You don’t have to be religious to be Jewish. The law hasn’t caught up

We are two Jewish men who wear yarmulkes, the skullcaps that mark us in public as religiously observant. Neither of us came to that easily or early; our connection to Jewish faith and ritual deepened over the course of our lives—ebbing and growing along the way—until each of us, in his own time, chose to cover his head.

But we were singled out as Jews long before we ever wore one. Antisemitism has never paused to ask whether a Jew believes in God or keeps the Sabbath—and neither do two Jews meeting for the first time, as that quiet flash of recognition passes between them. Faith is not what makes a person Jewish, in the eyes of our own community or in the eyes of those who would do us harm. You do not have to believe in God, keep kosher or ever set foot in a synagogue. Some of the most deeply, unmistakably Jewish people we know do none of those things, and they are no less Jewish for it.

Yet American law can see only the religious part of us. On government forms, “Jewish” is typically recorded as a religion—a matter of faith and practice. For the many Jews whose Jewishness runs through ancestry, culture and peoplehood, rather than belief, that box simply doesn’t fit. Judaism is a religion, yes. But Jewishness is also, and for many of us primarily, a people: a shared inheritance of ancestry, history, language, culture and belonging that does not depend on what a person believes.

That is the conviction behind a bill we are working to pass in California, Senate Bill 1387. It would ensure that when the state collects data on ethnicity, “Jewish” is one of the options a person can choose. It sounds technical. It is really about whether the government can see Jews as most of us actually are—a people—rather than as members of a faith that many of us don’t hold.

The numbers show how much the current approach misses. In surveys by the Pew Research Center, a majority of American Jews say religion is not central to what makes them Jewish: 52 percent point to ancestry and 55 percent to culture, while just 36 percent name religion. More than a quarter describe themselves as having no religion at all. File all of those people under “religion,” as California’s data systems effectively do, and you have miscounted—or missed outright—much of the community you meant to describe.

American law once understood the difference. A century ago, immigration officials recorded Jews not as a religion but as “Hebrews,” a people. Then Nazi race theory turned the classification of Jews into grounds for murder, and American Jewish leaders urged their own government to stop counting Jews as a race and to treat them purely as a religious group—safer, more assimilable, less exposed. It was an understandable choice, made under the shadow of catastrophe. But it wrote a misunderstanding into the statute books, collapsing an ancient and diverse people into a single narrow line. Jewish scholarship and communal life returned to the language of peoplehood long ago. The law never followed. (None of this, we should add, has anything to do with Israel or Middle East politics; it is a question of ancestry and culture, and of whom the state can see.)

And what the state cannot see, it struggles to serve. Because Jewish identity is filed under religion—something governments rarely track at all—Jewish Californians are largely absent from the data that shapes public policy. The gap is not abstract. There is almost no reliable data on cancer risk among American Jews, even though conditions from Tay-Sachs to certain BRCA-related cancers appear at elevated rates in Jewish populations; when Oregon began collecting Jewish ethnicity data in its health system in 2024, a Jewish cancer researcher led the effort because the numbers simply did not exist. California has spent 15 years building this kind of data collection for Asian American, Black, LGBTQ+, and Middle Eastern and North African communities—not to monitor them, but because a community the state cannot count is one whose needs go unmet.

We know that counting Jews carries a dark echo, and we do not take it lightly; some in our own community flinch at any effort to record who is Jewish. So it matters what this bill is, and is not. Identifying as Jewish under SB 1387 would be voluntary and self-chosen—no one is ever required to. The results would be published only in aggregate, as totals and shares, never as a list of names. There is no registry. There is the difference between being watched and being recognized.

We came to our own religious practice slowly and we treasure it. But the case for this bill has nothing to do with how we pray or whether we do. It is for the Jew who has never believed and never will, and who is no less part of our people for it. A government that files that person under “religion” will always miss them. If SB 1387 passes, California will become the first state in the nation to recognize Jewish identity as an ethnicity in law—a small change resting on a basic truth: you do not have to be religious to be Jewish, and it is long past time the law could tell.

Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) is a member of the California State Senate and the author of Senate Bill 1387. David Bocarsly is the CEO of Jewish California, the nation’s largest statewide coalition of Jewish organizations, and the organizational sponsor of SB 1387.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.