Are Jews an Ethnicity?

California wants to add Jews as an ethnic category.

From the New York Times news section:

Who Is a Jew? California Considers a Small Box With Big Implications.

A bill would allow Jews to identify themselves as an ethnic group on state forms. Supporters argue it’s a step toward acknowledging the complex nature of Jewish identity.

By Yair Rosenberg

Aug. 13, 2026

The state of California recognizes nearly 50 racial and ethnic identities for data collection, from American Indian to Samoan. Now it is considering adding one more: Jewish.

A bill that passed a crucial committee vote on Thursday would require state agencies to include an optional box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, from college applications to public assistance programs. Its passage would make California the first state to officially treat Jewishness as something more than a religion in this fashion — a shift more significant than it might seem.

Scholars of Jewish identity say that it has long posed challenges to American law and public discourse, because Jews have never fit into contemporary conceptual categories. In fact, the challenges — and misconceptions — go back centuries.

“When Jews received the rights of citizenship in European nation states, Jews were forced to think of themselves as a religion,” said Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of “How Judaism Became a Religion.” “But this was always contested from an internal Jewish point of view.”

Judaism tends to be a religion of race.

Plenty of proudly identified Jews do not attend synagogue or even believe in God — and Jewish tradition considers them to be Jews just the same. Jewish identity, like ethnic identity, is generally passed through parentage. But while outsiders cannot convert to another race or ethnicity, they can convert to Judaism. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that only 11 percent of American Jews said that “being Jewish is mainly about religion,” with most preferring some combination of religion, ancestry and culture.

For its proponents in California, the bill, S.B. 1387, is an attempt to counter this confusion by making clear that “Jewish” means more than religion.

Why the Hispanic plurality of Californians would or should care about this question seems baffling.

Practically speaking, the bill aims to help the state quantify its Jewish population and to enable better data collection for hate crimes tracking and public health purposes — for example, by determining where to promote genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities, or ensuring that antisemitic attacks are not misclassified on reporting forms.

The implication that the Jewish community lacks data on where people who need genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities live seems implausible to me.

But beyond these concrete impacts, the bill’s backers intend it to accomplish something less tangible: a first step toward acknowledging and demystifying the multifaceted nature of Jewish identity.

Is that really the responsibility of the state government of California?

The purpose of adding the Jewish ethnicity checkbox, they argue, is to break Jews out of the box.

The bill, which heads next to the State Assembly for a vote, is a proposed — and disputed — solution to a very real problem.

Whose problem?

The complex nature of Jewishness has perplexed the courts, the culture and even the White House. In 2022, Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for two weeks as host of ABC’s “The View” and apologized after she said that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Her statement reflected a popular misconception that Jews have been persecuted in purely religious terms, when in fact, antisemites have long painted Jews as an inferior race.

Or as a superior race.

And it’s not just celebrities who have been flummoxed by Jewish identity. It took until 1987 for American law to determine that Jews might be attacked on nonreligious grounds.

OK, but 1987 was 39 years ago.

In 1982, a Maryland synagogue was vandalized by white supremacists. In response, the congregation sued the perpetrators under federal civil rights law. Its claims were initially dismissed by the lower courts. But in 1987, in Shaare Tefila v. Cobb, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed those decisions and ruled that Jewish people had the right to sue on grounds of racial discrimination.

Recent presidential administrations have also attempted to thread this needle. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination in federally funded programs on the basis of race, color or national origin — but not religion.

In 2010, however, the Obama administration interpreted the law as applying to discrimination against Jews and members of other religious groups such as Muslims and Sikhs “when that discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members’ religious practice.” In other words, what matters for the purposes of protection is not just how the victims see themselves but how a bigot sees them.

“You don’t have to prove that you look fundamentally different or have some fundamentally different physical characteristic in order to establish that you were subjected to racial discrimination,” explained Matthew Segal, a political science professor at Tufts University.

“It is enough — whether you’re Jewish or Arab or anything else — to show that you were treated differently because someone looked at you that way.”

In 2019, the first Trump administration sought to build on this interpretation with an executive order that defined Jews as a nationality purely for the purposes of applying anti-discrimination protections to them. At the time, it caused some consternation among some observers who worried — before the full text of the order was released — that it would define Jews themselves as a nation. (Many Jews, particularly those in Israel, consider themselves part of a Jewish nation; others, including some staunch anti-Zionists, reject this framing.)

The California bill was conceived in response to this turbulent context. The bill’s author, State Senator Henry Stern, a Democrat, was motivated by personal experience. He grew up in an engaged Jewish home, but one that was not particularly religious. His father, the actor Daniel Stern, added the improvised line, “Happy Hanukkah, Marv,” in the otherwise Christmas-themed hit “Home Alone 2.”

Later in life, the younger Mr. Stern adopted more traditional Jewish practices, including wearing a yarmulke and observing the sabbath. As he tells it, he knows firsthand that Jewishness is more than religious observance.

“I got picked on in school as a Jew even though I didn’t wear a kipa, I didn’t have a Star of David. But they figured out I was a Jew and they wrote a swastika on the back of my backpack,” he recalled. “I wasn’t a white guy to them. I was a Jew to them.”

Yeah, OK, sure.

Whatever.

State Senator Stern is …

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