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The ritual names convention, which
for a long time was reserved for boys,
opens up a whole discussion of gender
— including the fact that there are just
so many more male biblical names
than female names.

If you look at the names that are most
popular among Jewish respondents by
decade of birth, you see that the girls’
names include some modern Hebrew
names and some biblical names that
Israelis reclaimed, like Talia and Noa.

You also talk about Sephardi/Mizrahi
and Ashkenazi naming conventions,
which I think most people associate
with the idea that Ashkenazim don’t
name a child after a living relative.

Your survey confirms that that tradi-
tion is holding pretty strong.

To some extent, although I was
kind of surprised how many Sephardi
respondents exclusively named chil-
dren in honor of deceased relatives —
like 40% or more of those who identify
as only Sephardi or Mizrahi. They have
the highest rate of naming after living
honorees, but they also have the high-
est rate of naming after no honorees.

Granted, our sample of Sephardic and
Mizrahi Jews is pretty small, despite
our efforts to get respondents who
aren’t Ashkenazi.

The study discusses “Starbucks
names.” Is that a term of art in the
social sciences?
It refers to the idea of a name that
you use for some service encounters
[such as buying coffee] that’s different
from your own, because your own
name is hard to spell or you don’t want
to hear your name called in a public
place. I found that Jews with distinc-
tively Jewish names were much more
likely to use a Starbucks name some-
times than those who don’t have dis-
tinctively Jewish names. But I was also
surprised that some people who don’t
have distinctively Jewish names also
use a Starbucks alternative that’s more
Jewish because they want to identify in
public as Jewish.

And then there is the Aroma name,
named after the Israeli coffee chain.

That’s where Americans give a Hebrew
spin to their English name that they
know the Israeli barista is going to
mispronounce. Yeah, exactly. That was fun. I hadn’t
heard that term, but some of the
respondents use it. A Kelly said she
uses “Kelilah” in Israel.

Does Starbucks naming actually
extend to code-switching elsewhere?
I’m thinking of the generation that
included people like, say, Rabbi Irving
Greenberg, who goes by “Yitz,” short
for Yitzhak. I think that generation
— Rabbi Greenberg is 89 — did code
switch to some degree.

That’s right. Or Bernard Dov Spolsky
[a professor emeritus in linguistics
at Bar-Ilan University], who passed
away two weeks ago. He was from
New Zealand and his English name
was Bernard and he published under
Bernard Spolsky, but he went by Dov in
Jewish circles.

When you look at this data set, what
does it tell you about American Jewry
at this moment?
There are two ways to answer that.

One is through the acculturation and
distinctiveness lens. I think the data
show that Jews have become more dis-
tinct over time in the last 60 or 70 years
or so. You can also look through the
lens of tradition and innovation. Are
American Jews using naming practices
that have been parts of Jewish commu-
nities for centuries, or are they coming
up with new traditions? Most of the
naming practices reflect traditions that
have been part of Jewish communi-
ties for centuries, with some modern
spins. Even the Starbucks name: When
Hadassah goes by Esther in the Purim
story, you can think of that as a histor-
ical Starbucks name.

And pet names: You found that 32%, a
sizable minority, of Jewish pet owners
give their pets names they consider
Jewish, like Latke or Feivel or Ketsele.

I don’t know if Jews historically used
Jewish names for their pets. I don’t know
of any study of that. But the fact that that
is such a common thing among contem-
porary American Jews may reflect the
importance of pets in our culture, but
also the desire of Jews to highlight their
Jewishness, even if their children don’t
have distinctively Jewish names. That’s
another way that they can present them-
selves to the world as Jewish. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is is editor-in-
chief of the New York Jewish Week and
senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency.




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