The Box We Cannot Check

There is a bill moving through the California legislature that, on its surface, sounds almost comically bureaucratic.

SB 1387 would require state agencies that collect ancestry or ethnicity data to allow people to identify themselves as having Jewish ancestry or ethnicity. It would also state explicitly in California law that “ethnicity” includes Jewish identity. The bill passed the state Senate 33–0 and, on August 13, cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee 11–0. It is now in the Assembly floor process.

It is, in the end, a checkbox.

I cannot stop thinking about it.

Because hidden inside that little box is one of the oldest questions the Jewish people have ever been asked to answer:

What are we?

A religion? A race? An ethnicity? A civilization? A nationality? A tribe? A family?

The honest answer, maddening for anyone trying to design a government form, is yes.

All of it.

And no single one of it.

For much of American Jewish history, we learned to describe ourselves primarily as a religion. It made sense in a country that understood Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The synagogue became our church, the rabbi our minister, Judaism one item on a menu of religious affiliation.

There was real wisdom in that adaptation. It helped us build an extraordinary Jewish life in America.

But something was lost in translation.

Because the Torah never described us primarily as a community of believers. It speaks about an am.

A people.

At Sinai, God does not hand a theology to a collection of individuals who happen to share certain opinions. God enters into covenant with a people:

V’atem tihyu li mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh.

“You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Long before anyone invented the modern vocabulary of race and ethnicity, Torah had already given us a self-understanding that resists them both.

We are B’nei Yisrael.

The children of Israel.

And the word children matters.

You can stop believing in God and remain a Jew. You can stop observing Shabbat and remain a Jew. You can walk away from every synagogue for the rest of your life and remain a Jew. You can spend decades arguing with the Jewish people and, in some peculiarly Jewish way, the argument itself may become evidence that you never quite left.

The Talmud gives the idea its famously stubborn formulation:

Yisrael, af al pi she-chata, Yisrael hu.

A Jew, even having sinned, remains a Jew.

Religion alone cannot explain that.

The data confirms what our tradition has always known. Pew found that American Jews were more likely to describe Jewishness as a matter of culture or ancestry than religion; only about one in ten said being Jewish was solely a matter of religion.

But there is an even more beautiful clue in the Book of Ruth.

When Ruth binds her fate to Naomi’s, she does not begin with theology.

Ameikh ami, v’Elohayikh Elohai.

“Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Notice the order.

Your people first.

Your God second.

Before Ruth makes a statement of faith, she makes a statement of belonging.

Perhaps it is one of the most Jewish sentences ever spoken.

And it also explains why “ethnicity,” while perhaps closer to the truth than “religion,” is not quite right either.

Judaism does something almost paradoxical: we inherit this identity, and yet someone can join it.

A convert does not simply adopt Jewish beliefs. She acquires ancestors. Abraham becomes her Abraham. Sarah becomes her Sarah. Sinai becomes her Sinai. At the seder table she does not say, “God brought your ancestors out of Egypt.”

She says:

God brought us out.

That is not how race works.

It is not quite how ethnicity works.

It is how covenant works.

And government forms were never designed to hold covenant.

Which is why I take seriously the discomfort some Jews feel about California’s proposal.

We have been counted before.

We have been sorted.

We have been entered onto registries and reduced to lines on government ledgers. We know, in a way that resides somewhere deeper than intellectual argument, how badly that can end.

When a government asks, “Are you Jewish?” some old Jewish alarm sounds.

That instinct deserves respect.

And the concern is not merely historical. The Forward spoke with John Abowd, a former chief scientist at the Census Bureau, who warned that aggregated demographic information does not automatically guarantee anonymity; sophisticated analysis can sometimes make individuals identifiable. At the same time, he noted that California has significant legal protections governing such information. Under SB 1387, personally identifying information would be confidential and publicly released data aggregated.

Those objections deserve an answer, not a dismissal.

But there is another danger we should be willing to name.

The danger of being invisible.

That is why this matters.

