Who is a Jew?

For the quantitative section I use the data sets from the 2013 Pew Research Center “Portrait of Jewish Americans” survey⁶ and the 2020 Pew Research Center “Jewish Americans in 2020” survey⁷ with an important departure from the published reports. I expand the analysis to include “Persons of Jewish Background,” meaning adults with at least one Jewish parent who (a) identified with a religion other than Judaism, (b) identified with Judaism and another religion, or (c) identified with no religion and said they did not consider themselves Jewish. This expanded definition closely corresponds to what Sergio DellaPergola has defined as the “Extended Jewish Population”⁸ and the “population of Jewish parentage.”⁹ I use these terms throughout to clarify that I am using a more expansive definition of who is a Jew. As I have argued elsewhere,¹⁰ an understanding of American Jewry is incomplete without considering those persons who fall outside the consensus of who is a Jew. The same perspective applies to Jews of Color because the majority of JOCs in both Pew 2013 and Pew 2020 were not classified as Jews, but rather as “Persons of Jewish Background” (henceforth, “PJBs”).

Following the approach followed by the Census, both Pew studies asked about race and Hispanic origin separately:

Are you of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban or Argentinian?

What is your race or origin? (Mark all that apply): White, Black or African American, Asian or Asian American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Some other race or origin.

In the two Pew studies, Hispanic origin takes precedence over race. The two Pew data sets coded as “Hispanic” anyone who answered yes to the Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin question regardless of how they answered the race question. Respondents who described themselves as Asian or Asian-American, Mixed Race, or Some other race were categorized as Hispanic if they had that origin, or as “Other, non-Hispanic” if they did not. In my analysis of the two Pew surveys, I define “Jews of Color” as all respondents who are NOT white OR of Hispanic origin, following Kelman^{Table 1). The biggest difference is the number of Black non-Hispanic respondents (139 in Pew 2013 and just 33 in Pew 2020). Thus, respondents of Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin make up a much larger proportion of the “Jews of Color” in the Extended Jewish population in Pew 2020 than in Pew 2013. Conversely, Black non-Hispanics make up a larger proportion of Jews of Color in Pew 2013 (fig. 1). This compositional difference may be reflected in some of the differences between JOCs in Pew 2013 and Pew 2020.}

Table 1: Number of unweighted cases for “race/ethnicity” in the extended Jewish population, Pew 2013 and Pew 2020

Source: Author’s analysis of the Pew 2013 and Pew 2022 datasets

The qualitative section draws on interviews from an ongoing study of adults who grew up in interfaith homes who have or had connections to the “Building Jewish Bridges” interfaith outreach program.¹³ As such, the participants are more Jewishly-oriented than the larger population of Jewish adults of mixed parentage. This is a study in progress (only about half the completed interviews have been coded) and is presented as a “proof of concept” that Jews of Color should also be understood in the larger context of Jews of mixed parentage.

Quantitative Perspective: Jews of Color in the Extended Jewish Population

Kelman et al. argue in Counting Inconsistencies^{Table 2). The Pew 2020 report shows that Jews of Color account for 8% of the NET Jewish population overall, and 15% of adults under thirty.15 Expanding the Jewish population definition to include Persons of Jewish Background (PJBs), increases the presence of JOCs to 23% of the Extended Jewish population as compared with 8% of the NET Jewish population (Table 3).}

Table 2: Pew Jewish category by race/ethnicity in the extended Jewish population, Pew 2013 Pew 2020

Source: author’s analysis of the Pew 2013 and Pew 2020 datasets

Table 3: Race/ethnicity by Jewish population definition, Pew 2020

Source: author’s analysis of the Pew 2020 dataset

Jews of Color have a greater presence in the Extended Jewish Population because of interfaith marriage. Table 4 shows that in all three of the Pew Research Center “Jewish Categories” JOCs are much less likely than white non-Hispanic Jews to have two Jewish parents in both the 2013 and 2020 studies.¹⁶

Table 4: Jewish parentage by Pew Jewish category and race/ethnicity in the extended Jewish population, Pew 2013 Pew 2020 (% with two Jewish parents)

Source: author’s analysis of the Pew 2013 and Pew 2020 datasets

As noted above, JOCs are more likely than “white” (non-Hispanic) Jews to be classified as PJBs. Looking only at PJBs, however (Table 4), the differences between the two ethno-racial groups are only minimal regarding the type of PJB. The distribution of JOCs over type of PJB closely resembles that of white non-Hispanic PJBs. The leading PJB sub-category for both white, non-Hispanic Jews and Jews of Color are “Christian Jews,” meaning respondents who identified with both religions and respondents who identified as Christian by religion and Jewish by ethnicity.¹⁷

