A county-by-county map of American Jews in 2024, and of how each community's estimate moved between the 2012 and 2023 Year Books.
Pick Counties, 2024 or Community growth, 2012 to 2023 above the map. Spike height follows the square root of each figure, which keeps small places visible, and the dashed spikes in the lower right give the scale. Hover over any spike to see its numbers.
Use the + and − buttons, pinch, or hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) while you scroll. Double-click to zoom in on a spot, then drag to move around or use the small map in the corner. Spikes stay the same size as the ground grows, so the scale still holds, and city names appear in capitals, the largest first, so DuPage and McHenry show up next to Chicago. Reset view brings back the whole country.
In the county view, Shade the counties by colors every county by one measure, such as the 2024 vote or the share of adults with a college degree, and the spikes turn gray so they stand out. The chart under the map compares where American Jews live with where all Americans live on that measure. Hover over a county for its figure, or over a row of the chart to pick out those counties on the map. Further down, the same spikes leave their line and gather into groups by the measure, such as the counties Harris won and those Trump won, and Replay runs it again.
Gains rise above the surface and declines hang below it, colored by their rate of change (the key sits under the map). Change in people and Percent change switch what the height measures, and the percent view only draws communities that had at least 1,000 Jews in 2012. Attenuate measures each change against the growth of the people around it: the community's state, all Americans, or all American Jews.
Under the map, every spike stands in a single row sorted by size, each labeled with its name and figure. Scroll sideways, use the jump buttons, or click the bar underneath to move along it. Hovering over a spike in the row lights it up on the map, and clicking a spike on the map scrolls the row to it.
In the twenty-county section, click a county to chart its Jewish residents (blue) against all its residents (orange), both as percent change from 2011, and hover over the chart for any year's values. Clicking a row in the dot chart opens that county too. To sort either table, click a column heading. The communities that appear in only one Year Book edition are in the fold-out under the community table.
Most of the movement between two editions comes from new local studies and new methods. So a spike shows how the estimate moved, and a tall one usually marks a community that was restudied. Across all counties, the 2011 and 2024 county files differ by 962,743 Jews (6,736,097 against 7,698,840), and counties whose 2024 figure rests on a new local study account for 21 percent of that difference. The 830 counties with no local study on record account for half of it, while their residents grew 9.4 percent.
The switch to the county method moved state totals all by itself between the 2023 Year Book and the 2024 file. New York fell 123,070, Pennsylvania 85,810 and New Jersey 46,950, while Florida gained 81,430, North Carolina 50,860 and Texas 45,105. Nationally the 2024 file sits 238,240 above the 2023 Year Book, and its authors put that rise down to the method rather than to growth.
Joshua Comenetz and Ira M. Sheskin, Jewish Population Estimates and Demographics by Congressional District, County and State (2024), Berman Jewish DataBank. Their file gives an estimated Jewish population for 1,545 counties, adding up to 7,698,840 full-year residents. Each spike stands at its county's centroid on an oblique view of the Albers projection, with Alaska and Hawaii inset. City and neighborhood names on the zoomed map come from GeoNames' list of places with at least 15,000 people, and larger places get their names first.
Appendix A of the American Jewish Year Book population chapters for 2012 (Sheskin and Dashefsky, from the Data Bank's Excel edition) and 2023, each listing every community with 100 or more Jews. To make the two lists comparable, we rolled sub-areas up to their federation and counted cross-state federations once. Communities whose definition changed between editions were merged: Bridgeport and Westport-Weston-Wilton-Norwalk with Upper Fairfield County, Albany and its neighbors with Northeastern New York, Santa Cruz, Napa and Solano with the Bay Area, and the North Shore with Greater Boston. We also dropped the residual "Other Places" lines. The 452 matched communities hold 6,710,955 of the 6,721,680 Jews in the 2012 chapter and 7,422,075 of the 7,460,600 in 2023. Thirty-nine communities appear in only one edition, so they're listed under the table and left off the map. Each community stands at its principal city, or at the county centroid when the Year Book names only a county.
Attenuating divides each community's growth by the growth of a baseline. You can pick the residents of the community's own state (Census estimates for 2012 and 2023), all Americans (up 7.3 percent, from 313.9 to 336.8 million) or all American Jews (up 11.0 percent, from 6,721,680 to 7,460,600 in the Year Book). A community that grew exactly at that pace sits at zero. In people, the figure counts the Jews a community holds above or below what keeping pace would have given it, so a community carried unchanged reads as behind the pace wherever its baseline grew. The state is the finest baseline available, since the Year Book's areas don't follow Census geography.
Spike color runs in eight steps: red (down 25 percent or more), orange, yellow, gray (within 2.5 percent of no change), light blue, blue, deep blue and green (up 60 percent or more). With a baseline on, read the steps against the pace.
Each layer sorts every county into a few classes and adds up two groups in each class: American Jews, from Comenetz and Sheskin's 2024 county estimates, and all Americans, from the Census Bureau's 2019 county population estimates. A county counts whole, so the Jews of a county Harris won may live in its Trump-voting towns, and the reverse. The layers come from different years, and none of them describes Jews themselves.
The 2024 vote is the margin between Harris and Trump as a share of their combined vote. County results come from Tony McGovern's compilation on GitHub, gathered from Fox News's results pages, except Connecticut, taken from Wikipedia's table for its eight historical counties, and Alaska, which reports by legislative district, taken from Wikipedia's borough estimates built from precinct results.
Violent crime is the rate reported to the FBI per 100,000 residents, the average of 2014 and 2016, as published in County Health Rankings 2021 (its 2022 edition uses the same years). 193 counties have no figure, and they hold 66,665 Jews.
City to rural follows the National Center for Health Statistics classes for 2023, taken from the rurality package for R: big-city core and big-city suburbs are the large central and large fringe counties of metro areas of a million or more, mid-size metro means 250,000 to 999,999, small metro under 250,000, small town a micropolitan county, and rural everything else. The 2023 file uses Connecticut's new planning regions, so its eight historical counties take the class of their metro areas under the same rules.
Income, college degrees and median age come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2015 to 2019 (through the OpenIntro usdata package), the latest county set that still uses Connecticut's historical counties. Housing cost is what MIT's Living Wage Calculator budgets for one adult with no children in 2020, shown per month, and it rests on HUD's fair market rents, which are set for whole metro areas. Population growth compares the Census Bureau's estimates for 2010 and 2019.
The Jewish counts come from two county files. One is Comenetz's 2011 map, built from the Year Book and the federation studies of the time, with UJA-Federation's 2011 study for the New York counties. The other is the 2024 file by Comenetz and Sheskin. A straight line joins the two counts, since nothing is known about the years between them.
Counts of all residents come from the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the Census Bureau's annual estimates for 2011 to 2019, and its 2025 estimate, drawn dashed. Any step in the line at 2020 comes from the census correcting the estimates before it. The 2024 figure in the table carries the 2020 census four fifths of the way to the 2025 estimate. Where a community was restudied between the two dates, the change measures the new study as much as any movement of people.
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© 2026 Ḥeshbon, Center on Data and Jewish Life. Research, writing and charts by Gavriel Brown.