Arab Americans are Americans of Arab ancestry. Arab Americans trace ancestry to any of the various waves of immigrants from the Arab world. In the United States census, Arabs are a part of the "White" race group because the definition of "White" as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa".
Mizrahi Jews, also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) or Mizrachi (מִזְרָחִי) and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach, are terms used in Israeli discourse to refer to a grouping of Jewish communities that lived in the Muslim world. Mizrahi is a political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew.
Jewish ethnic divisions refer to many distinctive communities within the world's Jewish population. Although considered a self-identifying ethnicity, there are distinct ethnic subdivisions among Jews, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, mixing with local communities, and subsequent independent evolutions.
Arab Jews is a term for Jews living in or originating from the Arab world. Many left or were expelled from Arab countries in the decades following the founding of Israel in 1948, and took up residence in Israel, Western Europe, the United States and Latin America. The term is controversial and politically contested in Israel, where the term "Mizrahi Jews" was adopted by the early state instead. However, some anti-Zionist Jews of Arab origin actively elect to call themselves Arab Jews.
Persian Jews or Iranian Jews constitute one of the oldest communities of the Jewish diaspora. Dating back to the biblical era, they originate from the Jews who relocated to Iran during the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Books of the Hebrew Bible bring together an extensive narrative shedding light on contemporary Jewish life experiences in ancient Persia; there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Iran since at least the time of Cyrus the Great, who led the Persian army's conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and subsequently freed the Judahites from the Babylonian captivity.
New York City is a large and ethnically diverse metropolis. It is the largest city in the United States with a long history of international immigration. The New York region continues to be by far the leading metropolitan gateway for legal immigrants admitted into the United States. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban area. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York City is one of the world's most populous megacities.
Arab Canadians come from all of the countries of the Arab world. According to the 2021 Census, there were 690,000 Canadians, or 1.9%, who claimed Arab ancestry. According to the 2011 census there were 380,620 Canadians who claimed full or partial ancestry from an Arabic-speaking country. The large majority of the Canadians of Arab origin population live in either Ontario or Quebec.
Syrian Jews are Jews who live in the region of the modern state of Syria, and their descendants born outside Syria. Syrian Jews derive their origin from two groups: from the Jews who inhabited the region of today's Syria from ancient times, and sometimes classified as Mizrahi Jews ; and from the Sephardi Jews who fled to Syria after the Alhambra Decree forced the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Syrian Americans are Americans of Syrian descent or background. The first significant wave of Syrian immigrants to arrive in the United States began in the 1880s. Many of the earliest Syrian Americans settled in New York City, Boston, and Detroit. Immigration from Syria to the United States suffered a long hiatus after the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration. More than 40 years later, the Immigration Act of 1965, abolished the quotas and immigration from Syria to the United States saw a surge. An estimated 64,600 Syrians immigrated to the United States between 1961 and 2000.
Since its founding in 1625 by Dutch traders as New Amsterdam, New York City has been a major destination for immigrants of many nationalities who have formed ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods dominated by one ethnicity. Freed African American slaves also moved to New York City in the Great Migration and the later Second Great Migration and formed ethnic enclaves. These neighborhoods are set apart from the main city by differences such as food, goods for sale, or even language. Ethnic enclaves provide inhabitants security in work and social opportunities, but limit economic opportunities, do not encourage the development of English speaking, and keep immigrants in their own culture.
The Arab world consists of 22 states. As of 2021, the combined population of all the Arab states was around 475 million people.
Musta'arabi Jews were the Arabic-speaking Jews, largely Mizrahi Jews and Maghrebi Jews, who lived in the Middle East and North Africa prior to the arrival and integration of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Following their expulsion, Sephardi Jewish exiles moved into the Middle East and North Africa, and settled among the Musta'arabi.
Zev Chafets is an American-Israeli author and columnist.
Israeli Jews or Jewish Israelis comprise Israel's largest ethnic and religious community. The core of their demographic consists of those with a Jewish identity and their descendants, including ethnic Jews and religious Jews alike. Approximately 99% of the global Israeli Jewish population resides in Israel; yerida is uncommon and is offset exponentially by aliyah, but those who do emigrate from the country typically relocate to the Western world. As such, the Israeli diaspora is closely tied to the broader Jewish diaspora.
Religion in Syria refers to the range of religions practiced by the citizens of Syria. Historically, the region has been a mosaic of diverse faiths with a range of different sects within each of these religious communities.
Ethnic groups in the Middle East are ethnolinguistic groupings in the "transcontinental" region that is commonly a geopolitical term designating the intercontinental region comprising West Asia without the South Caucasus, and also comprising Egypt in North Africa. The Middle East has historically been a crossroad of different cultures and languages. Since the 1960s, the changes in political and economic factors have significantly altered the ethnic composition of groups in the region. While some ethnic groups have been present in the region for millennia, others have arrived fairly recently through immigration. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Egyptians, Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis but there are dozens of other ethnic groups that have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of members.
Jews comprise approximately 10% of New York City's population, making the Jewish community the largest in the world outside of Israel. As of 2020, over 960,000 Jews lived in the five boroughs of New York City, and over 1.9 million Jews lived in the New York metropolitan area, approximately 25% of the American Jewish population.
The Syrian Jewish communities of the United States are a collection of communities of Syrian Jews, mostly founded at the beginning of the 20th century. The largest are in Brooklyn, Deal, New Jersey and Miami. In 2007, the population of the New York and New Jersey communities was estimated at 90,000.
Little Syria was a diverse neighborhood that existed in the New York City borough of Manhattan from the late 1880s until the 1940s. The name for the neighborhood came from the Arabic-speaking population who emigrated from Ottoman Syria, an area which today includes the nations of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Also called the Syrian Quarter, or Syrian Colony in local newspapers it encompassed a few blocks reaching from Washington Street in Battery Park to above Rector Street. This neighborhood became the center of New York's first community of Arabic-speaking immigrants. In spite of this name the neighborhood was never exclusively Syrian or Arab, as there were also many Irish, German, Slavic, and Scandinavian immigrant families present.
American Jewish cuisine comprises the food, cooking, and dining customs associated with American Jews. It was heavily influenced by the cuisine of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century. It was further developed in unique ways by the immigrants and their descendants, especially in New York City and other large metropolitan areas of the northeastern U.S.