Table 5: Detailed breakdown of PJB classification, PJB respondents only in Pew 2013 Pew 2020

Source: author’s analysis of the Pew 2013 and Pew 2020 datasets

Qualitative Perspective: Jews of Color as Jews of Mixed Parentage

Much of the recent discourse about Jews of Color has focused on lack of inclusion and experiences of rejection. Hahn Tapper et al. have argued that Jewish population surveys have ignored or only inconsistently included Jews of Color as a purposeful strategy to present Jews as white.¹⁸ I take a broader approach. Since most Jews of Color come from families with only one Jewish parent (“mixed parentage”), I compare their perspectives and experiences with those of white, non-Hispanic (henceforth “white”) Jews who come from similar families.

The qualitative interviews used in this analysis come from a study (in progress) of adults who grew up in interfaith homes. The study participants were recruited from “Building Jewish Bridges,” an interfaith outreach program in northern California run by my co-researcher, Dawn Kepler. The interviews were coded around emerging themes using the NVIVO qualitative data analysis system. I went back through the data to identify a dozen Jews of Color for comparison with white participants. JOCs stressed similar themes and reported comparable experiences as white (non-Hispanic) Jews. For JOCs these experiences are refracted and amplified through the American lens of race.

Authenticity

Participants reported experiencing two types of challenges to their Jewish authenticity. The first applies to persons with a non-Jewish mother who are not halachically Jewish.¹⁹ A participant with two white parents related:

Like it’s very common for people to ask me—I’ll say I’m Jewish—they’ll ask me if my mother’s Jewish and I’ll say no. And then they’ll say, well, you’re not really Jewish then. That happens to me all the time … And once people find out my mom’s not Jewish, like it’s amazing how many people actually will, you know, then feel the freedom to assert an identity on me, right.

Some study participants, including two Reform rabbis, related that they had been informed by non-Jews that they were not Jewish. Some patrilineal Jews simply converted so as not to have convince others they were Jewish: “I used to feel very compelled and like I needed to confess that my mom wasn’t Jewish. Since my conversion I don’t do that anymore.”

Participants were asked about whether their Jewish authenticity had ever been challenged because they didn’t “look Jewish” or because they have a distinctly non-Jewish surname (Irish or Italian, for example). Not all white Jews of mixed parentage experienced this, but the question did not seem odd to any of them, either. A participant who is unusually tall, very blond and has a French surname explained that they had encountered the “you don’t look Jewish” response so often that they had developed a strategy to avoid being questioned: “I just start with, ‘I’m Jewish,’ and see where the conversation goes.” Another blond participant explained that not “looking Jewish” could sometimes be an advantage for avoiding potentially unpleasant situations in the larger non-Jewish world:

And I would also say one of the advantages I had growing up is that I don’t necessarily look stereotypically Jewish, and neither does my brother, being blonde-haired and blue-eyed, especially in a place like where I grew up, was very normal, that if I would have looked a lot different, people might have acted a lot differently towards me.

A non-Jewish surname can mark someone whose authenticity can be questioned:

MacNamara is a super, super Irish name. So I would say that most people who aren’t Jewish read Irish in my name…. But the Jews know that I’m Jewish by my [Hebrew first] name.

Another respondent was pleased that her distinctly Hebrew first name served to mark her as Jewish in spite of a distinctly non-Jewish surname:

Yeah, for sure I feel like in some ways it’s been really helpful to me because it makes me feel insta-Jewish to have this [Hebrew first] name. Because people have said “Oh, is that your Hebrew name? What is your English name?” I really don’t have one. I don’t have a middle name—this is all I’ve got. It’s very much connected me to Judaism, even the definition of my name has connected to me to Judaism, in and of itself.

A different participant observed that their biblical first and last names made them visible to other Jews, but not necessarily to non-Jews:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I have an interesting name in that it’s a name that I think a lot of Jews will code it as sounding Jewish. But a lot of non-Jews won’t necessarily code it as Jewish.

A participant whose father had a distinctly Jewish surname kept that surname as her middle name when she got married, specifically so she would continue to be recognized as Jewish:

But what I think is interesting, when I got married to ——, I changed my middle name, … to [father’s Jewish surname], so that I would still have the Jewish name. I didn’t want to just be —— ——, which just sounds not Jewish. So it’s definitely [first name, father’s Jewish surname, husband’s non-Jewish surname].

