Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Seattle Jewish Population Soars by 70%

A study found that Seattle’s Jewish population has increased by 70 percent since 2001.

The newly released Greater Seattle Jewish Community Study, which was conducted by a research team from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Jewish Studies, tallied the region’s Jewish population at 63,400. It also found that 89 percent of Jews in the area are college graduates.

“Given how Seattle has developed economically, it makes sense,” Leonard Saxe, one of the study’s authors and a Brandeis professor, told The Seattle Times.

Saxe said that the region’s advances in the technology, science and engineering fields has fueled the rapid growth. The study found that more than half of Seattle’s Jews have an advanced degree.

Among other study findings, more than half (56 percent) of married Seattle Jews are intermarried; two-thirds of the region’s Jewish population identified as “religious,” as opposed to culturally or ethnically Jewish; and more than half of the area’s Jews do not feel very connected to the local Jewish community.

The study was commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.

In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.

At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.

Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly. 

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.