News How these 29 last names became a cheat code for researchers surveying American Jews Can you guess which names make the list of distinctive Jewish last names used by researchers?

So far, he’s done Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo, and earlier this month, he published his latest, Beirut — which lists nearly 800 surnames, from Abadi to Zilkha.

Not everyone with one of these last names is Jewish, and not all Jews in the United States — not even close to a majority of Jews — have one of them. An obvious issue is that the list consists of ...