New York City May Now Have More Muslims Than Jews

Behind Zohran Mamdani surge is demographic shift

A 2023 study by the UJA-Federation of New York used an expansive definition to estimate the city’s Jewish population.

It’s close, but Muslims in New York may now outnumber Jews.

It’s a demographic race with political implications.

Analysts trying to understand why Canada, Britain, and France are moving to recognize a Palestinian state have pointed to demographic shifts and growing Muslim populations in those countries.

The Canadian government reported this year that “the proportion of Canada’s population who reported being Muslim has more than doubled in 20 years,” to “4.9% (1,775,715 people) in 2021” from “2.0% (579,640 people) in 2001.”

In Britain, the census reported that the Muslim population in England and Wales had soared to “3.9 million, 6.5% in 2021, up from 2.7 million, 4.9% in 2011.” During the same period, the Christian population fell to 46.2% from 59.3%.

In France, recent statistics put Muslims at 10 percent of the population, with Christians at 38 percent.

The New York City story is more complicated to piece together. In the U.S., unlike in many other countries, the federal government does not collect religious affiliation data. But there’s mounting, if less than 100 percent conclusive, evidence that America’s largest city matches the global trend of Islam gaining ground owing in part to birth rates and migration.

Here is an extensive analytic look at the available statistics and relevant information:

There are two national, privately conducted surveys that reported Jewish and Muslim data for New York City simultaneously.

A 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute said Queens is 6 percent Muslim and Brooklyn is 4 percent Muslim, while Brooklyn is 12 percent Jewish and Manhattan is 7 percent Jewish. But those are estimates based on small sample sizes.

And the Pew Research Center’s 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Survey reported on “the New York City metro area.” That includes the suburbs, which could affect the statistics. It found 8 percent Jewish and 3 percent Muslim, but had a margin of error of ±3.0 percentage points. Subtract three points from the 8 percent Jewish figure and add three points to the 3 percent Muslim figure and it’s a different story.

A 2023 study from the UJA-Federation of New York, a large Jewish charity, is also widely cited. It claimed 960,000 Jews in New York City. But that survey used an expansive definition of Jewish. As a result, its total count includes probably roughly 100,000 people who don’t feel part of the Jewish community, don’t engage in Jewish behaviors like observing holidays, and don’t pay attention to news about Israel.

Emgage, a Muslim voter education group, claims “New York City is home to around one million Muslims.” That may seem high, but the material for their annual lobbying day includes a long list of organizations—Arab Americans, Africans, Pakistanis, Gambians, Bengalis, Afghans, Yemenis, South Asians. It’s a reminder that Muslims come from a lot of places.

A February 2025 press release from Mayor Eric Adams’s office quoted the Muslim senior advisor in the Mayor’s Office Community Affairs Unit, New York City Police Department Detective Mohamed Amen, as saying “one in nine New Yorkers” identifies as Muslim. The city’s most recent total population estimate is 8,478,000, so one in nine would mean 942,000 Muslims. If you dig into that total population number, part of what is going on is that existing residents—including Jews—are moving out of the city and being replaced by hundreds of thousands of new international immigrants and asylum seekers.

Finding the original source of the “one in nine” claim, and assessing its veracity, is difficult.

A Muslim research and advocacy group called the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding issued a claim that “Around 768,767 Muslims live in New York City as of 2016, making up about 8.96% of the city’s total population.” The methodology is open to question; it is described as “The Muslims for American Progress (MAP) project team conducted quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis between March 2017 and March 2018. Qualitative interviews, lasting between 30 and 60 minutes, were conducted with 86 individuals from all eight focus areas: medicine; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; civics and democracy; philanthropy and nonprofit; education; economics; arts and entertainment; and sports. Secondary analysis was conducted on economic and population source material from The Muslim Green: American Muslim Market Study 2014–15 (DinarStandard and AMCC), the Bureau of Labor Statistics Aggregate Expenditures reports, the Pew Research Center 2011 report Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism, the Pew Research Center 2017 report U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream, and A Journey through NYC’s Religion Project. A detailed accounting of our methodology is available in our full report.”

A 2008 Columbia Teachers College study is widely cited for its claim that “About 1 in 10 students in New York City’s public schools is Muslim—nearly 100,000 in all.” But that paper cites no source for the claim and is designed really as a survey of Muslim students about their experiences and views rather than as a population estimate.

Official city social media accounts have mentioned “over 120,000 Pakistanis who live in New York City and who represent the second largest #Muslim population in our city,” and a New York Times report in 2023 also said “The number of Bangladeshis in New York City has nearly tripled over the last decade to more than 100,000.” The Times spoke to one immigrant from Bangladesh who “flew from the Middle East to South America and then trekked on foot through the Darién Gap, which divides Colombia and Panama.”

The New York City planning department has data from the 2020 U.S. census reporting 103,399 Bangladeshis and 63,843 Pakistanis.