In some situations, a distinctly non-Jewish surname can create obstacles to Jewish authenticity. A participant who had lived in Israel for an extended time recalled being regularly interrogated about the source of their last name:

I’m like, “Well, I come from everywhere. I’m truly American. My family is a melting pot.” My last name happens to be Scottish. My ancestry is from Scotland a million years ago it seems like.” So, I usually just say, “I’m so American I can’t even begin.”

Participants with a non-white parent²⁰ faced even further scrutiny because they “don’t look Jewish.” A participant with an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an African American father related that this regularly happens to them:

People make assumptions that I’m not Jewish, and if I tell them I’m Jewish, they make assumptions about how I’m Jewish. People assume I’m Ethiopian if I tell them I’m Jewish, or that I converted. Yeah, those are the two assumptions that happen.

Another participant with an Ashkenazi mother and African American father had developed a strategy for heading off questions before they arose: “You know, I think usually if I roll up kind of wearing a yarmulke or like a yarmulke and a tallis, like, and usually I don’t get any questions.”

A participant with a Japanese-born mother often encountered combined racial and patrilineal challenges because they did not look white: “Ugh, well, I don’t want to go there, because then I’m going to have to explain the whole thing and bring my mom’s conversion certificate and then they’re going to ask and what if they’re going to make me convert?” After joining a synagogue with a mixed-race rabbi this participant happily related that “[name of congregation] was the first one where I didn’t have to go through that,” because the rabbi is mixed-race and they noticed that immediately upon visiting the congregation for the first time; “And I saw Rabbi —— ——, and I didn’t know what she was, but I knew that she wasn’t, you know. a hundred percent white, so I was like, ‘I like this one. This is it; this is the one we’re going to join.’”

Bi-racial JOCs described a heavy emotional toll from these challenges of Jewish authenticity. A participant with a non-Jewish Chinese father did not face the halachic challenge, but reported many incidents of racial questioning:

Oh, well, people didn’t know, so they were forever asking me. And so, I always had to say what culture I was, and it was horrible. I hated it … You know, white people don’t get asked that all the time, so it was all of a sudden like, Oh, God, I do look different, you know, all the time. And people are looking at me because I’m the different one in the room.

A different participant with a Chinese father and Ashkenazi mother described being at a Jewish communal cocktail party event with her Ashkenazi mother where she met someone who knew her mother from Jewish communal circles:

Well, it was frustrating … And this woman who I didn’t know had come into the tent, and I guess she knew my mom, and she’s like, “Oh, how do you know the people here?” And I said, “Oh, that’s my mom,” and she said, “Oh, that’s so interesting,” and I said, “What do you mean by interesting?” I’d had a few cocktails. She said, “Oh, I don’t know, I just didn’t know that was your mom. And is that your sister?” And she points to this Mexican girl that happened to be there too. And I was like, “No, we’re not even of the same ethnic background,” and she said, “Oh, well, what are you guys?” And I just kind of walked away; I said, “This discussion is so over,” I was so upset…. And I felt like here we are, we’re having cocktails, we’re having a nice party, and I get singled out as the person that looks different, and then lumped in with … the other person that looks different. It was really bad, and it was very frustrating.

This same JewAsian went on to describe having to remind a good friend that they were Jewish as well as Asian:

Actually, just the other day my friend ——, from college, she called me and she’s like, “Hey, how was your Easter?” I was like, “I’m Jewish. Remember?” … It kind of irritated me a little bit. It’s like, we went to college, and we were good friends for five years, and you’re going to ask me how is my Easter, what is that?

Yet another participant whose father was Chinese described always being on edge in synagogues.

I really do feel uncomfortable. I never felt uncomfortable with [congregation where they grew up]. But when I’m going into a new place, I tend to feel a little bit on guard, it’s like I think that people think that I shouldn’t be there. That’s what it’s about.

This participant struggled with this sense of being an outsider and observed that they felt less self-conscious after becoming a regular part of a synagogue community:

But you can’t go in thinking “I wonder if people are wondering why I’m here.” And I still have that. I mean, obviously if join [current congregation] and then everyone there knows you’re Jewish, it’s very different, you know, once you have a community.

