Print and share interesting facts from recent JPR research with your family, friends and colleagues, and have a wonderful holiday.
Omri Gal Kornblum
This year, as we light the candles for each of the eight nights of Chanukah, let’s explore the vibrant and diverse world of contemporary Jewish life. To do so, we’ve chosen eight facts about the demography, religiosity and attitudes of Jews today, all from recent JPR research – one for each holiday night. To help you share these with your family and friends, we’ve prepared this printable factsheet you can use at a candle-lighting, bring to the dinner table, or, if you’re in education, discuss with your students.
1. 15.8 million Jews live across the world today. 85% of them live in Israel or the US.
According to the latest available figures, close to sixteen million people around the world self-identify as Jews today, making up just under 0.2% of the population of the world. More than seven million Jews live in Israel; over six million reside in the US; and Europe is home to over 1.3 million, with France (about 440,000) and the UK (just over 310,000) leading the list there. Other countries with a significant Jewish community are Canada (400,000), Argentina (170,000), Russia (123,000), Australia (117,000), and South Africa just under 50,000). If we expand our definition of who is Jewish to include everyone with at least one Jewish parent and all of their non-Jewish household members (spouses, children) to create what is known as the ‘enlarged’ Jewish population, the total number climbs to 21,775,000 worldwide.
2. Seven in ten Jews in the UK attend at least one candle-lighting during Chanukah.
71% of adult Jews in the UK attend at least one candle-lighting ceremony during Chanukah, either at home or elsewhere, which is about the same proportion of British Jews who attend a Passover seder every year. This level of participation makes Chanukah one of the most significant weeks on the Jewish calendar. However, while four in five Jews who are married to someone Jewish attend a candle-lighting ceremony each year, only 36% of Jews who are married to a non-Jewish person say they do this – less than the 45% of intermarried Jews who say they have a Christmas tree at home during that holiday.
3. Nearly 70% of secular Jews in the US and almost 50% in Europe are married to non-Jews.
Intermarriage is a key concern of Jewish leaders and policymakers worldwide: 26% of all married Jews around the world are intermarried, but there is a huge distinction between the situation in Israel (5%) and the Diaspora (42%). In Europe and the US, intermarriage is most prevalent among Jews identifying as secular or ‘Just Jewish’, although the situation in the American Jewish community – often characterised as having particularly high levels of intermarriage at around 45% – is actual fairly average when examined in the context of the Jewish Diaspora as a whole. The prevalence is notably higher in former communist European countries and in Scandinavian ones, and lower in certain parts of Western Europe – the UK, France and Belgium.
4. Nearly three in ten British Jews say they have a Christmas tree at home at least ‘some years’.
28% of adult Jews in the UK say they have a Christmas tree at home either ‘some years’, ‘most years’ or ‘every year’ – but the results vary significantly across the community. While almost no Orthodox Jews report having a Christmas tree at home, well over half of ‘non-practising’ Jews say they have one. Jews who describe themselves as ‘Reform/Progressive’ are almost four times as likely to have a Christmas tree as those who describe themselves as ‘Traditional.’ Yet some Jews adopt a ‘both/and’ position: almost a quarter of all Jews in the UK both light Chanukah candles and have a Christmas tree in their house at least some years.
5. Only one in three Jews in Europe say ‘believing in God’ is essential to their Jewish identity.
Many Jews, it seems, are quite comfortable being Jewish without believing in God. Even though just a third of European Jews say ‘believing in God’ is ‘very important’ to their Jewishness, 74% of them attend a Passover seder most or all years, and nearly half light candles most Friday nights. In the UK, only a third of Jews say they believe in God, as described in the Bible. Still, two out of three (65%) Jews who don’t believe in God attend synagogue, at least on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and ‘non-believers’ make up more than half (56%) of paid-up synagogue members. Similarly, only 34% of British Jews say ‘observing at least some aspects of Shabbat’ is ‘very important’ to their Jewishness, yet at the same time, most Jews in the UK observe Shabbat rituals at least occasionally.
6. Four times as much research on European Jewish life is being produced today than in the 1990s.
According to a recent JPR study undertaken for the European Commission, over four times as many research reports on contemporary Jewish life were conducted between 2010-2020 than in 1990-2000 (2428 research items compared to 562). The good news is that this trend appears to be continuing into the third decade of the 21st Century, so we will likely see the record from the previous decade smashed again. The not-so-good news is that the field of Contemporary Jewish Studies in Europe has an increasingly disproportionate focus on antisemitism and the Holocaust, and a comparative lack of focus on topics such as Jewish education, culture, identity and demography. But the great news is that all this research is available at our European Jewish Research Archive.
7. Tough year? You’re not alone: anxiety levels for Jews in 2024 were the highest we’ve recorded.
For over a decade, the Office for National Statistics has been assessing the mental wellbeing of the country’s population using a module of survey questions that includes a measure of anxiety. Based on their methods, JPR started replicating their approach during the Covid-19 pandemic and has done so regularly ever since. In general, we have found that anxiety levels among British Jews have been consistently higher than the national average in recent years. Still, the anxiety measure we recorded for Jews in 2024 was the highest we have seen so far: 3.8 on a scale of 0 (low anxiety) to 10 (high). Irrespective of the specifics of our individual lives, it has not been an easy year collectively. So, if you are feeling more anxious than usual this year, know at least that you are far from being alone.
8. The more attached to a Jewish community we feel, the happier we tend to be.
While correlation isn’t causation, there is a considerable amount of sociological literature on the relationship between being embedded in strong social networks and people’s mental wellbeing, which strongly suggests that community involvement is good for us. In our latest research on British Jewish identity, we found that Jews who don’t feel attached to a local Jewish community report their levels of happiness and satisfaction are about 20% lower than those who report feeling strongly attached. Given the significant mental health crisis going on today that particularly affects young people, community frameworks could play a more deliberate role in helping to offset some of these challenges and become more significant mechanisms to help people become part of supportive communal networks.
Happy Chanukah from JPR
Omri Gal Kornblum
Director of Communications
Omri Gal Kornblum
Director of Communications
Omri holds a Master’s degree in Political Communication and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and International Relations, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He...
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