Pop Vs. Soda, A Theory

It's a long story, and I really can't (nor want to) get into the details, but basically, it goes like this: This guy I met had apparently just moved to the area. I found out from a mutual acquaintance that they apparently offhand remark implying that referring to soda as pop, which is by far the norm for the area, was a "Jewish thing." I'm not really sure what the basis of this claim is, and it'd certainly be an interesting one to hear.

How serious he was, I really don't know. Not that I really thought it would go anywhere, but I decided to compare size and percentage of Jewish populations to usage of pop versus soda, and actually, it looks more the other way, that states with both high raw number and percentages of Jews are overwhelmingly soda-saying. New York is the notable exception, being split down the middle for pop and soda. Another interesting point is that his home state has the 2nd highest percentage of Jews, and the fourth in pure number (that's New Jersey, by the way).

Of course, I doubt that this could possibly be related, and in all likelihood he was trying to get a rise out of somebody or had some other kind of motivation for saying this. Or maybe he just lumped all of the "different" things together. I'm actually a little bit more aware of the circumstances that brought this about, but as I said before, I'm not going to really get into them. It's a curious remark though, isn't it?