An African American informant reported a particularly humiliating experience in an unfamiliar synagogue in a new city when the rabbi assumed they were the child of the synagogue cleaning woman:

So I went to a synagogue, a very big, well-known synagogue…. The way I found it was I called a bunch of synagogues and tried to find one that would let me go to the High Holidays for free or for less than having to join the shul or pay full price for tickets. And so I found this one, and I went, and as I was on the receiving line shaking hands at the door the rabbi said to me, Oh my gosh, are you Mary’s daughter? You’ve gotten so big. And I just looked at him with a blank stare. And he said something like, Mary, you know she works really hard for us, we’re really happy to have her. And I just looked at him, and I said, Who is Mary? And he’s like, Aren’t you Mary, our cleaning lady’s daughter? And I said, No, I’m not. I’m here to celebrate the High Holidays. He kind of looked a little embarrassed, but didn’t say anything, and I left and stayed away from Judaism again for a few years. I just felt really shitty, excuse my language, that when I tried to go for High Holidays that someone made an assumption based on my skin color that I was the cleaning lady’s daughter; it was really upsetting. So I left, and again stayed away for a few years.

Connecting with Non-Jewish Relatives

All the participants in the qualitative study, by definition, have non-Jewish relatives and at least a potential connection with the religious and/or cultural heritage of their non-Jewish parent. An important emergent finding from this qualitative study is that family connections create an identity that is simultaneously Jewish and not Jewish. For example:

My heritage has this whole other, you know, Scottish, English, French Canadian mash-up, now plus German, going forward … I want to honor these other people in my life and that’s why I connect so well with my aunts who are non-Jewish, my cousins who are non-Jewish. Sometimes I look at them and I think like, wow, there are like these beautiful blonde girls that don’t have anything to do with Judaism, those are my people too. Like, those are my blood cousins.

Many of the white participants had little or no connection with their non-Jewish extended family. This came about for different reasons. In some cases, they lived too far away from the non-Jewish side of the family. In other cases, the non-Jewish parent was distant or even alienated from their family of origin. In still other cases, the non-Jewish parent, having committed to raising their child(ren) exclusively Jewish, wanted to minimize contact with Christian relatives. One of the important emergent findings from this study was a desire to be more connected with non-Jewish family. A participant raised exclusively Jewish yearned to connect with the other half of their dual heritage:

You know, like how can my dad deny me this half of my family that I adore? I guess I do feel like just a much lesser, that I feel like a mixture, and that I don’t know what it looks like, like the non-Jewish part or whatever, but I just feel like—I feel false if I try to be just Jewish. That doesn’t feel right either because I keep thinking about these other family members and how close we are and them not being Jewish, so I just walk this weird line between these two families.

A different participant felt deprived by not learning about the Quaker philosophy practiced by their mother’s family:

I sometimes feel bummed out that I didn’t get educated in the ways of like Quaker philosophy and stuff that I sort of missed that. Like no one dared, you know, tell me anything about any other part of my heritage…. I’m curious about what all this other stuff is and I don’t really know what it is and it wasn’t really presented to me, so I don’t really know, I just know that it’s not Jewish.

A Black participant felt similarly deprived for not having experienced Christmas. They had recently sought out their Black family during Christmas as a way to learn more about this common American holiday that was not experienced in their interracial Jewish family of origin. In this regard they were like white participants in trying to become familiar with something they had missed as a child. Interestingly, the emphasis was on Christmas as an American experience, not as a specifically Black experience:

I spent Christmas with my dad’s side of the family, like on my own, a couple days ago, like without my dad. Like as an adult, just ‘cause I wanted that experience. And that was actually really nice. And I’d never really celebrated Christmas so I learned a lot. It was really cool.

A participant with a Chinese father lamented their lack of knowledge about their father’s culture:

And my dad also took no steps to kind of teach me about anything Chinese, so it was fine. I think it came after college. It was like, “You never taught me anything.” And he’s like, “Well, now you’re older. You can teach yourself.” I’m like, “That’s not the point. You’re missing the point.” … I think that’s also why I gravitated towards the Judaism, because there was really nothing else presented to me as a place to, you know—or something to identify with.

Participants who had been exposed to both sides of their cultural and religious heritages generally felt it was an advantage:

Well, I think one of the advantages is that you’re exposed to different perspectives. I think it just can give you insight into religion…. You’re not raised totally surrounded by just one religion and total faith in that religion. I think, you know, it might make you more sort of questioning of religion as an adult, which I see as an advantage because it just gives you a greater sort of critical capacity to think about religion.

Another participant similarly opined that having two heritages made them feel special:

I may have felt like, I think I actually, most of the time, felt really special, like I was even more special because of my two backgrounds. I never thought of it as a negative. I don’t remember ever having people at the Baptist church say anything negative or anything like that. So very positive. Yeah.

