(YNET NEWS) -- My parents, children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, were named Irving and Naomi. They named their three sons Stephen, Jeffrey and Andrew. My kids’ names are Noah, Elie and Kayla.
Our first names capture the sweep of the American Jewish experience, from the early 20th century to the early 21st. At each stop on the journey, kids were given names — sometimes “Jewish,” sometimes not — that tell you something about how they fit both into Jewish tradition and the American mosaic.
A new study from the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion charts how Jewish names have evolved over that history and what they say about American Jewish identity. For “American Jewish Personal Names,” Sarah Bunin Benor and Alicia B. Chandler surveyed over 11,000 people who identified as Jewish, asking about the names they were given and the names they were giving their children.
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