SACRAMENTO, California (Press Release) — The California Legislature just passed Senate Bill 1387 (Stern), which recognizes Jewish identity as an ethnicity in California law and data. It is the sixth and final Jewish California-sponsored bill to clear the Legislature this session.
The Assembly passed SB 1387 on a 62-0 vote, with 17 abstentions, and the Senate concurred in the Assembly’s amendments 38-0, with 2 abstentions. Final counts are subject to change slightly by day’s end. The bill now goes to Governor Newsom, who has until September 30 to sign it into law. If he does, California becomes the first state in the nation to recognize Jewish identity as an ethnicity in statute.
This one was hard-fought. SB 1387 asked California to reconsider something its laws have treated as settled for most of a century, and it drew scrutiny from outside our community and searching questions from within it. It cleared every committee and both houses because Senator Henry Stern carried it with conviction, because the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and 59 Jewish organizations across the state stood behind it, and because thousands of you wrote, called, and showed up. Thank you.
Now urge the Governor to sign SB 1387 and our other priority bills →
WHAT IT DOES
Authored by Senator Henry Stern, SB 1387 requires that when a California state agency collects data on ancestry or ethnic origin, “Jewish” is one of the options a person can select. It also writes into the Education Code that ethnicity is inclusive of Jewish identity.
Answering is voluntary. People choose as many ethnicities as fit them, so Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Jewish Californians of color can identify however they see themselves, and Judaism remains wherever the state collects religion. The bill adds an option and removes nothing.
WHY THIS MOMENT MATTERS
According to Pew Research Center, over 50% of American Jews said ancestry and culture are essential to what being Jewish means to them, while 36% said religion. More than a quarter describe themselves as Jews of no religion. Yet California’s data systems have recorded us as a faith and nothing else, which means the majority of Jewish Californians have been describing themselves in a box that was never built for them. The state cannot see disparities it does not measure, cannot classify hate crimes motivated by ancestry when Jews are recorded only by faith, and cannot direct services to a community it cannot count.
There is also what happens when the public sees the fuller picture. A community generalized as a monolithic faith is easy to caricature. Complexity is the enemy of prejudice.
A BOX, NOT A LIST
Some in our community raised real fears about “lists of Jews.” Jews have good historical reason to flinch at the idea of a government writing down who is Jewish. So we added strong protections directly into the bill, on top of California’s already robust privacy laws – so that this data will be used for its positive intents only.
Everything published is aggregate, as counts and shares, never lists or individual records. Personal identifying information stays confidential, agencies must apply de-identification methods and suppress counts too small to be safe, and the statute itself bars the data from being used for any purpose other than demographic analysis, approved research, required reporting, identifying disparities, and guiding policy and funding decisions. The bill says in plain words that this is “not for the creation of a registry of individuals, not for law enforcement, and not for immigration enforcement.”
We’re using the same safeguards that other vulnerable California communities have applied in recent years as they expanded their data collection.
A CALIFORNIA BILL THAT BECAME A NATIONAL STORY
A question California has been working through for the past six months turned out to be one the country wanted to discuss. The New York Times ran it under the headline “Who Is a Jew? California Considers a Small Box With Big Implications.” The Hill, JTA, Jerusalem Post, The Forward, JNS, The Sacramento Bee, J. – Jewish News of NorCal, and LAist all took it up.
Our CEO David Bocarsly and bill author Senator Stern made the case together in Newsweek: you do not have to be religious to be Jewish, and it is long past time the law could tell.
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Preceding provided by Jewish California.