Ask a Jewish atheist whether they’re still Jewish, and the answer is almost always the same: of course. Few other identities work in this way. You can reject our faith and remain unmistakably Jewish.
I sit elsewhere on that spectrum. I’m a kippah-wearing Conservative Jew, and my (evolving) religious practice is a real part of who I am. Yet it’s only one piece of my Jewishness. What defines me is bigger: my values of justice and equity, my community, my commitments, the place I call home. When I meet another Jew — however they practice, or whether they do at all — something clicks. There is a kinship. We know people in common, we laugh at the same quirks. There are fewer than 16 million of us on the planet, and somehow we keep finding each other.
We say all the time that we’re more than a religion. We’re a culture, a people, an ethnicity. And yet when I fill out a demographic form and look for myself in the ethnicity question, “Jewish” isn’t there. I often write it into the “other” box.
That gap is what Senate Bill 1387 — authored by state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) and sponsored by Jewish California, the organization I lead — would finally close. When California collects ethnicity data, this bill will ensure that “Jewish” is an option. If it passes, California would become the first state in the nation to recognize Jewish identity as an ethnicity in law.
To be precise, this is about ethnicity, not race. I’m racially white, but according to one estimate, as many as 15% of American Jews are not white. Ethnicity is different — it’s the shared ancestry, history, language, food and culture that bind a diverse people together. The data bears this out. According to Pew, a majority of American Jews say religion is not central to being Jewish: 52% point to ancestry and 55% to culture, while just 36% cite religion. Over a quarter (27%) call themselves “Jews of no religion” — atheists, agnostics, the secular and the searching. They are no less Jewish for it. Some engage with their Jewishness through their justice work. That range — believer to atheist, devout to activist, and everyone between — is part of what makes us who we are.
So how did we get boxed into a single religious category? History. For most of our 3,000 years, we were a people. Even into the early 20th century, immigrants were counted as “Hebrews” and Jews were understood to be an ethnicity. But with the rise of Nazism, Jewish leaders in America pressed to be seen as only a religion: a faith like any other, safely American, not an ethnic group that could be marked and targeted. It was a misguided but understandable act of self-protection.
It didn’t protect us. It flattened a gloriously diverse people into a monolith, easy to caricature. Jews were left out of intergroup coalitions, and stereotypes festered. In the decades since, Jewish scholars and communal leaders have returned to the older, truer understanding of Jewish peoplehood. Our laws and data systems are simply the last to catch up.
Catching up matters in concrete ways. First, recognition reshapes perception. When a non-Jewish neighbor sees “Jewish” listed as an ethnicity — on a form, in a law, in an article like this — the flat picture gains dimension. And complexity is the enemy of prejudice.
Second, when you can count a community, you can serve it. Oregon learned this: In 2024, it began collecting Jewish ethnicity in its health data. The effort was led by a Jewish cancer researcher who had almost no data on cancer risk among American Jews.
Think of the conditions we carry — Tay-Sachs, BRCA-related cancers, Gaucher disease — and of the life-saving research that better data can make possible. It’s why California recently required gathering similar data on LGBTQ+, Middle Eastern and North African people and a range of Black and Asian American and Pacific Islander subgroups. And it’s why Jewish organizations have spent millions of dollars cobbling together their own half-baked data, including studies on demographics, health, poverty and antisemitism.
The Justice Department, starting under the Obama administration, recognized that anti-Jewish discrimination often targets our shared ancestry, not our theology.
Good data makes for good policy, and we deserve to be counted.
I know some in our own community worry about ending up “on a list.” They’ll be pleased to know that participation is voluntary, and data is reported only in the aggregate, with robust state privacy laws ensuring that personal information is kept confidential. You can also select as many checkboxes on forms as you want — as many identities as fit you. And when the state collects religion data, Judaism will still be present there too. The bill never forces anyone into one box or erases our diversity; it reveals it. It adds an option and removes nothing.
At its base, SB 1387 is about being seen. The secular Jew, the Israeli American, the Jew of color, the atheist who finds meaning in the pursuit of justice. All of us deserve to look into the state’s own mirror and recognize ourselves in it.
I’ve spent years conceptualizing this bill because our institutions should reflect who we actually are. We were never just a religion. It’s time California’s laws finally said so.