Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Of Brandeis, Mr. Spock and 10 Other Facts About Jewish Massachusetts

1) Massachusetts has a Jewish population of roughly 278,000, accounting for 4.2% of the state population (which is twice the national average), and 4.1% of the total Jewish population in the United States.

2) Solomon Franco, a merchant who arrived from Holland in 1649, is Boston’s first recorded Jewish resident. However, he was not allowed to settle there. Instead, the Puritans at the General Court paid him off to return to Holland.

3) The Commonwealth, to which Massachusetts belonged, granted full citizenship rights to Jews in 1821.

4) Boston saw an influx of Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe from the middle of the 19th century onwards.

Our Inspiration: Mary Antin (1881 — 1949) wrote “The Promised Land,” depicting her emigration from Belarus to Boston. Image by Wikimedia Commons

5) The proportion of Jewish students at Harvard College rose drastically between 1900 and 1922 — from 7 to 21 percent. As a consequence, a committee to study the university’s “Jewish problem” was appointed. It rejected a quota but recommended an admissions policy that accepted top-ranking students from around the nation to replace the competitive entrance exam.

6) At the age of 10, Mary Antin (1881 — 1949) emigrated to Boston with her parents from today’s Belarus. Her autobiography, published in 1912, might sound familiar to readers of this section: “The Promised Land.”

7) Actor Leonard Nimoy grew up in the West End of Boston, where he was born to Yiddish-speaking immigrants parents from Ukraine in 1931.

8) Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, a city in Essex County with a long history of immigration. Bernstein’s parents came from today’s Ukraine. He studied music at Harvard.

9) Brandeis University in Waltham is the country’s only Jewish-sponsored university that is also nonsectarian. It opened in 1948, and is named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court, who lived from 1856 to 1941. Today, 48% of the undergraduate student population, and 20% of graduate students are Jewish, according to Hillel International.

10) Younger Jewish show biz talent from Massachusetts includes Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, both of whom were born in Newton and actress Jenny Slate, who was born in Milton.

11) Former New York City major Michael Bloomberg hails from Boston, where he was born in 1942. His native city has yet to be ruled by a Jewish mayor.

12) The vast majority (251,000) of Massachusetts’ Jews live in the Boston metropolitan area, where they account for 5.4% of the population.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.