I was just wondering, is there any way to find out the percentage of Jews in the US Armed Forces?
I doubt the Defense Department keeps any statistics on this. The closest you could probably estimate from may be the number of Jewish chaplains employed by the Armed Forces, as a percentage of all chaplains.
The serviceperson is given the choice to indicate in his personnel file and have it imprinted in his dog-tags a religious preference. But that is mostly for the sake of organizing such things as chapel time, counseling if requested, or indeed provide me a proper last rites/burial if there is the time to do so. Don’t think it’s a regularly-released statistic, though.
Published official stats focus more on racial, gender, educational background, rather than religion or social-class. See here; Chapter 2 of that page, for detailed tables.
I was just wondering why you were wondering.
I can’t find any current figures, but historically, Jews have constituted 3–5% of U.S. armed forces. They are also said to be slightly overrepresented; at 2% of the U.S. population, this seems to be the case.
Someone was just curious and i told them i knew just the place to find out.
A magical place where monkeys work at computers for days at a time… but it was closed so i came here.
Not very many. IIRC there was one Jewish chaplain at Ft. Hood when I was stationed there back in 92-94 and Ft. Hood is the largest Army post in the US.
According to this news article http://www.news-star.com/stories/010403/rel_24.shtml there are about 10 Jewish chaplains on active duty in the Army.
Heh, I posted too soon. According to this article in The Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=7521&print=yes
There are 27 Jewish chaplains in the entire US military. The article goes on to say about 2% of the military is Jewish.