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Hey, Irving — why are there so many Jews named Irving?
My mother wasn’t a big one for jokes, but there was one she liked to tell. Years later, it showed up in the book Old Jews Telling Jokes, from which I quote:
“A lady is taking her young son to his first day in school. She’s walking him to school and she starts giving him a little lecture.
“She says, ‘Now, bubele, this is a marvelous thing for you, bubele. Bubele, you’re never gonna forget it. Just remember, bubele, to behave in school. Remember, bubele, anytime you want to speak, you raise your hand.’
“They get to the school and she says, ‘Bubele, have a good day. I’ll be waiting for you when you get out of school.’
“Four hours later, she’s standing there, and the little kid runs down the steps. She runs toward him and says, ‘Bubele, bubele, it’s been such an exciting day. Tell me, bubele, what did you learn today?’
“He says, ‘I learned my name was Irving.’”
I, on the other hand, am a big one for wordplay. Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”
The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top 30 list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray and Seymour.
But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”
That isn’t really true. As the MIT study says, MNII names “stand out as favored by the Jewish immigrants but not by the general population.” According to Social Security Records, Irving was the 106th most popular name for all boys born in 1917, Milton the 75th; Stanley did a bit better at number 34. The others listed above are similarly low in the general count, especially Murray (241) and Seymour (242).
Someone else who has written widely in the field, Warren Blatt, called “Irving, Morris, Sidney, Sheldon, etc. … Anglo-Saxon names that were popular 100 years ago.”
That moves the discussion in the right direction but is misleading, because the word “popular” implies that they were traditional first names. In fact, Irving, Milton, Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour are venerable upper-crust British surnames. Only two of them are even mentioned in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1947), Sidney and Stanley; the book notes that the latter’s “use as a Christian name is apparently a recent development, originally due to the popularity of the explorer Henry Stanley (1841-1904).”
I hasten to say that Blatt was correct about other names in the G.I. top 30, such as William, Robert, Harry, Bernard, George, Harold and Arthur. And his point does hold for girls. I think of my mother (Harriet) and my aunts Fay, Florence, Sylvia, and Estelle; we didn’t have a Sophie in our family, but many others did. All born roughly between 1905 and 1920, all given posh British names.
The last-name-to-first-name trend — which I’m not aware of having previously been discussed — hit quickly. Among the ten most common boys’ names for native-born members of Yiddish-speaking American households (that is, kids) in the 1910 census, there’s only one of the MNII type (Morris, at number 7). The others, in order, are Samuel, Louis, Harry, Jacob, Abraham, Isadore, Max, Benjamin and Joseph.
What caused MNII to hit so soon after that? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it was not trivial. As Lieberson and a coauthor once observed, looking at first-name choices offers “a rare opportunity to study tastes in an exceptionally rigorous way.” I imagine the trend originated with some culture-loving Jews, who had been in the new country for a decade or more, who may have read Paradise Lost or seen Sir Henry Irving or one of his many thespian relatives on the stage, and thought such a distinguished name would cast a shimmering reflection on their sons. (And remember that they had a hall pass to use freely in their choices because of the custom of giving kids a Hebrew or Yiddish name as well). Peers agreed, and soon the trend went viral.
MNII dissipated as quickly as it hit, in some ways a victim of its own success. That is, it’s not necessarily attractive to give your kid a stereotypical name. There aren’t handy charts for later Jewish names along the lines of the World War II survey, but Social Security data for the whole country shows the MNII names peaking in popularity in the late teens and early ‘20s, then cratering.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, there were a lot of Normans, Henrys, Daniels, Jerrys, Howards and Philips; and the popular ‘50s Jewish boys’ listed by Warren Blatt names rings true for my mischpocheH: Alan, Andrew, Barry, Bruce, Eric, Harvey, Jay, Marc, Michael, Peter, Richard, Robert, Roger, Scott, Steven and Stuart. After that it was, and has been, back to the future, what with the flood of Noahs, Joshes, Sams, Bens, Isaacs, Abes, Maxes and Jakes.
While Irving is a lost cause (it fell out of the top 1000 boys’ names in 2005, according to Social Security), MNII has a legacy: it arguably popularized practice of giving last names as first names, which, judging from the current generation of young adults, is stronger than ever. Just ask Taylor Swift, Madison Cunningham, and consensus NBA Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg.
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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
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