"Not Jewish," he says.
"How do you know? Did you ask?" I reply
"Of course not! You can't do that," he retorted. "Anyway, her name is Tiffany. Have you ever met a Jewish woman named Tiffany?"
"Also, she's blonde." my other friend added thoughtfully.
Frequency of names always fascinated me. For better or worse, I was always the only Yoav in school, or even the entire world for all I knew. On the flip side, most of us have more than one friend named David, John, Ashley, Lauren, or Miguel. The Social Security Administration tracks names for babies born each year, and many data scientists have used this readily available information to note trends for certain names and decades. But, where can we find information specifically about Jewish names?
I'm glad you asked. The answer is JSwipe, a popular dating application for Jews. In what was no small feat, I manually collected the names of 1000 Jewish men and 1000 Jewish women (yes, there are at least this many gefilte fish in the sea), aged 18-40, in the South Florida area - from West Palm Beach to Boca Raton to Miami. I also noted the ethnicity of users, either by name origin or other profile details. Get ready to swipe right on my findings:
1. The top female Jewish name is Jessica. For men, Michael and David are tied at #1
The bar graph I constructed shows the top 20 names for both genders:
2. Israeli Men Really Need Your Love
While going through profiles, I noticed a definite peculiarity: there are almost twice as many Israeli men on the app than there are Israeli women. If you're a woman looking for men on JSwipe (or rather, having men aggressively look for you), there's a 1 in 7 chance you're swiping on an Israeli, with the most common names being Tal, Avi, and Yossi. If you're a man looking for women, about 1 in 13 are Israeli, with the most common name being Yael.
While American followed by Israeli names were by far the most common, I also identified three other distinct groups of name origin: Latin (from Brazil and Spanish speaking countries), Russian and Eastern European, and Ashkenazi Orthodox (Hebrew names that are not popular in modern Israel, such as Bracha or Mendel). The breakdown is represented in these two graphs:
3. Men's names are slightly more top-heavy, and women have more unique names
Out of 1000 people, there were 417 unique names for women, and only 324 for men. The fact that there are seemingly "less" male names corresponds with the finding that, compared to women, the top 10 male names are more common (taking up 27% of all male names) than the top 10 female names (which constitute 22% of all female names):
Men:
This means that by yelling "hey David, Michael, Daniel!" into a synagogue of 100 men, you should expect an average of 11 people to turn around. In fact, according to the binomial distribution, there's a 99.9% chance that at least 3 people will answer.
For women, however, you might have to shout one more name to achieve the same feedback, and this disparity grows the more names you try to guess.
update: after discussion of these findings, I've had it pointed out to me that male names tend to be more traditional (and often biblical) as opposed to female names (of which there are less in the Bible), which change more quickly and are more likely to be considered "modern". This is certainly an interesting observation.
4. There are too many Bretts
Seriously. I had to swipe through 11 Bretts? Yeesh.
5. It's interesting to compare Jewish names against the general population
Which names are more Jewish? Which names are less Jewish? I've analyzed data from the general population against the Jswipe data set to find this out. Here's a graphical summary of selected names:
And there you have it.
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I hope all of you have an extremely happy and joyful Hanukkah. And to my non-Jewish friends, which almost certainly include one Tiffany who danced with us at Rhythm & Vine last week, I'd like to wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Yours,
Yoav
