Jewish Buddhist

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A Jewish Buddhist is a person with an ethnic Jewish background who believes in the tenets of a form of Buddhism.

Some practice forms of Dhyanam Buddhist meditation, chanting or spirituality. When the individual practices a particular religion, it may be both Judaism and Buddhism. However, in many cases their ethnic designation is Jewish while the individual's main religious practice is Buddhism. Rodger Kamenetz introduced the term JewBu or JUBU in his 1994 book The Jew in the Lotus.^[1][2][3]

In her 2019 book on the subject, American JewBu, Emily Sigalow give different surveys and estimations about the Jewish percentage of the non-Asian American Buddhist population, going from 16.5% to around a third of the total number.^[4]

At the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions, a Jewish man named Charles Strauss declared himself a Buddhist^[5] following talks by Buddhist delegates Soyen Shaku and Anagarika Dharmapala.^[6]

After Zen's rise in popularity with the Beat Generation, a new wave of Jews became involved with Buddhism in the late 1960s. Prominent teachers included Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Shinge Roshi Sherry Chayat and Sharon Salzberg who founded the Insight Meditation Society, Sylvia Boorstein who teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, all of whom learned vipassana meditation primarily through Thai teachers.^[7][8][9] Another generation of Jews as Buddhist teachers emerged in the early 2000s, including author Taro Gold, expounding Japanese traditions such as Nichiren Buddhism.^[10]

• List of American Buddhists
• Jews and Buddhism
• List of converts to Buddhism
• Buddhism and Judaism

• Kamenetz, Rodger (1995), The Jew in the Lotus, [San Francisco, Calif.]: HarperSanFrancisco, ISBN 978-0060645748
• Bader, David M. (2002), Zen Judaism: For You a Little Enlightenment, Harmony, ISBN 978-0609610213
• Tatz, Akiva (2005), Letters to a Buddhist Jew, Targum Press, ISBN 978-1568713564
• Boorstein, Sylvia (1998), That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist, HarperOne, ISBN 978-0060609580
• Drescher, Frank (2017), Jewish Converts to Buddhism and the Phenomenon of "Jewish Buddhists" ("JuBus") in the United States, Germany and Israel, Grin Publishing, ISBN 9783668514034
• Lew, Alan (2005), Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 978-0316739108
• Musch, Sebastian. Jewish Encounters with Buddhism in German Culture. Between Moses and Buddha(1890-1940). Palgrave 2019. ISBN 978-3-030-27468-9.

• The “Oy Vey” School of Buddhism
• AFC News Source – Jews by birth who practice Buddhism
• Story of a Jewish Buddhist
• You don't look Buddhist
• A frank encounter between religious Jews and Tibetan Buddhists
• Excerpt from Letters to a Buddhist Jew by Akiva Tatz