California could become the first U.S. state to formally include Jewish ethnicity as an option on government demographic forms, a move that has triggered a broader debate over Jewish identity, data collection and the risks of officially categorizing a minority group.
State lawmakers have approved Senate Bill 1387, which would require state agencies to add an optional Jewish ethnicity category to demographic forms used for programs ranging from public assistance to college applications. The bill is now headed to Governor Gavin Newsom, who will have to decide whether to sign it into law.
Supporters argue that the change would give California a clearer picture of the needs of its estimated 1.2 million Jewish residents, the second-largest Jewish population in the United States after New York. Better data, they say, could help identify disparities in areas such as healthcare and education, as well as improve responses to antisemitic incidents.
The proposal has nevertheless opened a much broader discussion about what it means to be Jewish.
A complex identity
California already recognizes nearly 50 racial and ethnic categories for demographic purposes, but Jewish identity is currently recorded only as a religion.
Supporters of the bill say that approach fails to capture the cultural, historical and ancestral dimensions of Jewish identity. Jewish California, an advocacy organization that backed the legislation, argues that excluding Jewish ethnicity from official data can make social disparities harder to identify.
Political scientist Jeffrey Kopstein of the University of California, Irvine, said Jewish identity does not fit easily into the categories commonly used in the United States.
For some people, he noted, being Jewish is primarily religious. For others, it is connected to ancestry, culture or a sense of belonging to a broader Jewish people. Many secular Jews continue to identify strongly with their Jewish heritage despite having little connection to religious practice.
A 2021 Pew Research Center survey reflected that diversity. Around one-fifth of U.S. Jews said Jewish identity combines religion, ancestry and culture, while others primarily associated it with culture or ancestry. Only about 11% said it was mainly a religious identity.
Despite the relatively limited role of religion in the lives of many American Jews, roughly three-quarters said being Jewish was either very or somewhat important to them.
Concerns over a single category
Critics of the legislation say the proposed checkbox risks reducing a highly diverse population to a single ethnic label.
Rabbi Cat Zavis of Beyt Tikkun told a California legislative committee that Jewish communities have roots in regions including Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, with very different historical experiences.
She argued that placing all of those communities under one ethnic category could obscure important distinctions between them, including differences in migration, discrimination, privilege and cultural identity.
Stern, the bill’s author, says the system would still allow people to select multiple racial and ethnic categories, giving individuals the ability to describe themselves in more than one way.
For supporters, the fact that the identification would be voluntary is a central safeguard.
Historical fears over government records
The proposal has also revived particularly painful concerns about government data collection.
Some Jewish organizations and activists have pointed to the history of governments using official records to identify and target Jewish populations. During the Nazi era, information gathered through censuses, tax records and other administrative systems was used to help identify Jews who were subsequently persecuted and deported to concentration camps.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s Bay Area chapter warned that formally distinguishing Jews in government records could evoke that history and create risks at a time when antisemitism remains elevated.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025. Although that represented a decline from the previous year’s 9,354 incidents, the figure remained roughly five times higher than a decade earlier.
Opponents argue that adding Jewish ethnicity to government forms could potentially make Jewish residents more vulnerable if such information were ever misused.
A political debate about visibility
Stern says the legislation is ultimately about giving Jewish Californians greater control over how their identity is represented.
The Los Angeles Democrat has spoken publicly about experiencing antisemitism as a child, including classmates drawing swastikas on his belongings and antisemitic material appearing in his school newspaper.
He said those experiences made him aware of his Jewish identity at a young age, even though official forms gave him no opportunity to identify himself that way.
For Stern, that contrast is at the heart of the legislation: people should have the choice to identify themselves as Jewish when they want to, rather than having their identity defined by others.
The bill has therefore evolved beyond a question of statistics. Supporters see it as a way to improve representation and public policy, while opponents fear that an official ethnic classification could erase internal diversity or repeat historical mistakes.
The debate itself, Stern argues, reflects something fundamental about Jewish identity.
He says disagreement and discussion are deeply rooted in Jewish tradition — and hopes the new category can ultimately create a space where people with very different views can still agree that Jewish Californians should have the option to define themselves on their own terms.
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