feature story
A NEW STUDY EXPLAINS WHY
STARBUCKS CAN’T SPELL
YOUR JEWISH NAME
20 SEPTEMBER 22, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
The results suggest my family’s first names were
typical: In the century since my grandparents (Albert,
Sarah, Sam and Bessie) arrived at Ellis Island, and
after an era of Susans and Scotts, American Jews
became more and more likely to give their children
Biblical, Hebrew, Israeli and even ambiguous names
that have come to sound “Jewish.” “The top 10 names
for Jewish girls and boys in each decade reflect these
changes,” the authors write, “such as Ellen and
Robert in the 1950s, Rebecca and Joshua in the 1970s,
and Noa and Ari in the 2010s.”
It’s a story about acculturation, say the authors,
but also about distinctiveness: Once they felt fully
at home, Jews asserted themselves by picking names
that proudly asserted their Jewishness.

On Sept. 8, I spoke with Benor, vice provost at
HUC-JIR in Los Angeles, professor of contemporary
Jewish studies and linguistics and director of the
Jewish Language Project. Our conversation touched
on, among other things, today’s most popular Jewish
names, the Jewish names people give to their pets and
the aliases many people give to Starbucks baristas.

Mostly we spoke about the ways Jewish tradition and
American innovation are expressed in our first names.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I want to start with the
big takeaway from your study: “Younger Jews are
significantly more likely than older Jews to have
Distinctively Jewish names.” Does that sound right?
Sarah Bunin Benor: Definitely. The thing that I
think people are going to be most excited about is the
chart showing the most popular names by decade.

If you look at the 1950s, you have girls’ names like
Barbara, Linda and Robin. These are not distinctively
Jewish and not biblical. And then by the 1980s, it’s
very biblical: Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca. By the 2000s
the top three names are Hannah, Maya and Miriam.

JTA Illustration by Grace Yagel
M y 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,
mostly Jews, asking about the names they were given
and the names they were giving their children.

BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL



And by the 2010s you get these names that
are either biblical or modern Hebrew or
coded Hebrew: Noa, Eliana, Naomi.

You note that today most of the top 20
Jewish girls’ and boys’ names are English
versions of Biblical names. But that doesn’t
account for all the “Jewish” names in the
study, which range from “Hebrew Post-
Biblical,” like Akiva, Bruria and Meir, to the
“ambiguously Jewish,” like Lila and Mindy.

How did you decide which names are dis-
tinctively Jewish?
We based our judgment on our respon-
dents’ judgments. We had them rate their
own names, and ask, If you met some-
one with your name, how likely would you
assume that they were Jewish on a scale of
10 boys’ names among Jewish respondents to the “Survey of American
zero to 10? And we had them do the same for Top
Jewish Personal Names,” by decades of birth. (An * indicates that the name is
a sample of, I think it was 13 male names and also in the overall U.S. top 10 for that decade.)
13 female names.

By which you discovered that there are
currently “names of no Jewish origin” that
have come to be seen as Jewish.

Definitely. And the ones that I find most
interesting in that category are the coded
Jewish names like Maya and Lila and
Eliana, and other names that are popular
in America, like Emmett. They have these
coded Jewish meanings. [“Maya” is thought
to relate to mayim, the Hebrew word for
water; in Hebrew, “lilah” means “night” and
“emet” means “truth.”] And Evan [“rock”
in Hebrew and “John” in Welch] is another
example where we American Jews inter-
pret these American names as Jewish names
because they have homologous interpreta-
tions in Hebrew.

Eliana, for example, is not of Jewish origin,
but it sounds exactly like “Eli ana,” my God
answered. And so it’s a beautiful name. And
it’s become pretty popular among Jews.

Same information for girls’ names
jewishlanguages.org I think about my father’s generation — the genera-
tion of Irvings and Stanleys and Sylvias. And they
became distinctively Jewish names without being
Jewish names, right? Was that about people want-
ing to assimilate, but also not wanting to disappear
into the mainstream?
When immigrant parents gave their children
names like Irving and Stanley, it was an attempt to
Americanize, but also they chose names that their
neighbors or friends were giving their babies, and so
it ended up that some names turned out to be seen as
Jewish names.

You compared the names of your respondents and
the names of their children. What does this tell us
about naming trends?
Across generations, groups increased in their
Jewish distinctiveness over time. Take, for example,
names we categorize as “of no Jewish origin,” like
Richard and Jennifer. There is a significant drop
between the older generation and the younger gener-
ation when it comes to such names.

Meaning the Richards and Jennifers are not nam-
ing their kids Ellen and Steven but Maya and Ezra.

Yes. Although there are still many Jews who do use
names of no Jewish origin, it’s much less than it was
before. We have data on name changing, and I was sur-
prised at how few people reported changing their
name to one that sounds less Jewish. The name
changes that we heard were more about changes in
gender presentation and changes for various other
reasons but not to sound less Jewish.

You talked about 1970 as a sort of pivot point, in
which a decline in Jews changing their last names
is replaced by an increase in baby names considered
more Jewish. Remind us of that history.

There’s a great book about this, “A Rosenberg by
Any Other Name,” by Kirsten Fermaglich. She found
that Jews in the middle of the 20th century were
changing their names — because of antisemitism,
because they weren’t able to get into universities
or stay at hotels or get certain jobs because of their
names. It was a way of integrating into
American society, not necessarily as a way of
assimilating. Just because they changed their
names didn’t mean that they were now not
identified with Jewish communities. They
tended to still be engaged.

And then in the ’60s and ’70s, it became
more acceptable to have a distinctive ethnic
identity. Antisemitism diminished signifi-
cantly, but it was also part of a broader
American trend to highlight your ethnic
distinctiveness. Jews participated in that in
numerous ways, including a tendency to give
their babies distinctive names.

That theme runs through your discussion:
the back and forth between acculturation
and distinctiveness.

That has been the case throughout Jewish
history. Wherever Jews have lived, they have
had to come up with a balance between accul-
turation and distinctiveness, and in some
cases, it was much more on the acculturation
side. In some cases, it was much more on the
distinctive side.

You describe how the distinctiveness of
Jewish baby names rises with the parents’
engagement in Jewish life, including visits
to Israel, synagogue attendance, denom-
ination. You also note that “rabbis and
cantors have the highest rates of children
with Distinctively Jewish names, followed
by Jewish educators and Jewish studies
scholars,” and that Orthodox Jews are
more likely than non-Orthodox Jews to
pick names high on the scale of Jewishness.

Let’s talk about how these trends increase
across levels of engagement.

Another really striking image to me is the
time spent in Israel. Having a distinctively
Jewish name and especially having a modern
Hebrew name increase with how much time
the parents have spent in Israel. And you get
similar spreads for other things like denominations.

Something like 69% of haredi or “black-hat” Jews
give their children distinctively Jewish names, com-
pared to 35% of Modern Orthodox. So there is a huge
split even among the Orthodox. And then you know,
for other denominations, it is even lower than that.

I was surprised how many people still have Jewish
ritual names in addition to their given “English”
names — in my case, I am Avrum on my wedding
contract and when called up for synagogue honors.

Wasn’t it over 90%?
Yes, 95% of the respondents say they have a ritual
name, but a lot of those are the same name as their
non-ritual name, like “Sarah.” That does reflect our
sample being more engaged in Jewish life than the
average random sample of Jews. What’s interesting
here is the Orthodox versus non-Orthodox children,
where 64% of Orthodox children have exactly the
same ritual name as their given first name, which
means that they’re giving their children distinctively
Jewish names, and non-Orthodox children only 30%.

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