Judaism Today

How many Jews are there?

About 14.8 million people were Jewish in 2020, Pew Research Center estimates, or 0.2 percent of the world's population.¹ Their number grew 6 percent from 2010, while the rest of the world's population grew about twice as fast. Jews have not returned to the 16.6 million alive in 1939, before the Holocaust.² In 2020, 36 percent of Jews were 50 or older, tied with Buddhists for the oldest age profile of the seven groups Pew compared.¹

The demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimated 15,736,800 Jews on January 1, 2024, up 78,800 in a year. Nearly all the growth came in Israel, while in most other countries the number of Jews held steady or fell slightly.³

Why do the counts differ?

Counts differ because sources define Jewishness differently: some measure religion, some ethnicity, and some a mix of the two.² For consistency with other religions, Pew generally counts, when possible, people who give Judaism as their religion in censuses and surveys. In Israel it uses the Ministry of Interior's register, which counts only children of Jewish mothers and people with formal conversions.²

So the count depends on the definition. Pew's religious count for the United States in 2020 was 5.7 million. Its 2020 survey of Jewish Americans also counted Jews who have no religion but consider themselves Jewish by ancestry, culture, or family, and reached 7.5 million, including 1.8 million children.²⁴

DellaPergola's core Jewish population counts everyone who identifies as Jewish and with no other religion, whether by religion or not. Wider circles add people with a Jewish parent and members of Jewish households. The widest covers everyone eligible to immigrate under Israel's Law of Return: Jews, their children and grandchildren, and their spouses.³ He describes the permanently provisional nature of Jewish population estimates³.³

Where do Jews live?

In 2020, 46 percent of Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa, almost all in Israel, and 41 percent in North America, mainly the United States.² From 2010 to 2020 Israel's Jewish population grew by over a million, while that of the United States grew by about 30,000. Israel, the only country with a Jewish majority, was 77 percent Jewish in 2020 by Pew's count.² Europe's Jews fell 8 percent, to 1.3 million.²

Pew's shares for countries other than Israel and the United States are rounded to a tenth of a percent, so the rows marked "calculated" are rough.⁵²³

Country	Pew Research Center, 2020	DellaPergola, core count, 2024
Israel	about 6.8 million	7,153,000
United States	about 5.7 million by religion; 7.5 million by Pew's broader definition	6,300,000
France	about 460,000 (calculated)	438,500
Canada	about 340,000 (calculated)	400,000
United Kingdom	about 270,000 (calculated)	313,000

What do the projections say?

A Pew Research Center report of April 2015 extended the trends of the time from 2010 to 2050. It projected that Jews would grow 16 percent, from a little under 14 million to 16.1 million, and slip from 0.20 to 0.17 percent of the world. Jewish fertility, 2.3 children per woman, was above the replacement level, but the report expected a net loss of about 300,000 people through religious switching.⁶ These projections are more than a decade old; Pew's 2020 count above is more recent.

How is Jewish life organized?

Each movement has its own institutions. Membership figures below are the organizations' own, from their websites in October 2026.

• Orthodox. The Orthodox Union, founded in 1898, supports a network of synagogues and runs a kosher certification service.⁷ Haredi communities, which Pew notes are commonly called ultra-Orthodox, are generally highly observant.⁸ The Israel Democracy Institute describes Israel's traditional Haredi society as led by its Gdolim (great sages), senior rabbis whose rulings members follow.⁹
• Chabad, also called Lubavitch, is a Hasidic group known for outreach to less observant Jews.¹⁰ In Pew's 2020 survey, 17 percent of US Jews took part in Chabad activities often or sometimes.⁴
• Conservative. The Rabbinical Assembly has about 1,700 members, and its Committee on Jewish Law and Standards sets the movement's halakhic policy.¹¹¹²
• Reform. The Central Conference of American Rabbis says its 2,100 rabbis serve more than 1.5 million Reform Jews.¹³
• Reconstructionist. Reconstructing Judaism, the movement's organization, carries on Mordecai Kaplan's idea of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization.¹⁴

In Israel, religion and state meet in family law. Israel has no civil marriage, and Jewish weddings there must be approved by Orthodox rabbis. In Pew's survey of 2014 and 2015, most secular Israeli Jews favored letting Reform and Conservative rabbis perform weddings; Haredi Jews strongly opposed it.⁸

What questions are Jews debating?

