee and evening performance schedule at the Palace. Merman introduced the songs "Sam and Delilah" and "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!" as well as "I Got Rhythm" in the show.


title: Ethel Merman

text: "Girl Crazy" opened on October 14, 1930, at the Alvin Theatre, where it ran for 272 performances. "The New York Times" noted Merman sang "with dash, authority, good voice and just the right knowing style", and "The New Yorker" called her "imitative of no one." Merman was fairly blasé about her notices, prompting George Gershwin to ask her mother "Have you ever seen a person so unconcerned as Ethel?"


title: Ethel Merman

text: During the run of "Girl Crazy", Paramount signed Merman to appear in a series of 10 short musical films, most of which allowed her to sing a rousing number as well as a ballad. She also performed at the Central Park Casino, the Paramount Theatre, and a return engagement at the Palace. As soon as "Girl Crazy" closed, her parents and she departed for a much-needed vacation in Lake George in Upstate New York, but after their first day there, Merman was summoned to Atlantic City, New Jersey to help salvage the troubled latest edition of "George White's Scandals". Because she was still under contract to Freedley, White was forced to pay the producer $10,000 for her services, in addition to her weekly $1,500 salary. Following the Atlantic City run, the show played in Newark, New Jersey, and then Brooklyn before opening on Broadway, where it ran for 202 performances.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman's next show, "Humpty Dumpty", began rehearsals in August 1932 and opened—and immediately closed—in Pittsburgh the following month. Producer Buddy DeSylva, who also had written the book and lyrics, was certain it could be reworked into a success, and with a revamped script and additional songs by Vincent Youmans, it opened with the new title "Take a Chance" on November 26 at the 42nd Street Apollo Theatre, where it ran for 243 performances. Brooks Atkinson of "The New York Times" called it "fast, loud, and funny" and added Merman "has never loosed herself with quite so much abandon." Following the Broadway run, she agreed to join the show on the road, but shortly after the Chicago opening, she claimed the chlorine in the city's water supply was irritating her throat, and returned to Manhattan.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman returned to Hollywood to appear in "We're Not Dressing" (1934), a screwball comedy based on the J.M. Barrie play "The Admirable Crichton". Despite working with a cast including Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, and Burns and Allen, under the direction of Academy Award–winning director Norman Taurog, Merman was unhappy with the experience, and she was dismayed to discover one of her musical numbers had been cut when she attended the New York opening with her family and friends. She also appeared on screen with Eddie Cantor in "Kid Millions" (also 1934), but her return to Broadway established her as a major star and cemented her image as a tough girl.


title: Ethel Merman

text: "Anything Goes" proved to be the first of five Cole Porter musicals in which Merman starred. In addition to the title song, the score included "I Get a Kick Out of You", "You're the Top", and "Blow Gabriel Blow". It opened on November 21, 1934, at the Alvin Theatre, and the "New York Post" called Merman "vivacious and ingratiating in her comedy moments, and the embodiment of poise and technical adroitness" when singing "as only she knows how to do." Although Merman always had remained with a show until the end of its run, she left "Anything Goes" after eight months to appear with Eddie Cantor in the film "Strike Me Pink". She was replaced by Benay Venuta, with whom she enjoyed a long but frequently tempestuous friendship.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman initially was overlooked for the film version of "Anything Goes" (1936). Bing Crosby insisted his wife Dixie Lee be cast as Reno Sweeney opposite his Billy Crocker, but when she unexpectedly dropped out of the project, Merman was cast in the role she had originated on stage. From the beginning, it was clear to Merman the film would not be the enjoyable experience she had hoped it would be. The focus was shifted to Crosby, leaving her very much in a supporting role. Many of Porter's ribald lyrics were altered to conform to the guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code, and "Blow Gabriel Blow" was eliminated, replaced by a song, "Shang Hai-de-Ho", that Merman was forced to perform in a headdress made of peacock feathers while surrounded by dancers dressed as Chinese slave girls. The film was completed $201,000 over budget and 17 days behind schedule. Richard Watts Jr. of the "New York Herald Tribune" described it as "dull and commonplace", with Merman doing "as well as possible", but unable to register "on screen as magnificently as she does on stage."


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman returned to Broadway for another Porter musical, but despite the presence of Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope in the cast, "Red, Hot and Blue" closed after less than six months. Back in Hollywood, Merman was featured in "Happy Landing", one of the top 10 box-office hits of 1938 comedy with Sonja Henie, Cesar Romero and Don Ameche; another the box-office hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band", a pastiche of Irving Berlin songs interpolated into a plot that vaguely paralleled the composer's life; and "Straight Place and Show", a critical and commercial flop starring the Ritz Brothers. She returned to the stage in "Stars in Your Eyes", which struggled to survive while the public flocked to the 1939 New York World's Fair instead, and finally closed short of four months. Merman followed this with two more Porter musicals. "DuBarry Was a Lady", with Bert Lahr and Betty Grable, ran for a year, and "Panama Hattie", with Betty Hutton (whose musical numbers were cut from the show on opening night at Merman's insistence), June Allyson, and Arthur Treacher, fared even better, lasting slightly more than 14 months.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Shortly after the opening of the latter, Merman—still despondent about the end of her affair with Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley—married her first husband, Treacher's agent, William Smith. She later said she knew on their wedding night she had made "a dreadful mistake", and two months later, she filed for divorce on grounds of desertion. Shortly after she met and married Robert D. Levitt, promotion director for the "New York Journal-American". The couple eventually had two children and divorced in 1952 because of his excessive drinking and erratic behavior.


title: Ethel Merman

text: In 1943, Merman was a featured performer in the film "Stage Door Canteen" and opened in another Porter musical, "Something for the Boys", produced by Michael Todd. In 1944, Merman was set to star as the title character in the musical play "Sadie Thompson" with a score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz, directed and produced by Rouben Mamoulian. The musical play was based on the short story "Rain" by W. Somerset Maugham. The serious nature of the production was a departure from Merman's string of successful musical comedies. Moreover, during rehearsals, Merman had difficulties memorizing the lyrics, and she blamed Dietz for his use of sophisticated and foreign words. She had her husband tone down some of the lyrics. Dietz took exception to Merman's singing the altered lyrics and gave her an ultimatum to sing his original lyrics or leave the show. In response, Merman withdrew from the production. Commentators have speculated that Merman's departure was probably due to her reluctance to assume such a serious role in her first dramatic musical.June Havoc left her starring role in "Mexican Hayride" and assumed the role written for Merman." Sadie Thompson" opened on Broadway on November 16, 1944, to mixed reviews. Havoc received almost uniformly favorable reviews. However, the score and the book received mixed reviews, with the score called “undistinguished.” The show only lasted 60 performances and closed on January 6, 1945.


title: Ethel Merman

text: In August 1945, while in the hospital recovering from the Caesarean birth of her second child, Merman was visited by Dorothy Fields, who proposed she star as Annie Oakley in a musical her brother Herbert and she were writing with Jerome Kern. Merman accepted, but in November, Kern suffered a stroke while in New York City visiting Rodgers and Hammerstein (the producers of the show) and died a few days later. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II invited Irving Berlin to replace him, and the result was "Annie Get Your Gun", which opened on May 16, 1946, at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for nearly three years and 1,147 performances. During this time, Merman took only two vacations and missed only two performances because of illness. Merman lost the film version to Judy Garland, who eventually was replaced by Betty Hutton, but she did star in a Broadway revival two decades later at Lincoln Center with Bruce Yarnell, who was 27 years Merman's junior, cast as Frank E. Butler, Annie Oakley's loyal husband and manager.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman and Berlin reunited for "Call Me Madam" in 1950, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, and she starred in the 1953 screen adaptation as well, winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her performance. The following year, she appeared as the matriarch of the singing and dancing Donahue family in "There's No Business Like Show Business", a film with a Berlin score.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman returned to Broadway at the behest of her third husband, Continental Airlines executive Robert Six, who was upset she had chosen to become a housewife in Colorado following their wedding in 1953. He expected her public appearances to engender publicity for the airline, and her decision to forgo the limelight did not sit well with him. He urged her to accept the lead in "Happy Hunting", with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (who had written "Call Me Madam") and a score by the unknown team of Harold Karr and Matt Dubey. Merman acquiesced to her husband's demands, although she clashed with the composers from the start and soon was at odds with co-star Fernando Lamas and his wife Arlene Dahl, who frequently attended rehearsals. Based on the Merman name, the show opened in New York with an advance sale of $1.5 million, and despite the star's dissatisfaction with it, garnered respectable reviews. Although Brooks Atkinson thought the score was "hardly more than adequate", he called Merman "as brassy as ever, glowing like a neon light whenever she steps on the stage." Several months into the run, she insisted that two of her least-favorite numbers be replaced by songs written by her friend Roger Edens, who, because of his exclusive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, credited them to Kay Thompson. She lost the Tony Award to Judy Holliday in "Bells Are Ringing", and the show closed after 412 performances, with Merman happy to see what she considered "a dreary obligation" finally come to an end.


