Counting the Uncounted: Investigating the "Other" Ancestry Category in the American Community Survey

The U.S. Census Bureau is prohibited from collecting data on religion on mandatory surveys. Thus, religious responses on open-ended questions, like ancestry, are encoded as "other." Utilizing American Community Survey (ACS) 2018-2022 data (n = 15,721,123), I find that the 1.49 million Americans with an "other" ancestry display remarkable parallels with American Jews, the country's largest religious minority, according to non-governmental survey data. They are disproportionately concentrated in regions with large Jewish populations, exhibit a linguistic profile (e.g., prevalence of Yiddish and Hebrew) consistent with American Jews, and display demographic characteristics (age structure, educational attainment, and racial/ethnic composition) much more in line with Jews than the general U.S. population. These findings suggest that Jews likely comprise a significant portion of those with "other" ancestry on the ACS, yet a majority of the 7.63 million Jews in the U.S. do not report this information. This poses important questions on defining Jewish identity in the U.S. today, especially since the ACS ancestry question may be eliminated and subsumed into the new combined race/ethnicity question under statistical policy directive 15. This is the first study on ACS data analyzing the "other" ancestry category and assessing its congruence with the American Jewish population.