This section covers three topics where Jewish communities and organizations differ, who is Jewish, Zionism and Israel, and religion and the state in Israel, and a fourth, hostility toward Jews, where it gives counts.^15161718

Who is Jewish. The Orthodox Union holds that by Jewish law a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother or a convert. Its 2014 glossary entry reports that Reform and Conservative leaders say conversions by their rabbis have not been recognized by Israeli authorities.¹⁵ In March 2021 the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative rabbinate, reported that Israel's High Court had ruled Conservative and Reform conversions performed in Israel valid for the purposes of the Law of Return.¹⁹ DellaPergola writes that Israel's Central Rabbinate rejected proposals for a unified conversion procedure that all denominations would accept.³

In 1983 the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbis' body in North America, presumed a child of one Jewish parent, mother or father, to be Jewish. The presumption is established by raising the child as a Jew, through public acts of Jewish identification. The Conservative Rabbinical Assembly reaffirmed descent through the mother in 1986.²⁰²¹

Zionism and Israel. Zionism is the movement whose goal, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes it, was the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.²² Its supporters make their case in founding documents. The Basle Program of 1897 sought a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.²³

Israel's Declaration of Independence of 1948 calls the land of Israel the birthplace of the Jewish people. It cites the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe as one demonstration of the urgency of re-establishing a Jewish state. It says the state will be open to Jewish immigration and ensure equal rights for all inhabitants regardless of religion, race, or sex.²⁴

Swartz writes that a religious Zionist movement held that Jewish life, including halakhah, could be lived most fully in the Land of Israel, and the Orthodox Union says it supports Religious Zionist advocacy programs.²⁵⁷

Reform rabbis declared in 1885, We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community¹⁶. They reversed that stand in 1937, and in 1997 affirmed the State of Israel while urging full civil, human, and religious rights for all its citizens.¹⁶

The Israel Democracy Institute reports that some Haredi groups reject Zionism on religious grounds, holding that the Jewish people remain in exile, while others work within the state while opposing its ideology.⁹

Jewish Voice for Peace, an advocacy group, says it opposes Zionism because Zionism is counter to its vision of justice, equality, and freedom for all people.²⁶ In Pew's 2020 survey, Orthodox Jews were the most attached to Israel. Among Jews under 30, 48 percent were very or somewhat emotionally attached, against two-thirds of those 65 and older.⁴

In February 2024, during the Israel-Hamas war, Pew asked US Jews about Israel's conduct. Among Jews under 35, 52 percent called it acceptable and 42 percent unacceptable; among those 50 and older, 68 percent called it acceptable. About eight in ten or more in every age group, and 89 percent overall, called Israel's reasons for fighting valid.²⁷

Religion and the state in Israel. As of January 21, 2026, the date of the Israel Democracy Institute's explainer, the law allowing yeshiva students, men in full-time Torah study, to defer military service had expired in June 2023. In June 2024 Israel's High Court ruled unanimously that the state must draft them, and in November 2025 it ordered an effective enforcement policy. A contempt motion was filed on January 6, 2026.¹⁷ The Israel Democracy Institute's explainer of July 1, 2026 says a bill freezing, for three months, arrests and enforcement proceedings against draft-eligible yeshiva students who failed to report became law on July 14, 2026, and that on July 15, 2026 the Supreme Court issued a temporary order preventing it from coming into effect pending a further decision.²⁸

The Israel Democracy Institute describes traditional Haredi leaders as holding that Torah study itself protects the Jewish people, and as opposing the draft as a threat to the community's separation from secular life.⁹ The January 2026 explainer reports that the petitioners argue that exemptions harm equality and security in wartime, and that the government has argued for gradual change.¹⁷

Hostility toward Jews. Pew Research Center's report for 2023, published in 2026, found that Jews were harassed by governments or social groups in 98 of the 198 countries and territories it studied.²⁹ Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident in the year, whether physical or nonphysical.²⁹ The figure shows how many countries, not how severe the harassment was or how many incidents occurred.²⁹

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an advocacy group, counted 6,274 incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism in the United States in 2025. That was down a third from 2024 but its third-highest total since 1979.³⁰ Jewish Insider reported that the FBI recorded 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024, the most since it began collecting this data in 1991. It added that the FBI said some of the rise could be due to better data collection.³¹ In a 2023 survey in 13 European Union countries, 34 percent of Jews avoided Jewish events or sites because they felt unsafe. Eighteen percent thought their government combats antisemitism effectively.¹⁸