title: Ethel Merman

text: "" was based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee and starred Merman as her domineering stage mother Rose Hovick, possibly Merman's best-remembered performance. The musical opened on May 21, 1959, at The Broadway Theatre. In the "New York Post," Richard Watts called Merman "a brilliant actress", and Brooks Atkinson of "The New York Times" wrote that "She gives an indomitable performance, both as actress and singer." Despite the acclaim, Merman lost the Tony Award to her close friend Mary Martin in "The Sound of Music" and jokingly quipped "How are you going to buck a nun?" Shortly after she divorced Robert Six, his affair with television actress Audrey Meadows became public, and she found solace in her work.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Throughout the 702-performance run of "Gypsy," Mervyn LeRoy saw it numerous times, and repeatedly assured Merman that he planned to cast her in the film adaptation he was preparing. However, before the show's closing, it was announced that Rosalind Russell instead had been signed to star. Russell's husband, theatre producer Frederick Brisson (whom Merman later called "the lizard of Roz"), had sold the screen rights to the Leonard Spigelgass play "A Majority of One" to Warner Bros. with the stipulation his wife would star in both films. Because Russell was still a major box-office draw with the success of "Auntie Mame" a few years earlier, and Merman never having established herself as a popular screen presence, the studio agreed to Brisson's terms. Merman was devastated at this turn of events and called the loss of the role "the greatest professional disappointment of my life."


title: Ethel Merman

text: Following the Broadway closing of "Gypsy" on March 25, 1961, Merman halfheartedly embarked on the national tour. In San Francisco, she severely injured her back, but continued to play to packed houses. During the Los Angeles run, LeRoy visited her backstage and claimed Russell was so ill that "I think you're going to end up getting this part." Believing the film version of "Gypsy" was within her grasp, she generously gave him the many house seats he requested for friends and industry colleagues, only to discover she had been duped. During her run in "Gypsy", Merman earned an estimated $130,000 per year in the role plus 10% of the box-office receipts.


title: Ethel Merman

text: In 1963, Merman starred in the ensemble comedy film "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" alongside Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, and Mickey Rooney. Merman played Mrs. Marcus, the loudmouthed, battle-axe mother in-law of Milton Berle. The film was a major box office success, earning $60 million off a budget of $9.4 million and becoming the 3rd highest-grossing film of 1963. The film received 6 Academy Award nominations and 1 win.


title: Ethel Merman

text: She also starred in the flop "The Art of Love" (1965). She made dozens of television appearances on variety series hosted by Perry Como, Red Skelton, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, and Carol Burnett, talk shows with Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin, and in episodes of "That Girl", "The Lucy Show," "Match Game", "Batman," "Tarzan," and others.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Producer David Merrick encouraged Jerry Herman to compose "Hello, Dolly!" specifically for Merman's vocal range, but when he offered her the role, she declined it. She finally joined the cast on March 28, 1970, six years after the production opened. On Merman's opening night, her performance was continually brought to a halt by prolonged standing ovations, and the critics unanimously heralded her return to the New York stage. Walter Kerr in "The New York Times" described her voice: "Exactly as trumpet-clean, exactly as penny whistle-piercing, exactly as Wurlitzer-wonderful as it always was." He wrote: "Her comic sense is every bit as authoritative, as high-handed, really, as her voice." The seventh actress to portray the scheming matchmaker in the original Broadway production, she remained with the musical for 210 performances until it closed on December 27, 1970. Merman received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance for what proved to be her last appearance on Broadway.


title: Ethel Merman

text: For the remainder of her career, Merman worked as frequently as offers were made. She appeared on "Match Game 76" in the Spring of that year, infamously telling "Match Game" regular Brett Somers to "shut up" in one of the series' self-proclaimed "Gold Star" episodes.


title: Ethel Merman

text: In 1979, she recorded "The Ethel Merman Disco Album," with many of her signature songs set to a disco beat. She was a guest host on a memorable episode in season 1 of "The Muppet Show". Her last screen role was a self-parody in the 1980 comedy film "Airplane!," in which she portrayed Lieutenant Hurwitz, a shell-shocked soldier who thinks he is Ethel Merman. In the cameo appearance, Merman leaps out of bed singing "Everything's Coming Up Roses" as orderlies sedate her. She also appeared in several episodes of "The Love Boat" (playing Gopher's mother), guest-starred on a CBS tribute to George Gershwin, did a summer comedy/concert tour with Carroll O'Connor, played a two-week engagement at the London Palladium, performed with Mary Martin in a concert benefiting the theatre and museum collection of the Museum of the City of New York, and frequently appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras. She also volunteered at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center (now Mount Sinai West) working in the gift shop or visiting patients.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman was known for her powerful, belting mezzo-soprano voice and precise enunciation and pitch. Because stage singers performed without microphones when Merman began singing professionally, she had a great advantage, despite never taking singing lessons. Broadway lore holds that George Gershwin advised her never to take a singing lesson after she opened in his "Girl Crazy".


title: Ethel Merman

text: Caryl Flinn's 2007 biography includes many quotes from reviews of Merman's work, most of which were compliments to her. Brooks Atkinson summed up her talent:


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman was married and divorced four times. Her first marriage, in 1940, was to theatrical agent William Smith. They were divorced in 1941. Later that same year, Merman married newspaper executive Robert Levitt. The couple had two children: Ethel (born July 20, 1942) and Robert Jr. (born August 11, 1945). Merman and Levitt were divorced in 1952. In March 1953, Merman married Robert Six, the president of Continental Airlines. They separated in December 1959 and were divorced in 1960.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman's fourth and final marriage was to actor Ernest Borgnine. They were married in Beverly Hills on June 27, 1964. They separated on August 7, and Borgnine filed for divorce on October 21.


title: Ethel Merman

text: In a radio interview, she said of her many marriages: "We all make mistakes. That's why they put rubbers on pencils, and that's what I did. I made a few lulus!" In her autobiography "Merman" (1978), the chapter titled "My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine" consists of one blank page.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Ethel Levitt, her daughter, died on August 23, 1967, of a drug overdose that was ruled accidental. Her son Robert Jr. was married to actress Barbara Colby. While she was estranged from Robert, Colby was shot and killed (along with a friend, James Kiernan), in a parking garage in Los Angeles in July 1975. The shooting was by apparent gang members who had no clear motive.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman was notorious for her brash demeanor and for telling vulgar stories at public parties. For instance, she once shouted a dirty joke across the room at José Ferrer during a formal reception.


title: Ethel Merman

text: While rehearsing a guest appearance on "The Loretta Young Show", Merman exclaimed "Where the hell does this go?" Young, who was a devout Catholic, advanced towards Merman waving an empty coffee can, saying, "Come on, Ethel. You know my rules. That'll cost you a dollar."—to which Merman replied, "Tell me, Loretta, how much will it cost me to tell you to go fuck yourself?"


