Flight from White
Israelis are no longer white, according to the state of California.
If Bibi Netanyahu goes into exile in Calabasas, CA to escape corruption charges in Israel, will he be officially white, or will he be eligible for minority business development low-interest loans?
The Jewish News of Northern California reports:
New state law says Israelis aren’t white. Let the debates begin.
The change raises new and age-old questions around Jewish identity, national heritage and ethnicity.
by Maya Mirsky November 12, 2025
It’s official. Israelis aren’t white — at least in California.
On Oct. 6, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 91 into law, creating a new racial or ethnic category to be used when California agencies collect demographic data.
Middle East and North African, or MENA, is a new demographic designation that explicitly includes those with “ancestry or ethnic origin” from Israel, as well as other countries in the Middle East. It is distinct from the “white” category, which until recently encompassed Middle Eastern ethnicities.
Of course, nothing about race is that simple. Nor, for Jews, is the issue of identity.
“The thing about these categories is the definitions of them matter, in a sense, far less than what the uses of them are meant to be,” said Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of Jewish history at New York University.
According to the text of the bill, MENA includes the “Middle Eastern group, including, but not limited to, Afghan, Bahraini, Emirati, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Lebanese, Omani, Palestinian, Qatari, Saudi Arabian, Syrian, Turkish and Yemeni.”
North African countries are also included, as is what the law calls a “transnational” group of ethnicities like Kurdish and Armenian that span various countries.
The Biden Administration made a similar change for the upcoming 2030 Census, except that Armenians are supposed to stay white. The Obama Administration also created a MENA category in January 2017, but the first Trump Administration reversed it before the 2020 Census. What the second Trump Administration will do is unknown.
In theory, that would mean that Israeli Jews, or American Jews with Israeli heritage, could mark “MENA,” while Jews with heritage from Poland could not, creating a white dividing line through American Jewish identity.
You can pretty much mark whatever you feel like on the Census — it’s based on “self-identification.” On the other hand, most Americans try to follow the instructions (with the exception, often, of leftist female academics, who love to pretend they are Indian princesses and the like).
AB 91 is in line with a policy change at the U.S. Census Bureau that was proposed in 2023 and approved in March of this year. It’s the culmination of a long push by Arab, Armenian and Somali organizations to create a new category that is distinct from white.
The literacy rate in Somalia is only around 50% (to the extent that any government statistics from that semi-anarchic place are reliable). And yet nobody seems to read the fine print in bureaucratic forms with a more gimlet eye than Somali-Americans.
The bill was introduced by Assemblymember John Harabedian, a Democrat from Pasadena who is Armenian.
He said he did so in an effort to ensure proper representation in demographic data.
Decades ago, Pasadena started an affirmative action program for Armenians on the grounds that not enough Armenians in Pasadena had government jobs. Eventually, a survey was done and it was discovered …
Paywall here.
