One of the vexing problems of the modern period is how to categorize Jews, sociologically. Are they members of a religion? A nation? An ethnic group? A race? A peoplehood? What is a peoplehood? A diaspora? None of the available answers seem to perfectly fit the bill. Still, people ask because, in part, those labels help people and governments make sense of themselves and others.
California (the Berman Archive’s home state) is on the cusp of legally turning Jewishness into an ethnic designation. California bill SB 1387, which proposes adding “Jewish” to state-mandated demographic forms, is sitting on the Governor’s desk, awaiting his signature, having already passed the State Legislature.
What are the implications of enshrining Jewishness as a demographic category? To help us think through that question, we turned to a handful of people who have been thinking about questions of Jewishness and ethnicity for a long time, and whose perspectives on the matter will hopefully help our readers figure out what they think and feel about the bill.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with the Documensch Research Report. In the meantime, check us on the Documensch Daily website or on Bluesky to get your fix before then.
-Ari
Ari Y. Kelman, Director, Berman Archive
Lila Corwin Berman, Paul & Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, NYU, author of Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship
I’ve just published a book about Jews and U.S. citizenship law over the last century. The main thing I learned is that the categories used by state agents to classify citizens do not matter at all yet are incredibly consequential. Here’s what I mean. The categories themselves — are Jews a race, a religion, a national origin group, a color, and so on — carry little intrinsic value. Jews have slipped in and out of each of those categories depending on the historical context and the priorities and political exigencies of government officials and Jews. Anyone looking toward these state-based categories to answer existential questions about the nature of being will be disappointed. However, the consequences of the categories can be profound and, even, existential. The function, not the form, of the category matters. What will California do with the information about Jews by ethnicity that it collects? What will Jews do with their newfound ability to report themselves as an ethnicity? Will the category become the basis for new coalitions and an inclusive and pluralistic political imagination? Or will it become an agent for exclusion, whether at the hands of the state or through legal action instigated by Jewish groups? At the end of the day, these are human questions about the kind of society we want to build, no matter what box a person checks.
David Bocarsly, CEO, Jewish California, the nation’s largest statewide coalition of Jewish organizations and the Jewish community’s unified voice in Sacramento; Jewish California is the sponsor of SB 1387
I’m thrilled to see California leading the way to recognize Jewish identity as an ethnicity in law — a conversation our communal leadership has led for years while the law lagged behind. Backed by 59 major Jewish groups across the state, SB 1387 accomplishes three critical things. The first is education. Getting here required teaching legislators, agencies, and the public something most had never considered: Jewishness runs through ancestry, culture, and peoplehood, and most American Jews describe their Jewishness in those terms before they describe it through religion. That conversation will keep happening every time someone encounters the category on a form, complicating a too-simple picture of who Jews are, and leading to greater understanding and less ignorance. The second is aggregated data. Hate-crime reports, health surveys, and education records will account for Jewish Californians, finally giving researchers and policymakers numbers where they have had almost none, while still protecting people’s individual identities. There is still no reliable picture of cancer risk among American Jews, to take one example, despite conditions that appear at elevated rates in Jewish populations. The third is simply being seen. For a community whose identity has been filed under a heading that fits a minority of us, having the state ask the question and accept our own answer carries weight past anything the data will show.
Under the shadow of Nazi race theory, American Jewish leaders urged our government to stop counting Jews as a people and to treat us purely as a religion, hoping to be safer and less conspicuous. That was an understandable request in that moment — and it didn’t work. Antisemitism has never paused to ask what a Jew believes. What the change did accomplish was to leave us out of the demographic data that determines where resources go, separate us from multi-ethnic coalitions, and write a misunderstanding of who we are into the statute books, where it has sat ever since. California has spent fifteen years expanding recognition for Asian American, Black, LGBTQ+, and Middle Eastern and North African communities in this way, and it did so because those communities organized, argued, and won it. That the state is now willing to extend the same recognition to Jews is something we should be deeply proud of.
Deborah Dash Moore, Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan
The issue of counting Jews in the U.S. on the federal census goes back several centuries. The last big push after WWII had Jews facing off against Catholics on whether religion should be counted. Catholics wanted it to be; Jews did not. So God entered the pledge of allegiance but religion didn’t enter the census. Now the issue is counting Jews as an ethnicity at the state level. Sure, Jews can be understood as an ethnicity since you can be born Jewish. But as I explained to my class on the history of American Jews, if you’re a boy, within eight days religion enters and defines you as a Jew. So not just an ethnicity. Maybe religio-ethnicity, but do Jews really want to walk down that religion path again? I would hope not. Better to be undefined and uncounted.
Keith P. Feldman, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America
Proponents of SB 1387 frame the classification of Jewish ethnicity as aligning with a decade’s worth of disaggregation efforts in the government code meant to better capture the significant heterogeneity contained within Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander groups. Among these newly legible categories are: Bangladeshi, Cuban, Fijian, Guatemalan, Indian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Mexican, Nicaraguan, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Samoan, Salvadoran, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Tongan, and Vietnamese. These prior efforts at disaggregation follow important scholarly trends and are salutary indeed. However, note that these are all national categories, with explicit connection to particular national identities formed through distinctive linguistic, historical, and cultural commonalities. I worry that this form of classification may produce a framing of Jewish ethnicity through a similar national logic. Doing so may not only further enable the specious conflation of substantive critiques of Israel with antisemitism, but could also feed precisely the kinds of conspiratorial thinking that figure Jews as somehow essentially apart from the U.S. national polity.