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman, a lifelong Republican, was a frequent guest at the Eisenhower White House. Merman was also noted as saying, "Eisenhower was my war hero and the President I admire and respect most." On January 20, 1981, Merman performed at the inauguration of Ronald Reagan singing "Everything's Coming up Roses". She had previously sung the same song at an inaugural gala for John F. Kennedy which was never broadcast.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman co-wrote two memoirs. The first, "Who Could Ask for Anything More?" (1955), was published by Doubleday & Co. and written with the assistance of Pete Martin. The second, "Merman" (1978), was published by Simon & Schuster and written with George Eels.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman began to become forgetful with advancing age, and on occasion, had difficulty with her speech. At times her behavior was erratic, causing concern among her friends. On April 7, 1983, she was preparing to travel to Los Angeles, to appear on the 55th Academy Awards telecast, when she collapsed in her apartment. Merman was taken to Roosevelt Hospital (Mount Sinai West) where doctors initially thought she had suffered a stroke. However, after undergoing exploratory surgery on April 11, Merman was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma. "The New York Times" reported that she underwent brain surgery to have the tumor removed, but it was inoperable and her condition was deemed terminal (doctors gave Merman eight and a half months to live). The tumor caused Merman to become aphasic, and as her illness progressed, she lost her hair and her face swelled. According to Merman biographer Brian Kellow, Merman's family and manager did not want the true nature of her condition revealed to the public. Merman's son, Robert Jr., who took charge of her care, later said he chose not to publicly disclose his mother's true condition because Merman strove to keep her personal life private. He stated, "Mom truly appreciated [her fans'] presence and their applause. But you shouldn't attempt to be personal—she drew lines, and she could cut you off."


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman's health eventually stabilized enough for her to be brought back to her apartment in Manhattan. On February 15, 1984, ten months after she was diagnosed with brain cancer, Merman died at her home in Manhattan at the age of 76. On the evening of Merman's death, all 36 theatres on Broadway dimmed their lights at 9 pm in her honor. A private funeral service for Merman was held in a chapel at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on February 27, after which Merman was cremated at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. In accordance with her wishes, Merman's remains were given to her son Robert Jr. Merman was interred in the Shrine of Remembrance Mausoleum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, next to her daughter Ethel.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Upon her death, Merman left an estate estimated to be worth US$1.5 million (equivalent to $ million in ) to be divided between her son and two grandchildren.


title: Ethel Merman

text: On October 10, 1984, an auction of her personal effects, including furniture, artwork, and theatre memorabilia, earned in excess of $120,000 () at Christie's East. The 56th Academy Awards, held on April 2, 1984, ended with a performance of "There's No Business Like Show Business" in tribute to Merman.


title: Ethel Merman

text: Merman was among the hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.


title: American Jews

text: American Jews or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by religion, ethnicity, culture, or nationality. Today the Jewish community in the United States consists primarily of Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from diaspora Jewish populations of Central and Eastern Europe and comprise about 90–95% of the American Jewish population.


title: American Jews

text: During the colonial era, prior to the mass immigration of Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews who arrived via Portugal represented the bulk of America's then-small Jewish population, and while their descendants are a minority today, they, along with an array of other Jewish communities, represent the remainder of American Jews, including other more recent Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Beta Israel-Ethiopian Jews, various other ethnically Jewish communities, as well as a smaller number of converts to Judaism. The American Jewish community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, encompassing the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance.


title: American Jews

text: Depending on religious definitions and varying population data, the United States has the largest or second largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel. As of 2020, the core American Jewish population is estimated at 7.6 million people, accounting for 2.4% of the total US population. This includes 4.9 million adults who identify their religion as Jewish, 1.2 million Jewish adults who identify with no religion, and 1.6 million Jewish children. It is estimated that up to 15,000,000 Americans are part of the ""enlarged"" American Jewish population, accounting for 4.5% of the total US population, consisting of those who have at least one Jewish grandparent and would be eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.


title: American Jews

text: Jews were present in the Thirteen Colonies since the mid-17th century. However, they were small in number, with at most 200 to 300 having arrived by 1700. Those early arrivals were mostly Sephardi Jewish immigrants, of Western Sephardic (also known as Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) ancestry, but by 1720, Ashkenazi Jews from diaspora communities in Central and Eastern Europe predominated.


title: American Jews

text: For the first time, the English Plantation Act 1740 permitted Jews to become British citizens and emigrate to the colonies. Despite the fact that some of them were denied the right to vote or hold office in local jurisdictions, Sephardi Jews became active in community affairs in the 1790s, after they were granted political equality in the five states where they were most numerous. Until about 1830, Charleston, South Carolina had more Jews than anywhere else in North America. Large-scale Jewish immigration commenced in the 19th century, when, by mid-century, many German Jews had arrived, migrating to the United States in large numbers due to antisemitic laws and restrictions in their countries of birth. They primarily became merchants and shop-owners. Gradually early Jewish arrivals from the east coast would travel westward, and in the fall of 1819 the first Jewish religious services west of the Appalachian Range were conducted during the High Holidays in Cincinnati, the oldest Jewish community in the Midwest. Gradually the Cincinnati Jewish community would adopt novel practices under the leadership Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, the father of Reform Judaism in the United States, such as the inclusion of women in "minyan". A large community grew in the region with the arrival of German and Lithuanian Jews in the latter half of the 1800s, leading to the establishment of Manischewitz, one of the largest producers of American Kosher products and now based in New Jersey, and the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the United States, and second-oldest continuous published in the world, "The American Israelite", established in 1854 and still extant in Cincinnati. By 1880 there were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States, many of them being the educated, and largely secular, German Jews, although a minority population of the older Sephardi Jewish families remained influential.


title: American Jews

text: Jewish migration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, as a result of persecution and economic difficulties in parts of Eastern Europe. Most of these new immigrants were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom arrived from poor diaspora communities of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement, located in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. During the same period, great numbers of Ashkenazic Jews also arrived from Galicia, at that time the most impoverished region of the Austro-Hungarian empire with a heavy Jewish urban population, driven out mainly by economic reasons. Many Jews also emigrated from Romania. Over 2,000,000 Jews landed between the late 19th century and 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration. Most settled in the New York metropolitan area, establishing the world's major concentrations of Jewish population. In 1915, the circulation of the daily Yiddish newspapers was half a million in New York City alone, and 600,000 nationally. In addition thousands more subscribed to the numerous weekly papers and the many magazines in Yiddish.


title: American Jews

text: At the beginning of the 20th century, these newly arrived Jews built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and "Landsmanshaften" (German and Yiddish for "Countryman Associations") for Jews from the same town or village. American Jewish writers of the time urged assimilation and integration into the wider American culture, and Jews quickly became part of American life. Approximately 500,000 American Jews (or half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50) fought in World War II, and after the war younger families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated and demonstrated rising intermarriage. The suburbs facilitated the formation of new centers, as Jewish school enrollment more than doubled between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, while synagogue affiliation jumped from 20% in 1930 to 60% in 1960; the fastest growth came in Reform and, especially, Conservative congregations. More recent waves of Jewish emigration from Russia and other regions have largely joined the mainstream American Jewish community.


title: American Jews

text: Americans of Jewish descent have been successful in many fields and aspects over the years. The Jewish community in America has gone from being part of the lower class of society, with numerous employments barred to them, to being a group with a high concentrations in members of the academia and a per capita income higher than the average in the United States.


title: American Jews

text: Scholars debate whether the historical experience of Jews in the United States has been such a unique experience as to validate American exceptionalism.


title: American Jews

text: Korelitz (1996) shows how American Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned a racial definition of Jewishness in favor of one that embraced ethnicity. The key to understanding this transition from a racial self-definition to a cultural or ethnic one can be found in the "Menorah Journal" between 1915 and 1925. During this time contributors to the Menorah promoted a cultural, rather than a racial, religious, or other view of Jewishness as a means to define Jews in a world that threatened to overwhelm and absorb Jewish uniqueness. The journal represented the ideals of the menorah movement established by Horace M. Kallen and others to promote a revival in Jewish cultural identity and combat the idea of race as a means to define or identify peoples.


title: American Jews

text: Siporin (1990) uses the family folklore of ethnic Jews to their collective history and its transformation into an historical art form. They tell us how Jews have survived being uprooted and transformed. Many immigrant narratives bear a theme of the arbitrary nature of fate and the reduced state of immigrants in a new culture. By contrast, ethnic family narratives tend to show the ethnic more in charge of his life, and perhaps in danger of losing his Jewishness altogether. Some stories show how a family member successfully negotiated the conflict between ethnic and American identities.


title: American Jews

text: After 1960, memories of the Holocaust, together with the Six-Day War in 1967 had major impacts on fashioning Jewish ethnic identity. Some have argued that the Holocaust highlighted for Jews the importance of their ethnic identity at a time when other minorities were asserting their own.


