Where to now?
(Part 2 in the saga)
So, step #0 is to decide where to go. The top three Jewish communities in the US are:
- New York area
- Los Angeles area
- Miami/Fort Lauderdale
I'm not sure how fond I am of New York. I was talking to a local friend, who said that he'd dated girls from L.A. and that they'd seemed too materialistic. And housing in L.A. is horrendously expensive.
I've been trying to find some corroborating evidence for the list above. The biggest online Jewish dating site is JDate, but it doesn't show number of hits for any searches. Frumster does, but it's focused mainly on Orthodox singles. But I did a search anyway, for women 22–29, and found 977 in NY and 96 in CA.
That's strange, though. NY should have ~3× the population or so. (Yes, I know this link switches the order of the list above; the list comes from a different, more recent source I cannot find.) But Frumster's got an order of magnitude.
Perhaps an answer can be found in the National Jewish Population Survey:
While in general the northeast has 80% more than the West, for the Orthodox it's 420%. But that still doesn't really explain the order of magnitude difference. Is that a good sign, that more people are online? Is that a good sign, that the 22–29 year olds are more proportionally in NY than older adults? Is that a bad sign, that New Yorkers need the internet to find dates where the people in California do without? I don't really know.
I'd like to post a question of Jewish Modern Orthodox professional singles as to where they live and why, and how the community is working for them. But I haven't any idea where to post such a query.
And meanwhile, the research goes on.
Comments
The problem with a survey like the one in the graphic you posted is that it's just too broad. The Jewish population in the West is disproportionately concentrated in Los Angelese, for example. It's pretty unusual to find a large Jewish community anywhere else in Calfornia, Oregon, or Washington. On the other hand, in the Northeast Jews are spread all over -- Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Jersey, Connecticut, and so on. If you're in a large Jewish community in LA or Miami, it doesn't really matter too much if there aren't many Jews in the surrounding thousand miles.
One interesting experiment might be to go visit each area for a week or so, perhaps getting in touch with a local synagogue or two first so you could stop by some events and get to meet some people. If you find a large community where you think you'd be comfortable, maybe you wouldn't need to spend additional time reading over surveys....
Posted by: Eric Albert | November 1, 2004 10:11 PM
I would recommend the east coast. At least it's all within driving distance from one major city to another. What's the point of isolating yourself within one city far away from any others?
Posted by: Shira | November 2, 2004 1:32 AM
I'd recommend Baltimore or Washington, DC over Florida or LA. As Shira said, it's close to the all the cities on the East Coast--NY, NJ, Philly, Boston, Atlanta, and Florida are all do-able from there. Even Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Chicago are reasonable weekends. But going to outliers such as Florida or LA would limit your options. I was just in Silver Spring--it's a beautiful community and lots of trees, but with the most sophisticated people around. Try a shabbos in Kemp Mill, you may like it there.
Posted by: Batya | November 2, 2004 10:21 AM
Eric,
Interesting idea about the population distribution, but it doesn't seem to be holding the more I look. I did a search on JDate by running through all the results to get a count, and NYC still beats LA 10:1. It's still a bit weird, though, for the reasons I mentioned.
The visits are a good idea.
Posted by: Avi | November 2, 2004 11:13 AM
Florida is a wonderful place to live. I'm sure you could find a Jewish beach bunny without much trouble. :-)
Posted by: Gordon Worley | November 3, 2004 10:36 AM
Gordon, that's undoubtedly true, but not quite the point of this exercise.
The key here is community. Where is the community? I'm still not sure.
Posted by: Avi | November 3, 2004 10:56 AM
About Florida... Are there any nice Jewish neighborhoods there where one can still find a house at a reasonable price? What are the distribution of Jews in Florida by city?
Posted by: Al | November 26, 2004 7:39 PM