News coverage offers additional clues that those immigrants flowing over the Southern border during the Biden administration weren’t all Mexican Catholics. The Associated Press reported in 2024, “in the Bronx, an imam has turned the two-story brick residence that houses his mosque into a makeshift overnight shelter for migrants, many of them men from his native Senegal. Islamic institutions in the Big Apple are struggling to keep up with the needs of the city’s migrant population as an increasing number of asylum seekers come from Muslim-majority African countries.” The article said, “The latest migrant surge has seen more than 185,000 asylum seekers arrive in New York City since the spring of 2022, with Africans from majority Muslim nations such as Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania among the top nationalities represented in new cases in federal immigration courts in the state.”

A 2024 dispatch in The City found Muslim migrants in Queens from Morocco, Mauritania, and Chad; some had arrived “from California…after crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.”

Even the Chinese immigrants to New York are Muslim. “Facing repression in China, Muslims seek freedom in NYC,” the Voice of America reported in 2024. “In a dramatic surge, U.S. border patrol authorities detained more than 24,000 Chinese citizens crossing the southern border in fiscal year 2023, a 12-fold increase from the previous year. Many come seeking asylum, and among those that do, a small group of China’s ethnic Hui Muslims stands out.”

City documents list Wolof, Fulani, and Arabic among the languages preferred by new arrivals to New York City between April 2022 and June 2024. Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal and Gambia by many Muslims; Fulani is another African language also spoken largely by Muslims. A 2024 report from the mayor’s office of immigrant affairs listed Amazigh, Bambara, Dioula, Hassaniya Arabic, Hausa, Pulaar, Soninke, Twi, and Wolof as languages frequently requested for translation. “Wolof and Fulani/Pulaar were consistently noted as the preferred languages of many immigrants,” the report said.

The city has been gradually adjusting policies to accommodate the influx. In 2023, Mayor Adams announced he’d allow mosques to use loudspeakers to amplify calls to prayer on Fridays and at sunset during Ramadan. In August 2025, the mayor and Governor Hochul renamed a Harlem subway stop in honor of Malcolm X, who converted to Islam. A bill to rename a Brooklyn stop, Utica Avenue, in honor of Malcolm X has passed the state Assembly and awaits action by the state Senate.

There are enough Islamic schools in New York that they run their own annual spelling bee competition; rules state: “Participants and guests must be in proper Islamic attire. All girls and sisters must wear hijab upon entering the school building.”

As for the New York City public schools, in 2015 they added Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha as official school holidays; there’s a push to make halal food available in all city schools on the grounds that “about one in eight public school students are Muslim.” The New York City public schools offered free halal meals during this summer at 27 different locations.

Muslims and their media stenographers have a history of exaggerating their numbers in the U.S., which I’ve been pointing out since as far back as 2001 (See “How Many Muslims?,” Smartertimes.com, December 17, 2001.) That may still be happening.

There are also seasonal variations—plenty of Jewish New York City residents (and others) decamp for the summer to the Catskills, the Hamptons, the Jersey Shore, and other summer colonies. Others go south to Florida for the winter.

For that and other reasons (try hiring a census-taker to interview undocumented immigrants in obscure languages), a precise answer may be hard to pin down. The organized Muslim groups’ claim of around a million exceeds the UJA-Federation claim of 960,000.

Search engines, media accounts, and commercial list vendors suggest that halal restaurants far outnumber kosher ones in New York City, though the number of synagogues in the city may still, at least for now, outnumber the number of mosques.

And there are certainly concrete signs of a wave of recent arrivals adding to the Muslim population. Mosques are adding capacity: a $22 million project at 350 6th Ave in Manhattan, a 32,000-square-foot Bronx project that is being touted as the largest mosque in New York State. Perhaps they’ll help stem the tide of secularism.

I’m not making value judgments here about whether this demographic change is good or bad. If it contributes to the election of a mayor who is a socialist and who backs a boycott of Israel, that is certainly a cause for concern. Zohran Mamdani, a Shiite Muslim with family roots in Asia and Africa who is the Democratic Party nominee, has been campaigning in black churches on Sundays and also met yesterday with, he said, “Imams from dozens of western Queens mosques.”

Noncitizens can’t legally vote in the mayoral election, though it’s not for lack of trying by the city, whose effort to extend the franchise has been blocked by the courts at the state level.

Yet even beyond the implications for the mayoral race, the surging Muslim population is certainly a newsworthy development for a city that was once the largest Jewish population center in the world. New York not long ago elected Jewish mayors like Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg. No one is yet writing any obituaries for the Jewish community of New York City. But one risk of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty is that rather than merely marking a demographic transition it could accelerate it. Jews have had periods of prosperity and influence and security in Muslim-dominated places. Yet the historical pattern has been that it hasn’t ended well, not only for the Jews but for the places left behind after they flee or are forced out.

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