title: American Jews

text: In New York City, while the German-Jewish community was well established 'uptown', the more numerous Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe faced tension 'downtown' with Irish and German Catholic neighbors, especially the Irish Catholics who controlled Democratic Party Politics at the time. Jews successfully established themselves in the garment trades and in the needle unions in New York. By the 1930s they were a major political factor in New York, with strong support for the most liberal programs of the New Deal. They continued as a major element of the New Deal Coalition, giving special support to the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-1960s, however, the Black Power movement caused a growing separation between blacks and Jews, though both groups remained solidly in the Democratic camp.


title: American Jews

text: While earlier Jewish immigrants from Germany tended to be politically conservative, the wave of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in the early 1880s were generally more liberal or left-wing and became the political majority. Many came to America with experience in the socialist, anarchist and communist movements as well as the Labor Bund, emanating from Eastern Europe. Many Jews rose to leadership positions in the early 20th century American labor movement and helped to found unions that played a major role in left-wing politics and, after 1936, in Democratic Party politics.


title: American Jews

text: Although American Jews generally leaned Republican in the second half of the 19th century, the majority has voted Democratic since at least 1916, when they voted 55% for Woodrow Wilson.


title: American Jews

text: With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Jews voted more solidly Democratic. They voted 90% for Roosevelt in the elections of 1940, and 1944, representing the highest of support, equaled only once since. In the election of 1948, Jewish support for Democrat Harry S. Truman dropped to 75%, with 15% supporting the new Progressive Party. As a result of lobbying, and hoping to better compete for the Jewish vote, both major party platforms had included a pro-Zionist plank since 1944, and supported the creation of a Jewish state; it had little apparent effect however, with 90% still voting other-than-Republican. In every election since, except for 1980, no Democratic presidential candidate has won with less than 67% of the Jewish vote. (In 1980, Carter obtained 45% of the Jewish vote. See below.)


title: American Jews

text: During the 1952 and 1956 elections, Jewish voters cast 60% or more of their votes for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, while General Eisenhower garnered 40% of the Jewish vote for his reelection, the best showing to date for the Republicans since Warren G. Harding's 43% in 1920. In 1960, 83% voted for Democrat John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon, and in 1964, 90% of American Jews voted for Lyndon Johnson, over his Republican opponent, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater. Hubert Humphrey garnered 81% of the Jewish vote in the 1968 elections in his losing bid for president against Richard Nixon.


title: American Jews

text: During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, Jewish voters were apprehensive about George McGovern and only favored the Democrat by 65%, while Nixon more than doubled Republican Jewish support to 35%. In the election of 1976, Jewish voters supported Democrat Jimmy Carter by 71% over incumbent president Gerald Ford's 27%, but during the Carter re-election campaign of 1980, Jewish voters greatly abandoned the Democrat, with only 45% support, while Republican winner Ronald Reagan garnered 39%, and 14% went to independent (former Republican) John Anderson.


title: American Jews

text: During the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, the Republican retained 31% of the Jewish vote, while 67% voted for Democrat Walter Mondale. The 1988 election saw Jewish voters favor Democrat Michael Dukakis by 64%, while George H. W. Bush polled a respectable 35%, but during Bush's re-election attempt in 1992, his Jewish support dropped to just 11%, with 80% voting for Bill Clinton and 9% going to independent Ross Perot. Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 maintained high Jewish support at 78%, with 16% supporting Bob Dole and 3% for Perot.


title: American Jews

text: In the 2000 presidential election, Joe Lieberman became the first American Jew to run for national office on a major-party ticket when he was chosen as Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's vice-presidential nominee. The elections of 2000 and 2004 saw continued Jewish support for Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, a Catholic, remain in the high- to mid-70% range, while Republican George W. Bush's re-election in 2004 saw Jewish support rise from 19% to 24%.


title: American Jews

text: In the 2008 presidential election, 78% of Jews voted for Barack Obama, who became the first African American to be elected president. Additionally, 83% of white Jews voted for Obama compared to just 34% of white Protestants and 47% of white Catholics, though 67% of those identifying with another religion and 71% identifying with no religion also voted Obama.


title: American Jews

text: In the February 2016 New Hampshire Democratic Primary, Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish candidate to win a state's presidential primary election.


title: American Jews

text: For congressional and senate races, since 1968, American Jews have voted about 70–80% for Democrats; this support increased to 87% for Democratic House candidates during the 2006 elections.


title: American Jews

text: The first American Jew to serve in the Senate was David Levy Yulee, who was Florida's first Senator, serving 1845–1851 and again 1855–1861.


title: American Jews

text: There were 19 Jews among the 435 U.S. Representatives at the start of the 112th Congress; 26 Democrats and one (Eric Cantor) Republican. While many of these Members represented coastal cities and suburbs with significant Jewish populations, others did not (for instance, Kim Schrier of Seattle, Washington; John Yarmuth of Louisville, Kentucky; and David Kustoff and Steve Cohen of Memphis, Tennessee). The total number of Jews serving in the House of Representatives declined from 31 in the 111th Congress. John Adler of New Jersey, Steve Kagan of Wisconsin, Alan Grayson of Florida, and Ron Klein of Florida all lost their re-election bids, Rahm Emanuel resigned to become the President's Chief of Staff; and Paul Hodes of New Hampshire did not run for re-election but instead (unsuccessfully) sought his state's open Senate seat. David Cicilline of Rhode Island was the only Jewish American who was newly elected to the 112th Congress; he had been the Mayor of Providence. The number declined when Jane Harman, Anthony Weiner, and Gabby Giffords resigned during the 112th Congress.


title: American Jews

text: , there were five openly gay men serving in Congress and two are Jewish: Jared Polis of Colorado and David Cicilline of Rhode Island.


title: American Jews

text: In November 2008, Cantor was elected as the House Minority Whip, the first Jewish Republican to be selected for the position. In 2011, he became the first Jewish House Majority Leader. He served as Majority Leader until 2014, when he resigned shortly after his loss in the Republican primary election for his House seat.


title: American Jews

text: In 2013, Pew found that 70% of American Jews identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, with just 22% identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party.


title: American Jews

text: The 114th Congress included 10 Jews among 100 U.S. Senators: eight Democrats (Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz, Benjamin Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, Jon Ossoff, Jacky Rosen, Charles Schumer, Ron Wyden), and Bernie Sanders, who became a Democrat to run for President but returned to the Senate as an Independent.


title: American Jews

text: In the 118th Congress, there will be 28 Jewish U.S. Representatives. 25 will be Democrats and 3 will be Republicans. All 10 Jewish Senators are Democrats.


title: American Jews

text: Additionally, 6 members of President Joe Biden's cabinet are Jewish (Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland, DNI Avril Haines, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen).


title: American Jews

text: Members of the American Jewish community have included prominent participants in civil rights movements. In the mid-20th century, there were American Jews who were among the most active participants in the Civil Rights Movement and feminist movements. A number of American Jews have also been active figures in the struggle for gay rights in America.


title: American Jews

text: Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, stated the following when he spoke from the podium at the Lincoln Memorial during the famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963: "As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a twofold experience—one of the spirit and one of our history... From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe... It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is, above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions, a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience."


title: American Jews

text: During the World War II period, the American Jewish community was bitterly and deeply divided and as a result, it was unable to form a united front. Most Jews who had previously emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe supported Zionism, because they believed that a return to their ancestral homeland was the only solution to the persecution and the genocide which were then occurring across Europe. One important development was the sudden conversion of many American Jewish leaders to Zionism late in the war. The Holocaust was largely ignored by American media as it was happening. Reporters and editors largely did not believe the stories of atrocities which were coming out of Europe.


title: American Jews

text: The Holocaust had a profound impact on the Jewish community in the United States, especially after 1960 as Holocaust education improved, as Jews tried to comprehend what had happened during it, and especially as they tried to commemorate it and grapple with it when they looked to the future. Abraham Joshua Heschel summarized this dilemma when he attempted to understand Auschwitz: "To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray [of] God's radiance in the jungles of history."


