Your Vote? Kinky Friedman unsuccessfully ran as an independent candidate for governor of Texas in 2006. Image by Getty Images

1) 158,505 Jews live in Texas.

2) The state’s first Jewish cemetery was established in Galveston in 1852.

3) Texas’s first Jewish congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, was founded in Houston in 1859.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

4) Abraham Neiman and Stanley Marcus founded the Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas in 1907.

5) Olga Bernstein Kohlberg opened Texas’s first public kindergarten in El Paso in 1893.

6) E.M. Kahn and Company, founded in 1872 by Emanuel Kahn, was Dallas’s first air-conditioned store.

7) Born in 1905, Abraham Zapruder, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was working in the Dal-Tex building across from the street from the Texas School Book Depository on the day he made the infamous “Zapruder film” that documented John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Jack Ruby in a Dallas mug shot after he was charged with killing JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Image by wikipedia

8) Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby (born Jacob Leon Rubenstein), was found guilty of murdering JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963.

9) The Texas-based band Asleep at the Wheel is fronted by Ray Benson, who was born Ray Benson Seifert in Philadelphia.

10) Michael Dell, founder of Dell, Inc. was born to a Jewish family in Dallas in 1965.

11) Joe Straus, the current speaker in Texas’s House of Representatives, is Texas’s first Jewish speaker of the house.

12) Elected mayor of Austin in 1975, Jeffrey Friedman became known as the “hippie mayor.”

13) Adlene Harrison became the first Jewish mayor of Houston in 1976,

14) In 2006, Kinky Friedman ran as an independent candidate for governor of Texas and received 12.6% of the vote.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

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

$90 $180

$360

Other amount