California lawmakers and Jewish advocates supporting the bill argue that the absence of demographic information makes it difficult to understand the Jewish community accurately. Senator Henry Stern has pointed specifically to antisemitic hate-crime statistics: the state could count incidents, but lacked population data that would help demonstrate what it means when a relatively small community absorbs a disproportionate number of them. Advocates also point to potential public-health applications involving conditions that disproportionately affect some Jewish populations, including Tay-Sachs disease and BRCA mutations, as well as educational questions and the economic diversity hidden behind stereotypes of Jews as uniformly white and affluent.

The point is larger than statistics.

The categories a society uses to see its citizens help determine who gets noticed and who gets missed.

And when Jews are understood solely as practitioners of a religion, antisemitism itself becomes harder to comprehend.

If Judaism is merely a faith, why does the atheist Jew remain a target?

If Jewishness is merely religious practice, why have antisemites obsessed for centuries over Jewish grandparents, Jewish surnames, Jewish families, Jewish blood and Jewish ancestry?

Hatred has rarely paused to ask its victim whether he kept Shabbat last week.

The antisemite has often understood something about Jewish peoplehood that liberal Western categories have struggled to articulate:

We are a people.

A civil-rights framework that can see us only as a congregation will inevitably miss part of what antisemitism is attacking.

And that is why you should care about a checkbox in California even if you will never fill out a California government form.

Because this is not ultimately a story about California.

It is about whether Jews are permitted to describe ourselves in the fullness of our own language.

For generations, American Jews became remarkably successful at translating ourselves into categories this country could understand. Judaism became our religion. Jewishness became a private affiliation. Israel became a foreign country toward which some American citizens happened to feel an emotional attachment.

None of that is entirely false.

It is simply incomplete.

And October 7 shattered that incompleteness for many of us.

Jews who had not entered a synagogue in years discovered that they had been attacked all the same.

Jews thousands of miles from Israel discovered that strangers held them personally accountable for what happened there.

Jews who had barely thought about their Jewishness suddenly felt grief for people whose names they did not know and whose homes they had never seen.

Something older than politics stirred.

Kinship.

We remembered, whether we wanted to or not, that before Judaism was an “ism,” Israel was a people.

A family.

I have written before about the political homelessness I have felt in the years since October 7—no longer entirely at home in the political party in which I was raised, while certainly not finding a complete home in the alternative. Increasingly I wonder whether that dislocation is incidental to this story.

Perhaps it is the same story.

Jews have rarely fit comfortably into the available boxes—religious, racial, ethnic, national or political—because we were never quite the kind of thing those boxes were built to contain.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, our sages taught.

All Israel is responsible for one another.

That teaching makes little sense if Jewishness is merely a private religious preference.

It makes perfect sense if we are family.

Families argue. Families disappoint one another. Families contain believers and atheists, liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, the devout and the estranged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim and Mizrahim and Ethiopian Jews and Jews whose very existence makes nonsense of every neat racial category America offers us.

But family means that another person’s fate can somehow become your own.

And this week, fittingly, we entered Elul. Today is 2 Elul, the beginning of the season of cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul.

Perhaps our accounting this year should include not only the ancient question Who am I?

Perhaps we should also ask:

Who are we?

And are we prepared to resist answers that are too simple?

I do not believe California’s checkbox can answer the question.

I am not sure any checkbox can.

At best, it can acknowledge one piece of the truth: that Jewishness does not begin and end at the synagogue door.

The rest cannot be captured on a government form.

The covenant.

The memory.

The strange ability of a Jew in Nebraska to mourn a Jew in Israel he never met.

The audacity of a convert to stand at the seder table and call the Exodus her own.

The words Ruth whispered to Naomi.

The generations who faced Jerusalem in prayer from places Jerusalem could not be seen.

The stubborn, inexplicable persistence of Am Yisrael.

California can give us a box.

Perhaps there are good reasons to check it.

But it should never become large enough to contain us.

We are a religion, and an ancestry, and a civilization, and a family, and something that exceeds all of those words.

We are Am Yisrael.

A people.

Still arguing over what that means.

Still responsible for one another.

And, after everything, still here.