title: American Jews

text: Zionism became a well-organized movement in the U.S. with the involvement of leaders such as Louis Brandeis and the promise of a reconstituted homeland in the Balfour Declaration. Jewish Americans organized large-scale boycotts of German merchandise during the 1930s to protest Nazi Germany. Franklin D. Roosevelt's leftist domestic policies received strong Jewish support in the 1930s and 1940s, as did his anti-Nazi foreign policy and his promotion of the United Nations. Support for political Zionism in this period, although growing in influence, remained a distinctly minority opinion among Jews in the United States until about 1944–45, when the early rumors and reports of the systematic mass murder of the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries became publicly known with the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. The founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948 and recognition thereof by the American government (following objections by American isolationists) was an indication of both its intrinsic support and its response to learning the horrors of the Holocaust.


title: American Jews

text: This attention was based on a natural affinity toward and support for Israel in the Jewish community. The attention is also because of the ensuing and unresolved conflicts regarding the founding of Israel and the role for the Zionist movement going forward. A lively internal debate commenced, following the Six-Day War. The American Jewish community was divided over whether or not they agreed with the Israeli response; the great majority came to accept the war as necessary. Similar tensions were aroused by the 1977 election of Menachem Begin and the rise of Revisionist policies, the 1982 Lebanon War and the continuing administrative governance of portions of the West Bank territory. Disagreement over Israel's 1993 acceptance of the Oslo Accords caused a further split among American Jews; this mirrored a similar split among Israelis and led to a parallel rift within the pro-Israel lobby, and even ultimately to the United States for its "blind" support of Israel. Abandoning any pretense of unity, both segments began to develop separate advocacy and lobbying organizations. The liberal supporters of the Oslo Accord worked through Americans for Peace Now (APN), Israel Policy Forum (IPF) and other groups friendly to the Labour government in Israel. They tried to assure Congress that American Jewry was behind the Accord and defended the efforts of the administration to help the fledgling Palestinian Authority (PA), including promises of financial aid. In a battle for public opinion, IPF commissioned a number of polls showing widespread support for Oslo among the community.


title: American Jews

text: In opposition to Oslo, an alliance of conservative groups, such as the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) tried to counterbalance the power of the liberal Jews. On October 10, 1993, the opponents of the Palestinian-Israeli accord organized at the American Leadership Conference for a Safe Israel, where they warned that Israel was prostrating itself before "an armed thug", and predicted and that the "thirteenth of September is a date that will live in infamy". Some Zionists also criticized, often in harsh language, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, his foreign minister and chief architect of the peace accord. With the community so strongly divided, AIPAC and the Presidents Conference, which was tasked with representing the national Jewish consensus, struggled to keep the increasingly antagonistic discourse civil. Reflecting these tensions, Abraham Foxman from the Anti-Defamation League was asked by the conference to apologize for criticizing ZOA's Morton Klein. The conference, which under its organizational guidelines was in charge of moderating communal discourse, reluctantly censured some Orthodox spokespeople for attacking Colette Avital, the Labor-appointed Israeli Consul General in New York and an ardent supporter of that version of a peace process.


title: American Jews

text: As of 2020, the American Jewish population is, depending on the method of identification, either the largest in the world, or the second-largest in the world (after Israel).


title: American Jews

text: Precise population figures vary depending on whether Jews are accounted for based on halakhic considerations, or secular, political and ancestral identification factors. There were about four million adherents of Judaism in the U.S. as of 2001, approximately 1.4% of the US population. According to the Jewish Agency, for the year 2017 Israel was home to 6.5 million Jews (49.3% of the world's Jewish population), while the United States contained 5.3 million (40.2%).


title: American Jews

text: According to Gallup and Pew Research Center findings, "at maximum 2.2% of the U.S. adult population has some basis for Jewish self-identification."


title: American Jews

text: In 2020, it was estimated by demographers Arnold Dashefsky & Ira M. Sheskin in the American Jewish Yearbook that the American Jewish population totaled 7.15 million, making up 2.17% of the country's 329.5 million inhabitants.


title: American Jews

text: In 2012, demographers estimated the core American Jewish population (including religious and non-religious) to be 5,425,000 (or 1.73% of the US population in 2012), citing methodological failures in the previous higher estimates. Other sources say the number is around 6.5 million.


title: American Jews

text: The "American Jewish Yearbook population survey" had placed the number of American Jews at 6.4 million, or approximately 2.1% of the total population. This figure is significantly higher than the previous large scale survey estimate, conducted by the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population estimates, which estimated 5.2 million Jews. A 2007 study released by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute (SSRI) at Brandeis University presents evidence to suggest that both these figures may be underestimations with a potential 7.0–7.4 million Americans of Jewish descent. Those higher estimates were however arrived at by including all non-Jewish family members and household members, rather than surveyed individuals. In a 2019 study by Jews of Color Initiative it was found that approximately 12-15% of Jews in the United States, about 1,000,000 of 7,200,000 identify as multiracial and Jews of color.


title: American Jews

text: The population of Americans of Jewish descent is demographically characterized by an aging population composition and low fertility rates significantly below generational replacement.


title: American Jews

text: The National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 asked 4.5 million adult Jews to identify their denomination. The national total showed 38% were affiliated with the Reform tradition, 35% were Conservative, 6% were Orthodox, 1% were Reconstructionists, 10% linked themselves to some other tradition, and 10% said they are "just Jewish." In 2013, Pew Research's Jewish population survey found that 35% of American Jews identified as Reform, 18% as Conservative, 10% as Orthodox, 6% who identified with other sects, and 30% did not identify with a denomination.


title: American Jews

text: A follow up survey in 2013 showed that 14% of all Jews were actually affiliated with Reform communities, 11% with Conservative, 10% with orthodox communities and 3% with other communities.


title: American Jews

text: The Ashkenazi Jews, who are 90-95% of American Jews, settled first in and around New York City; in recent decades many have moved to South Florida, Los Angeles and other large metropolitan areas in the South and West. The metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami contain nearly one quarter of the world's Jews.


title: American Jews

text: According to a study published by demographers and sociologists Ira M. Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsky in the American Jewish Yearbook, the distribution of the Jewish population in 2020 was as follows:


title: American Jews

text: Although the New York City metropolitan area is the second-largest Jewish population center in the world (after the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in Israel), the Miami metropolitan area has a slightly greater Jewish population on a per-capita basis (9.9% compared to metropolitan New York's 9.3%). Several other major cities have large Jewish communities, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia. In many metropolitan areas, the majority of Jewish families live in suburban areas. The Greater Phoenix area was home to about 83,000 Jews in 2002, and has been rapidly growing. The greatest Jewish population on a per-capita basis for incorporated areas in the U.S. are Kiryas Joel Village, New York (greater than 93% based on language spoken in home), City of Beverly Hills, California (61%), and Lakewood Township, New Jersey (59%), with two of the incorporated areas, Kiryas Joel and Lakewood, having a high concentration of Haredi Jews, and one incorporated area, Beverly Hills, having a high concentration of non-Orthodox Jews.


title: American Jews

text: The phenomenon of Israeli migration to the U.S. is often termed "Yerida". The Israeli immigrant community in America is less widespread. The significant Israeli immigrant communities in the United States are in the New York City metropolitan area, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago.


title: American Jews

text: According to the 2001 undertaking of the National Jewish Population Survey, 4.3 million American Jews have some sort of strong connection to the Jewish community, whether religious or cultural.


title: American Jews

text: According to the North American Jewish Data Bank the 104 counties and independent cities with the largest Jewish communities, as a percentage of population, were:


title: American Jews

text: These parallel themes have facilitated the extraordinary economic, political, and social success of the American Jewish community, but also have contributed to widespread cultural assimilation. More recently however, the propriety and degree of assimilation has also become a significant and controversial issue within the modern American Jewish community, with both political and religious skeptics.


title: American Jews

text: While not all Jews disapprove of intermarriage, many members of the Jewish community have become concerned that the high rate of interfaith marriage will result in the eventual disappearance of the American Jewish community. Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 and 25% in 1974, to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000. By 2013, the intermarriage rate had risen to 71% for non-Orthodox Jews. This, in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s. In addition to this, when compared with the general American population, the American Jewish community is slightly older.


title: American Jews

text: A third of intermarried couples provide their children with a Jewish upbringing, and doing so is more common among intermarried families raising their children in areas with high Jewish populations. The Boston area, for example, is exceptional in that an estimated 60% of children of intermarriages are being raised Jewish, meaning that intermarriage would actually be contributing to a net "increase" in the number of Jews. As well, some children raised through intermarriage rediscover and embrace their Jewish roots when they themselves marry and have children.


