Counting the Jewish population in the U.S. and uncovering previously unknown Jewish communities has become an annual project for Arnold Dashefsky, his graduate students, and his colleagues. Dashefsky, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, and his colleague Ira Sheskin, a human geographer at the University of Miami, recently found that there are about 6.6 million Jews in the U.S., a figure 20 percent higher than the one reported in a 2000 National Jewish Population Survey.

The exact figure is hard to establish – defining who is a Jew is one elusive feature of a population count – but Dashefsky and Sheskin have been refining their project for five years. Each year, they are discovering new, previously unreported Jewish communities.“People who follow this issue are intrigued by it,” says Dashefsky, a sociologist who is director of the North American Jewish Data Bank, which is housed at UConn.

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