In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union finally buckled to international pressure and allowed Russian Jews to emigrate out of the country. At a 7 May 2009 Kennan Institute lecture, Sam Kliger, Director of Russian Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, discussed the results of surveys he conducted on Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the United States. These immigrants number 750,000 in the United States; 350,000 of them live in New York.
“Russian immigration to the U.S. is a success story,” said Kliger as he presented some statistics garnered from his research: 65 percent of adults have college degrees; 10 percent of adults have advanced degrees; and economically, Russian Jews do as well as American Jews. However, one of the challenges for Russian-Jewish immigrants is identity, which Kliger says is “not just a philosophical question, but a practical one.”
The community of Russian-Jewish immigrants is by no means homogeneous; there are Ashkenazi Jews from the western states of the former Soviet Union, Bukharian Jews from Central Asia, Israeli Jews, and others. Moreover, Jewish identity does not correlate with religious identification. Kliger explained that only 55 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as “strongly Jewish” and 15 percent of those even said that the Russian Orthodox Church is the most attractive religion to them.
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