title: American Jews

text: In contrast to the ongoing trends of assimilation, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number.  In 2000, there were 360,000 so-called "ultra-orthodox" (Haredi) Jews in USA (7.2%). The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%). Data from the Pew Center shows that, as of 2013, 27% of American Jews under the age of 18 live in Orthodox households, a dramatic increase from Jews aged 18 to 29, only 11% of whom are Orthodox. The UJA-Federation of New York reports that 60% of Jewish children in the New York City area live in Orthodox homes. In addition to economizing and sharing, many Haredi communities depend on government aid to support their high birth rate and large families. The Hasidic village of New Square, New York receives Section8 housing subsidies at a higher rate than the rest of the region, and half of the population in the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, New York receive food stamps, while a third receive Medicaid.


title: American Jews

text: About half of the American Jews are considered to be religious. Out of this 2,831,000 religious Jewish population, 92% are non-Hispanic white, 5% Hispanic (Most commonly from Argentina, Venezuela, or Cuba), 1% Asian, 1% black and 1% Other (mixed race etc.). Almost this many non-religious Jews exist in the United States.


title: American Jews

text: In 2013, the Pew Research Center's "Portrait of Jewish Americans" found that more than 90% of Jews who responded to its survey described themselves as being non-Hispanic whites, 2% described themselves as being black, 3% described themselves as being Hispanic, and 2% described themselves as having other racial or ethnic backgrounds.


title: American Jews

text: Jews of European descent, often referred to as white Jews, are classified as white by the US census and have generally been classified as legally white throughout American history. Some American Jews of European descent identify themselves as being both Jewish and white, while others solely identify themselves as being Jewish or identify as both Jewish and non-white. However, Jews of European descent rarely identify as Jews of color and are rarely considered people of color in American society. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of American Jews are non-Hispanic white Ashkenazi Jews. Law professor David Bernstein has questioned the idea that American Jews were once non-white, writing that American Jews were "indeed considered white by law and by custom" despite the fact that they experienced "discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority and occasionally even violence." Bernstein notes that Jews were not targeted by laws against interracial marriage, were allowed to attend whites-only schools, and were classified as white in the Jim Crow South. The sociologists Philip Q. Yang and Kavitha Koshy have also questioned what they call the "becoming white thesis", noting that most Jews of European descent have been legally classified as white since the first US census in 1790, were legally white for the purposes of the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to "free White person(s)", and that they could find no legislative or judicial evidence that American Jews had ever been considered non-white.


title: American Jews

text: Several commentators have observed that "many American Jews retain a feeling of ambivalence about whiteness". Karen Brodkin explains this ambivalence as rooted in anxieties about the potential loss of Jewish identity, especially outside of intellectual elites. Similarly, Kenneth Marcus observes a number of ambivalent cultural phenomena which have also been noted by other scholars, and he concludes that "the veneer of whiteness has not established conclusively the racial construction of American Jews". The relationship between American Jews and white majority identity continues to be described as "complicated". Many American white nationalists view Jews as non-white.


title: American Jews

text: Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent (often referred to as Mizrahi Jews) are classified as white by the US census. Mizrahi Jews sometimes identify as Jews of color, but often do not, and they may or may not be considered people of color by society. Syrian Jews rarely identify as Jews of color and are generally not considered Jews of color by society. Many Syrian Jews identify as white, Middle Eastern, or otherwise non-white rather than as Jews of color.


title: American Jews

text: The American Jewish community includes African American Jews and other American Jews who are also of African descent, a definition which excludes North African Jewish Americans, who are currently classified by the U.S. Census as being white (although a new category was recommended by the Census Bureau for the 2020 census). Estimates of the number of American Jews of African descent in the United States range from 20,000 to 200,000. Jews of African descent belong to all American Jewish denominations. Like their other Jewish counterparts, some black Jews are atheists.


title: American Jews

text: Notable African-American Jews include Drake, Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Bonet, Sammy Davis Jr., Rashida Jones, Yaphet Kotto, Jordan Farmar, Taylor Mays, Daveed Diggs, Alicia Garza, Tiffany Haddish and rabbis Capers Funnye and Alysa Stanton.


title: American Jews

text: Relations between American Jews of African descent and other Jewish Americans are generally cordial. There are, however, disagreements with a specific minority of Black Hebrew Israelites community from among African-Americans who consider themselves, but not other Jews, to be the true descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrew Israelites are generally not considered members of the mainstream Jewish community, because they have not formally converted to Judaism, and they are not ethnically related to other Jews. One such group, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, emigrated to Israel and was granted permanent residency status there.


title: American Jews

text: Hispanic Jews have lived in what is now the United States since colonial times. The earliest Hispanic Jewish settlers were Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal. Beginning in the 1500s, some of the Spanish settlers in what is now New Mexico and Texas were Crypto-Jews, but there was no organized Jewish presence. Later waves of Sephardi immigration brought Judeo-Spanish speaking Jews from the Ottoman Empire, in what is now Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Syria. These Spanish-speaking Sephardi Jews are sometimes considered "Hispanic", but are not Latino. Sephardi Jews of European descent, such as the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, are not considered Jews of color and may or may not be considered to be Hispanic or Latino.


title: American Jews

text: Hispanic and Latino American Jews, particularly Hispanic and Latino Ashkenazi Jews, often identify as white rather than as Jews of color. Some Jews with roots in Latin America may not identify as "Hispanic" or "Latino" at all, usually due to their recent European immigrant origins. American Jews of Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican descent are often Ashkenazi, but some are Sephardi.


title: American Jews

text: Education plays a major role as a part of Jewish identity; as Jewish culture puts a special premium on it and stresses the importance of cultivation of intellectual pursuits, scholarship and learning, American Jews as a group tend to be better educated and earn more than Americans as a whole. Jewish Americans also have an average of 14.7 years of schooling making them the most highly educated of all major religious groups in the United States.


title: American Jews

text: Forty-four percent (55% of Reform Jews) report family incomes of over $100,000 compared to 19% of all Americans, with the next highest group being Hindus at 43%. And while 27% of Americans have a four-year university or postgraduate education, fifty-nine percent (66% of Reform Jews) of American Jews have, the second highest of any ethnic groups after Indian-Americans . 75% of American Jews have achieved some form of post-secondary education if two-year vocational and community college diplomas and certificates are also included.


title: American Jews

text: 31% of American Jews hold a graduate degree; this figure is compared with the general American population where 11% of Americans hold a graduate degree. White collar professional jobs have been attractive to Jews and much of the community tend to take up professional white collar careers requiring tertiary education involving formal credentials where the respectability and reputability of professional jobs is highly prized within Jewish culture. While 46% of Americans work in professional and managerial jobs, 61% of American Jews work as professionals, many of whom are highly educated, salaried professionals whose work is largely self-directed in management, professional, and related occupations such as engineering, science, medicine, investment banking, finance, law, and academia.


title: American Jews

text: Much of the Jewish American community lead middle class lifestyles. While the median household net worth of the typical American family is $99,500, among American Jews the figure is $443,000. In addition, the median Jewish American income is estimated to be in the range of $97,000 to $98,000, nearly twice as high the American national median. Either of these two statistics may be confounded by the fact that the Jewish population is on average older than other religious groups in the country, with 51% of polled adults over the age of 50 compared to 41% nationally. Older people tend to both have higher income and be more highly educated. By 2016, Modern Orthodox Jews had a median household income of $158,000, while Open Orthodox Jews had a median household income at $185,000 (compared to the American median household income of $59,000 for 2016).


title: American Jews

text: As a whole, American and Canadian Jews donate more than $9billion a year to charity. This reflects Jewish traditions of supporting social services as a way of living out the dictates of Jewish law. Most of the charities that benefit are not specifically Jewish organizations.


title: American Jews

text: While the median income of Jewish Americans is high, there are still small pockets of poverty. In the New York area, there are approximately 560,000 Jews living in poor or near-poor households, representing about 20% of the New York metropolitan Jewish community. Most affected are children, the elderly, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Orthodox families.


title: American Jews

text: According to analysis by Gallup, American Jews have the highest well-being of any ethnic or religious group in America.


title: American Jews

text: The great majority of school-age Jewish students attend public schools, although Jewish day schools and yeshivas are to be found throughout the country. Jewish cultural studies and Hebrew language instruction is also commonly offered at synagogues in the form of supplementary Hebrew schools or Sunday schools.


