Is your last name code for ‘Jewish’?

(JTA) — Ira Sheskin is one of the most prominent demographers of American Jews. A professor at the University of Miami, Sheskin helps Jewish communities across the country carry out complicated population surveys. He sometimes works for businesses, too, and several years ago, a major kosher poultry company turned to him with a quandary.

The company had convinced Publix Super Markets to stock its kosher chicken products, but not in every store. In Birmingham, Alabama, the company had to pick just one of Publix’s several local branches. But how to pick the one closest to the largest number of Jews?

The way to obtain the most accurate results would be through making phone calls or even sending letters to a very large number of people across Greater Birmingham, asking if they are Jewish as part of a randomized survey. But it would be too expensive. 

Instead, Sheskin opted for a trick that Jewish demographers have been relying on for generations: checking the phone book for distinctive Jewish names. 

Researchers have a list of 29 last names that are so common among Jews in the United States, and so uncommon in the rest of the population, that they can be used to draw demographic conclusions. 

Not everyone with one of these last names is Jewish, and not even close to a majority of Jews — have one of them. An obvious issue is that the list consists of entirely Ashkenazi surnames, and would do poorly for identifying, for example, Persian, Israeli, or Russian Jews in the United States, which is a growing concern as American Jewry becomes increasingly diverse. But there’s still enough of a pattern to extrapolate total Jewish population estimates in most places using these names,

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