(It’s not as simple as you’d think: there’s controversy among historians about how many of those supposedly Scots-Irish people in Appalachia were really Gaelic Irish who converted to Protestantism for one reason or another.)

Sally, it’s even more complicated than the more complicated. Scots- or Scotch-Irish is a term used essentially only in the US. Around the world, other folks that pay attention to the Celtic diaspora understand what is meant by Ulster Presbyterians, or less common and slightly different, Ulster Scots. Simple enough; respectively the Presbyterians or the Scots with roots in the Ulster (this includes some of my mother’s people, who were Scots migrated to the Ulster, then back to the Scottish Central Belt, and finally to the US; their religion was mostly Free Presbyterian). In the US, some folks use Scots-Irish as co-extensive with either of these groups, while others limit the use to the descendants of the earliest, 17th century Scots to migrate to Ireland and thence to the New World, which leaves out all those folks that migrated to Ireland from the Highlands in the 18th Century and then left to follow a paycheck.

And anyway, distinguishing between Gaelic Irish who converted to Protestant and Scots from the Ulster is in my view not useful. Many Ulster Presbyterians were Scots Gaelic speakers; their Q-Celtic language very close to Irish and their roots in the same migration of Celtic peoples — as you may know, the “Scots” that were joined to the Picts in the 800s to form Scotland as a united entity were the descendants of the Kingdom of Dal Riada, which the “Scotti” from Ireland founded in the 4th century on the Western shore of Scotland. In the 17th or 18th century, there was more common ground in language and culture between the ragged-arsed crofters and Western Isles lads on the one hand and a fisherman from the rocky shores of the Gaeltacht in Ireland, on the other, than between the same folks and the Scots-speakers of the lowlands. The Wars of Independence created a sort of unity between highlander and lowlander against the big Southern neighbor, but that fell apart for many centuries, culminating in the Jacobite Risings, Culloden and the Clearances (lowlanders were completely complicit with the English there), before Walter Scott and Highland romanticism made the Gaelic culture of the Highlands a collection of national rather than regional symbols.

All that is to say that enthicity isn’t no simple most places. People migrate and religions, languages and tribes mix, assimilate and change. The Basques have been on that patch of ground, as far as anyone can tell, since the last mammoth gave up the ghost, speaking the same language; the same is largely true of Australia’s indiginous people. The rest of us are vagabonds and mutts.

Jews comprise 20% of the population of Manhattan; I have no idea how many Dominicans there are here, though.

That quote is interesting. I’m going to have to read that article. I think it is beyond just the Jewish question because my understanding is that from the very beginning it was agreed that they would not measure religion because of the religious freedom/separation of church and state issue. (Reminds me how much better the US is on religious issues, compared to race.) Nevertheless, I agree with many of your points.

Well, yeah, on the West Coast there’s no such thing as “WASP”; the proper term here is “Anglo.” The part that was weird for me to adjust to, coming from the East, is that it turns out that “Greek-American” is subsumed under “Anglo.” So is “Irish-American,” to the annoyance of some Irish-Americans :-).

And it’s not especially weird to me that the map shows me in the middle of a sea of Mexican, given that it’s picking the plurality ethnic group, and not the absolute majority one (if it went for absolute majority, lots of places wouldn’t have one, including probably most of California).

Sally, They are only picking the largest group. In many cases that group may be less than 1/2 the population, but still be the largest ethnic group.

Right. But I’m not convinced that Jews are the largest single ethnic group anywhere in the U.S., or at least anywhere big enough to register on that map. I could be totally wrong about that.

Also the Census is prohibited by law from asking about religion, which does make me wonder what they do when people fill in the ethnicity slot on the long form with Jewish.

From the census webpage on the ancestry question:

We do not request people to tell us their religious groups. If people write in a religious group as an ancestry response, it is included under “Other ancestries”.

So if you write “Jewish,” you get shoved into “other ancestries.” They literally will not count Jews. I know that Jewish leaders were instrumental in keeping the proposed religion question off of the census, and I’m pretty sure that I read somewhere that pressure from Jews is the reason that they won’t count “Jewish” as a valid answer in the ancestry question. There’s a fear that if they cross-tabulate Jewishness with other things, it will lend fodder to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (since it will reveal that Jews are wealthier and better-educated than the country as a whole, although I believe the fear goes back to the days when Jews worried it would show that they were poorer than the country as a whole), and a lot of Jews have Holocaust-related hang-ups about the government keeping records of who’s Jewish. There was an article in September’s Journal of American History about the controversy about the 1960 religion question.

Also the Census is prohibited by law from asking about religion, which does make me wonder what they do when people fill in the ethnicity slot on the long form with Jewish.

Everybody should keep in mind that this question is only on the long form. The short forms that most of us get don’t include this question. They do ask people to indentify an “enrolled tribe” if they check American Indian, but that’s as close as they get.

They make a distinction between race and ethnicity. This map is measuring ethnicity, not race. I think your confusing the two Darleen, not that there is a 100% clear distinction.

Please stand down the phasers. I’m only trying to point out the inherent sloppiness when any bureaucracy is trying to categorize people according to ever changing and unscientific definitions.

The map is entitled “Ethnic Ancestory” … ok, self-reported “ethnic” as in cultural? Ethnic as in “race”? (and that begs the question — what is “race”?)

Edward James Olmos is Mexican-American and so is Joanna Kerns.

Mexican culture is the result of the mixing of Southern European and aboriginal Indian cultures. The people of Mexico are, of varying degrees, genetically tied to both.

Jewish is not just a religious designation and certainly falls into the cultural designation. And populations have held those cultural ties close enough that there is, too, genetic populations that overlay that culture.

“Hispanic” is such a null term as to be almost useless… the government uses it for anyone who comes from “Hispanic” labeled countries regardless of ethnic/cultural heritage.

Radio-talkshow host Bill Handel is the son of a Holocaust survivor and a Brazilian mother and since he was born in Brazil and immigrated to this country when he was a child, he can claim per government definition, to be “Hispanic.”

While I personally find geneology fascinating in tracing the migration of populations over time (and learning the roots of family traditions), I’ve always been leery and uncomfortable with the attempts to categorize people according to rather arbitrary and politically shifting designations.

I have for years refused to mark the “race” box on forms and have taught my child to do the same.

Indeed, “Jewish” is much more an ethnicity than “Hispanic” and it’s not on the list.

Are they using census data? Because “Jewish” is not a valid answer to the ethnicity question on the census. I believe that’s because Jewish leaders felt that anti-Semites would use census data to argue bad things about Jews. If you answer “Jewish” in the ethnicity section, your answer won’t be counted. (I got the long form in 2000, and I had no idea what to answer, since the only ethnicity with which I identify is Jewish. I think I left it blank.)

Having said that, I’d be really surprised if Jews were the most common ethnic group anywhere in the country. Possibly Manhattan, but even there probably not.