Sarah Levin, Executive Director, JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa
JIMENA supports SB 1387 because it recognizes something integral to Jewish identity: that we are a people, not only a religion. As the bill is hopefully implemented, we would be delighted to see sub-identification options that reflect the recommendations of JIMENA’s national demographic study: distinct Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi options. A decade of scholarly research on Jewish demographics confirms that the Jewish people are incredibly diverse, and many of us hold multiple identities at once. Therefore, the ability to co-select other identity categories is equally important for a significant portion of California’s Jewish population. These are ultimately methodological questions, and we are confident they can be solved.
Shaul Magid, Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence, Harvard Divinity School
As I understand it, defining “Jewish identity” as an “ethnicity” for the purposes of state demographic data collection is being considered in California. This attempt to limit “identity” to “ethnos,” regarding the Jews, poses certain challenges. First is the very notion of “ethnos” as opposed to, say “genos” (race). Jews were identified as a race (by Jews and non-Jews) until the first part of the 20th century, abandoned largely because of Nazism’s racial definition of Jews. Ethnos (ethnicity) came as a replacement. But what determines “ethnicity”? Biology? If so, why not race. Family? If so, why not tribe? Civilization? If so, what connects one to a civilization is collective cohesion which does not require ethnos. Different ethnic groups can comprise a civilization.
Traditionally, Jews were Jews by dint of a combination of biology and covenant, that is, a religious affiliation, being part of a covenanted community. The issue of conversion, that is, the non-biological Jew, was resolved by asserting that conversion to Judaism, as opposed to Christianity or Islam, marked a somewhat amorphous “biological transformation” whereby the convert is now no longer connected to their previous biological lineage, and is referred to as a “child of Abraham and Sarah.” And according to tradition, one could not “convert out” of Judaism, one could only become a Jewish “apostate.”
But how does “ethnicity” fit into all this if it is not (1) biological, not (2) racial, and not (3) covenantal? Secularism has made this all more complicated because many Jews no longer view themselves in a covenantal paradigm. And race has too many negative connotations. So “ethnicity” seems to be a placeholder, neither this nor that. But substantively I am not sure what work it does, if not to offer some more benign rendering of “race” or “tribe” (however mythic that may be). If “ethnos” is defined by parentage (or the womb one inhabited) then it really doesn’t quite offer an alternative meaning to race/tribe. According to this proposal, saying “I am ethnically Jewish” is a tautology, since that is the same as saying “I am Jewish.” So a Christian born of Jewish parents who says, “I am ethnically Jewish, but I am a Christian” means essentially, according to the definition being considered, “I am Jewish.” From a traditional Jewish legal (halakhic) perspective I understand that, but from a (secular) legal definition that seems odd to me.
Samira Mehta, Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies, Academic Director, Innovations in Jewish Life Collection, University of Colorado Boulder
Proponents of California’s SB 1387 frame being Jewish as an ethnic identity because they argue that it does not work to think of being Jewish solely as a religion. They correctly point out that it is possible to be Jewish without being a religious person at all. The problem is that being Jewish isn’t really an ethnicity either — people who share an ethnicity share a cultural tradition, and there are many different cultural traditions, and therefore ethnic distinctions, within Judaism. For instance, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jews come from Eastern Europe, Spain, and Arabic speaking lands respectively. Within each of these separate categories, Jews also have different national or cultural origins. There are Polish Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, French Jews, Finnish Jews, and so on. Foods that Americans think of as ethnically Jewish — matzah ball soup or challah — come from the Ashkenazi tradition, which is the culturally dominant Jewish ethnic group in the United States, but they are not universally Jewish foods. They are more closely connected to non-Jewish foods in Eastern Europe than they are to the Jewish foods of Morocco or India. The bill will include being Jewish in a list that allows people to select ethnic identities — boxes to check on a form or, should your appropriate choice not be listed, a blank to fill in. The problem with seeing Jews as a distinct ethnic group becomes even more clear when compared to some of the other options provided by the state of California. The other ethnicities listed include (among many others) English, Scottish, and Irish — raising the question of what California has against the Welsh. The granularity of these categories, all hailing from two small and neighboring islands that are historically white, Christian, committed to very good cheese and often (if reluctantly) ruled by the same monarch over much of the past 800 years, point to the importance of shared language, food, history, and traditions — something that Jews simply do not have. Jews, by contrast, live and have distinct traditions, on each of the inhabited continents of the planet. In the end, just as religion is not a particularly good category to describe Jews, but rather is a category that works for Christians and was superimposed on Jews, so too, ethnicity is a category that is a poor fit for describing the nuances of Jewish identity.
Rabbi Kendell Pinkney, Director of Education, Reboot
Legally defining Jews as an “ethnic group” makes a great deal of sense given how the term is plainly understood by a variety of American Jewish communities. Still, I can’t help but wonder which Jews might be overlooked by such a vague definition. Numerous scholars (Shelly Tenenbaum and Lynn Davidman, Stuart Charme, Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartman, Eviatar Zerubavel, et al.) have demonstrated how well-meaning individuals often elide ethnicity with culturally essentialist discourse, race, and biology/genealogy. I worry that such a legal definition might unintentionally generate a more “muscular” sense of cultural essentialism within Jewish communities that might in turn further marginalize groups like converts or self-identified Jews of Color.