title: American Jews

text: From the early 1900s until the 1950s, quota systems were imposed at elite colleges and universities particularly in the Northeast, as a response to the growing number of children of recent Jewish immigrants; these limited the number of Jewish students accepted, and greatly reduced their previous attendance. Jewish enrollment at Cornell's School of Medicine fell from 40% to 4% between the world wars, and Harvard's fell from 30% to 4%. Before 1945, only a few Jewish professors were permitted as instructors at elite universities. In 1941, for example, antisemitism drove Milton Friedman from a non-tenured assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Harry Levin became the first Jewish full professor in the Harvard English department in 1943, but the Economics department decided not to hire Paul Samuelson in 1948. Harvard hired its first Jewish biochemists in 1954.


title: American Jews

text: According to Clark Kerr, Martin Meyerson in 1965 became the first Jew to serve, albeit temporarily, as the leader of a major American research university. That year, Meyerson served as acting chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, but was unable to obtain a permanent appointment as a result of a combination of tactical errors on his part and antisemitism on the UC Board of Regents. Meyerson served as the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1981.


title: American Jews

text: By 1986, a third of the presidents of the elite undergraduate final clubs at Harvard were Jewish. Rick Levin was president of Yale University from 1993 to 2013, Judith Rodin was president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 2004 (and is currently president of the Rockefeller Foundation), Paul Samuelson's nephew, Lawrence Summers, was president of Harvard University from 2001 until 2006, and Harold Shapiro was president of Princeton University from 1992 until 2000.


title: American Jews

text: Jewishness in the United States is considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one. See ethnoreligious group.


title: American Jews

text: Jewish religious practice in America is quite varied. Among the 4.3 million American Jews described as "strongly connected" to Judaism, over 80% report some sort of active engagement with Judaism, ranging from attending at daily prayer services on one end of the spectrum, to as little as attending only Passover Seders or lighting Hanukkah candles on the other.


title: American Jews

text: A 2003 Harris Poll found that 16% of American Jews go to the synagogue at least once a month, 42% go less frequently but at least once a year, and 42% go less frequently than once a year.


title: American Jews

text: The survey found that of the 4.3 million strongly connected Jews, 46% belong to a synagogue. Among those households who belong to a synagogue, 38% are members of Reform synagogues, 33% Conservative, 22% Orthodox, 2% Reconstructionist, and 5% other types. Traditionally, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews do not have different branches (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) but usually remain observant and religious. The survey discovered that Jews in the Northeast and Midwest are generally more observant than Jews in the South or West. Reflecting a trend also observed among other religious groups, Jews in the Northwestern United States are typically the least observant.


title: American Jews

text: In recent years, there has been a noticeable trend of secular American Jews returning to a more observant, in most cases, Orthodox, lifestyle. Such Jews are called baalei teshuva ("returners", see also Repentance in Judaism).


title: American Jews

text: The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that around 3.4 million American Jews call themselves religious—out of a general Jewish population of about 5.4 million. The number of Jews who identify themselves as only culturally Jewish has risen from 20% in 1990 to 37% in 2008, according to the study. In the same period, the number of all US adults who said they had no religion rose from 8% to 15%. Jews are more likely to be secular than Americans in general, the researchers said. About half of all US Jews—including those who consider themselves religiously observant—claim in the survey that they have a secular worldview and see no contradiction between that outlook and their faith, according to the study's authors. Researchers attribute the trends among American Jews to the high rate of intermarriage and "disaffection from Judaism" in the United States.


title: American Jews

text: American Jews are more likely to be atheists or agnostics than most Americans, especially when they are compared with American Protestants or Catholics. A 2003 poll found that while 79% of Americans believe in God, only 48% of American Jews do, compared to 79% and 90% of American Catholics and Protestants respectively. While 66% of Americans said that they were "absolutely certain" of God's existence, 24% of American Jews said the same. And though 9% of Americans believe that there is no God (8% of American Catholics and 4% of American Protestants), 19% of American Jews believe that God does not exist.


title: American Jews

text: A 2009 Harris Poll showed that American Jews constitute the one religious group which is most accepting of the science of evolution, with 80% accepting evolution, compared to 51% for Catholics, 32% for Protestants, and 16% of born-again Christians. They were also less likely to believe in supernatural phenomena such as miracles, angels, or heaven.


title: American Jews

text: A 2013 Pew Research Center report found that 1.7 million American Jewish adults, 1.6 million of whom were raised in Jewish homes or had Jewish ancestry, identified as Christians or Messianic Jews but also consider themselves ethnically Jewish. Another 700,000 American Christian adults considered themselves "Jews by affinity" or "grafted-in" Jews.


title: American Jews

text: Jews are overrepresented among American Buddhists; this is specifically the case among those Jews whose parents are not Buddhist, and those Jews who are without a Buddhist heritage, with between one fifth and 30% of all American Buddhists identifying as Jewish though only 2% of Americans are Jewish. Nicknamed "Jubu"s, an increasing number of American Jews have started to adopt Buddhist spiritual practices, while at the same time, they are continuing to identify with and practice Judaism. Notable American Jewish Buddhists include: Robert Downey Jr. Allen Ginsberg, Linda Pritzker, Jonathan F.P. Rose, Goldie Hawn and daughter Kate Hudson, Steven Seagal, Adam Yauch of the rap group The Beastie Boys, and Garry Shandling. Film makers the Coen Brothers have been influenced by Buddhism as well for a time.


title: American Jews

text: Today, American Jews are a distinctive and influential group in the nation's politics. Jeffrey S. Helmreich writes that the ability of American Jews to effect this through political or financial clout is overestimated, that the primary influence lies in the group's voting patterns.


title: American Jews

text: "Jews have devoted themselves to politics with almost religious fervor," writes Mitchell Bard, who adds that Jews have the highest percentage voter turnout of any ethnic group (84% reported being registered to vote).


title: American Jews

text: Though the majority (60–70%) of the country's Jews identify as Democratic, Jews span the political spectrum, with those at higher levels of observance being far more likely to vote Republican than their less observant and secular counterparts.


title: American Jews

text: Owing to high Democratic identification in the 2008 United States Presidential Election, 78% of Jews voted for Democrat Barack Obama versus 21% for Republican John McCain, despite Republican attempts to connect Obama to Muslim and pro-Palestinian causes. It has been suggested that running mate Sarah Palin's conservative views on social issues may have nudged Jews away from the McCain–Palin ticket. In the 2012 United States presidential election, 69% of Jews voted for the Democratic incumbent President Obama.


title: American Jews

text: In 2019, after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, poll data from the Jewish Electorate Institute showed that 73% of Jewish voters felt less secure as Jews than before, 71% disapproved of Trump's handling of anti-Semitism (54% strongly disapprove), 59% felt that he bears "at least some responsibility" for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and Poway synagogue shooting, and 38% were concerned that Trump was encouraging right-wing extremism. Views of the Democratic and Republican parties were milder: 28% were concerned that Republicans were making alliances with white nationalists and tolerating anti-Semitism within their ranks, while 27% were concerned that Democrats were tolerating anti-Semitism within their ranks.


title: American Jews

text: In the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, 77% of American Jews voted for Joe Biden, while 22% voted for Donald Trump.


title: American Jews

text: American Jews have displayed a very strong interest in foreign affairs, especially regarding Germany in the 1930s, and Israel since 1945. Both major parties have made strong commitments in support of Israel. Dr. Eric Uslaner of the University of Maryland argues, with regard to the 2004 election: "Only 15% of Jews said that Israel was a key voting issue. Among those voters, 55% voted for Kerry (compared to 83% of Jewish voters not concerned with Israel)." Uslander goes on to point out that negative views of Evangelical Christians had a distinctly negative impact for Republicans among Jewish voters, while Orthodox Jews, traditionally more conservative in outlook as to social issues, favored the Republican Party. A "New York Times" article suggests that the Jewish movement to the Republican party is focused heavily on faith-based issues, similar to the Catholic vote, which is credited for helping President Bush taking Florida in 2004. However, Natan Guttman, "The Forward"s Washington bureau chief, dismisses this notion, writing in "Moment" that while "[i]t is true that Republicans are making small and steady strides into the Jewish community... a look at the past three decades of exit polls, which are more reliable than pre-election polls, and the numbers are clear: Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic," an assertion confirmed by the most recent presidential election results.


