This paper discusses support for, and opposition to, racial classification of European immigrants among high-level researchers at both the United States Immigration Commission of 1907–11 (the Dillingham Commission) and the Census Bureau during those same years. A critical distinction must be...

There is much interest in explaining the persistent ethnic gaps in education among Israeli Jews; specifically, the much lower attainments of those from Asian and African countries compared to the rest - Mizrahim vs. Ashkenazim, respectively. Some explanations (especially older ones) have...

One part of this paper is methodological, or bibliographical in nature; I argue that a body of evidence that scholars have dismissed for a century as useless may in fact be very valuable. The evidence to which I refer is data on Jewish literacy found in the 1897 Census of the Russian Empire. A...

This working paper directs to an historical puzzle, the rapid upward mobility of the east-European Jews who came to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Theoretically important issues are inherent in the explanations for Jewish upward mobility, and in any case, this particular historical...

We have constructed some preliminary comparisons involving present-day immigrants and natives, as well as their children, based on the 1990 Census. In particular we are interested in whether the prognosis for the second generation is as grim as recent discussions of "second generation decline"...

Assimilation of today's immigrants is one topic of current debate on immigration. Some observers assert that recent immigrants are unable to assimilate into U.S. society as easily as past immigrants were able to. Others counter that the pressures against assimilation today are not strong. In...

If a child has a white mother and a black father, then the child is racially.... what? How the next Census, to be held in the year 2000, should handle the multiracial' child will be decided by October. Moreover, every government agency counts races in roughly the same way, and it is the...

This paper describes a small opposition group that functioned during 1930-33 on the left fringes of Ben Gurion's Mapai party in Palestine. Mapai dominated Jewish Palestine's politics, and later the politics of the young State of Israel; it lives on today in Israel's Labor Party. The opposition...

While there have been very few national surveys of American Jews, two that we do have are from the same period, 2000–01. They were conducted by different researchers using different sampling methods. Known as the NJPS and the AJIS, these surveys are now available as public-use datasets, but...

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) surveys of Jewish opinion are unique both in being conducted annually and in the subject matter covered. This paper assesses the quality of these samples. I first summarize my earlier findings on the implications of limiting a sample to respondents who...