title: American Jews

text: Though some racist claim charged that Jewish interests were partially responsible for the push to war with Iraq, Jewish Americans were actually more strongly opposed to the Iraq War from its onset than any other ethnic group, or even most Americans. The greater opposition to the war was not simply a result of high Democratic identification among Jewish Americans, as Jewish Americans of all political persuasions were more likely to oppose the war than non-Jews who shared the same political leanings.


title: American Jews

text: A 2013 Pew Research Center survey suggests that American Jews' views on domestic politics are intertwined with the community's self-definition as a persecuted minority who benefited from the liberties and societal shifts in the United States and feel obligated to help other minorities enjoy the same benefits. American Jews across age and gender lines tend to vote for and support politicians and policies which are supported by the Democratic Party. On the other hand, Orthodox American Jews have domestic political views which are more similar to those of their religious Christian neighbors.


title: American Jews

text: American Jews are largely supportive of LGBT rights with 79% responding in a 2011 Pew poll that homosexuality should be "accepted by society", while the overall average in the same 2011 poll among Americans of all demographic groups was that 50%. A split on homosexuality exists by level of observance. Reform rabbis in America perform same-sex marriages as a matter of routine, and there are fifteen LGBT Jewish congregations in North America. Reform, Reconstructionist and, increasingly, Conservative, Jews are far more supportive on issues like gay marriage than Orthodox Jews are. A 2007 survey of Conservative Jewish leaders and activists showed that an overwhelming majority supported gay rabbinical ordination and same-sex marriage. Accordingly, 78% of Jewish voters rejected Prop8, the bill that banned gay marriage in California. No other ethnic or religious group voted as strongly against it.


title: American Jews

text: A 2014 Pew poll found that American Jews mostly support abortion rights, with 83% answering that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.


title: American Jews

text: In considering the trade-off between the economy and environmental protection, American Jews were significantly more likely than other religious groups (excepting Buddhism) to favor stronger environmental protection.


title: American Jews

text: Jews in America also overwhelmingly oppose current United States marijuana policy. In 2009, eighty-six percent of Jewish Americans opposed arresting nonviolent marijuana smokers, compared to 61% for the population at large and 68% of all Democrats. Additionally, 85% of Jews in the United States opposed using federal law enforcement to close patient cooperatives for medical marijuana in states where medical marijuana is legal, compared to 67% of the population at large and 73% of Democrats.


title: American Jews

text: A 2014 Pew Research survey titled "How Americans Feel About Religious Groups", found that Jews were viewed the most favorably of all other groups, with a rating of 63 out of 100. Jews were viewed most positively by fellow Jews, followed by white Evangelicals. Sixty percent of the 3,200 persons surveyed said they had ever met a Jew.


title: American Jews

text: Since the time of the last major wave of Jewish immigration to America (over 2,000,000 Jews from Eastern Europe who arrived between 1890 and 1924), Jewish secular culture in the United States has become integrated in almost every important way with the broader American culture. Many aspects of Jewish American culture have, in turn, become part of the wider culture of the United States.


title: American Jews

text: Most American Jews today are native English speakers. A variety of other languages are still spoken within some American Jewish communities that are representative of the various Jewish ethnic divisions from around the world that have come together to make up all of America's Jewish population.


title: American Jews

text: Many of America's Hasidic Jews, being exclusively of Ashkenazi descent, are raised speaking Yiddish. Yiddish was once spoken as the primary language by most of the several million Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to the United States. It was, in fact, the original language in which "The Forward" was published. Yiddish has had an influence on American English, and words borrowed from it include "chutzpah" ("effrontery", "gall"), "nosh" ("snack"), "schlep" ("drag"), "schmuck" ("an obnoxious, contemptible person", euphemism for "penis"), and, depending on idiolect, hundreds of other terms. (See also Yinglish.)


title: American Jews

text: Many Mizrahi Jews, including those from Arab countries such as Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, etc. speak Arabic. There are communities of Mizrahim in Brooklyn. The town of Deal, New Jersey, is notably mostly Syrian-Jewish, with many of them Orthodox.


title: American Jews

text: The Persian Jewish community in the United States, notably the large community in and around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, California, primarily speak Persian (see also Judeo-Persian) in the home and synagogue. They also support their own Persian language newspapers. Persian Jews also reside in eastern parts of New York such as Kew Gardens and Great Neck, Long Island.


title: American Jews

text: Many recent Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union speak primarily Russian at home, and there are several notable communities where public life and business are carried out mainly in Russian, such as in Brighton Beach in New York City and Sunny Isles Beach in Florida. 2010 estimates of the number of Jewish Russian-speaking households in the New York city area are around 92,000, and the number of individuals are somewhere between 223,000 and 350,000. Another high population of Russian Jews can be found in the Richmond District of San Francisco where Russian markets stand alongside the numerous Asian businesses.


title: American Jews

text: American Bukharan Jews speak Bukhori, a dialect of Tajik Persian. They publish their own newspapers such as the "Bukharian Times" and a large portion live in Queens, New York. Forest Hills in the New York City borough of Queens is home to 108th Street, which is called by some "Bukharian Broadway", a reference to the many stores and restaurants found on and around the street that have Bukharian influences. Many Bukharians are also represented in parts of Arizona, Miami, Florida, and areas of Southern California such as San Diego.


title: American Jews

text: There is a sizeable Mountain Jewish population in Brooklyn, New York that speaks Judeo-Tat (Juhuri), a dialect of Persian.


title: American Jews

text: Classical Hebrew is the language of most Jewish religious literature, such as the Tanakh (Bible) and Siddur (prayerbook). Modern Hebrew is also the primary official language of the modern State of Israel, which further encourages many to learn it as a second language. Some recent Israeli immigrants to America speak Hebrew as their primary language.


title: American Jews

text: There are a diversity of Hispanic Jews living in America. The oldest community is that of the Sephardi Jews of New Netherland. Their ancestors had fled Spain or Portugal during the Inquisition for the Netherlands, and then came to New Netherland. Though there is dispute over whether they should be considered Hispanic. Some Hispanic Jews, particularly in Miami and Los Angeles, immigrated from Latin America. The largest groups are those that fled Cuba after the communist revolution (known as Jewbans), Argentine Jews, and more recently, Venezuelan Jews. Argentina is the Latin American country with the largest Jewish population. There are a large number of synagogues in the Miami area that give services in Spanish. The last Hispanic Jewish community would be those that recently came from Portugal or Spain, after Spain and Portugal granted citizenship to the descendants of Jews who fled during the Inquisition. All the above listed Hispanic Jewish groups speak either Spanish or Ladino.


title: American Jews

text: Although American Jews have contributed greatly to American arts in general, there still remains a distinctly Jewish American literature. Jewish American literature often explores the experience of being a Jew in America, and the conflicting pulls of secular society and history.


title: American Jews

text: Yiddish theater was very well attended, and provided a training ground for performers and producers who moved to Hollywood in the 1920s. Many of the early Hollywood moguls and pioneers were Jewish. They played roles in the development of radio and television networks, typified by William S. Paley who ran CBS. Stephen J. Whitfield states that "The Sarnoff family was long dominant at NBC."


title: American Jews

text: Many individual Jews have made significant contributions to American popular culture. There have been many Jewish American actors and performers, ranging from early 1900s actors, to classic Hollywood film stars, and culminating in many currently known actors. The field of American comedy includes many Jews. The legacy also includes songwriters and authors, for example the author of the song "Viva Las Vegas" Doc Pomus, or "Billy the Kid" composer Aaron Copland. Many Jews have been at the forefront of women's issues.


title: American Jews

text: There were 110 Jewish players in Major League Baseball between 1870 and 1881. The first generation of Jewish Americans who immigrated during the 1880–1924 peak period were not interested in baseball, and in some cases tried to prevent their children from watching or participating in baseball-related activities. Most were focused on making sure they and their children took advantage of education and employment opportunities. Despite the efforts of parents, Jewish children became interested in baseball quickly since it was already embedded in the broader American culture. The second generation of immigrants saw baseball as a means to celebrate American culture without abandoning their broader religious community. After 1924, many Yiddish newspapers began covering baseball, which they had not done previously.