Other participants experienced dual heritage as a liability. A participant with one Jewish and one Asian parent felt marginal to both groups. Participants with a non-Jewish Asian parent were typically the children or grandchildren of an immigrant and thus only a generation or two away from the country of origin. A participant whose mother was raised within Japanese culture in Hawaii was sent to both Hebrew school and Japanese school, but did not feel fully at home in either setting:

So, I went to Japanese school every week too [in addition to Hebrew school]. We would go to Little Tokyo at least once a week to do Japanese things. I don’t know really what that was. But I got to go to the Hello Kitty store. My, what else? I don’t know. Just anything that wasn’t Jewish, was Japanese. So, I just really wanted to be American. That was like my whole thing was like, “When do I just get to be regular?”

At Japanese school this participant found themselves dangling between cultures in how they were perceived: “Everybody there was Japanese. There were absolutely no white kids at all. I was the only one. And it’s funny, ‘cause in Japanese school I was the white kid, but in every other school I was the Japanese kid.” Another participant with a Vietnamese father also found themselves between racial-social worlds. Their Asian family regarded them as Jewish and not Asian while white people they interacted with saw them as Asian:

I would say, Jews I think accept me as their own, more readily than the Asians do. Even specifically Vietnamese. And it’s not that they don’t accept me. It’s just there’s something more, maybe Jews are just generally more like welcoming than other people, or at least the ones I hang out with or am around. And eventually, you know, ‘cause I know Jewish culture a little better, that’s probably a big part of it. And I am Jewish, but people would often, people who don’t know me, or don’t know me too well, or people that aren’t Jewish or Asian are always, probably be quicker to think of me as being Asian than as being Jewish.

The JewAsian participants had similar experiences as the white participants but experienced them more acutely because of the immigrant experience of the non-Jewish parent. As the white participant said above, their non-Jewish family connection was with distant European backgrounds “a million years ago it seems like.” The non-Jewish roots of Jewish-Asian participants, by contrast, were only a generation or two away. White participants might experience their extended family’s Christianity as distantly foreign; JewAsian participants experienced their non-Jewish Asian family as literally foreign. The JewAsian participant who regretted not being exposed to Chinese culture sounds a lot like the white participant who wished they had learned about the Quaker religion of their mother’s family. Whether they experienced it as an advantage or a liabity, both white and JOC participants were accutely conscious of having two distinct cultural and religious heritages.

Because the “one-drop rule” is deeply ingrained in American society, even more than half a century after passage of the Civil Rights Act, two African American participants that came from Jewishly involved homes also reported being raised Black as well as Jewish:

I think our parents raised me to be really proud of my identity both the black identity and the Jewish identity…. I think they were raising me to be like really proud of those things and their introspections. And I was oftentimes also learning about like great black historical figures and sages and great Jewish historical figures that like made changes for the positive in the world. And I think I was like learning those things pretty regularly as well…. You know, my dad would always kind of give me biographies of great black heroes that I should read about. I grew up reading about like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Malcolm X and kind of all of these different figures, learned that like being black was hard, but it was something to be proud of.

He [father of participant] would talk about it[being Black] generally from a historical standpoint: Martin Luther King, and Jesse Jackson, and that type of thing. We talked about kind of figureheads a lot, and he did talk to me about being treated differently because I was African American, like I said if I came in third place he’d say, “That’s because you’re black. You were really the best but they didn’t give it to you because you’re black.” He would say that kind of thing a lot, definitely. Or if I came home with a B he would say, “You need to get an A because you’re black, and if you want to go to college you have to work harder than other people,” that kind of thing. So, there was definitely a lot of talk about inequities amongst the races.

For both white and JOC participants, American and Christian holidays were occasions for contact with their extended non-Jewish family. White participant often described Christmas as their main contact with their non-Jewish extended family and sometimes with their Jewish family as well:

So everybody in my family celebrates Christmas. Both sides, Jewish and the Irish side both celebrate Christmas.

Thanksgiving is a second family holiday that often brings adults of mixed Jewish parentage together with non-Jewish family. A Latino participant who had lived in Israel and served in the IDF cited Thanksgiving as the one time they got together with the Hispanic side of the family. A Black participant considered Thanksgiving to be a specifically Black holiday experienced with non-Jewish relatives:

Thanksgiving is a big holiday for Black people. Yeah, so Thanksgiving was like the big one for my dad’s family. That’s where we really like made the effort. Not really the other ones…. But, yeah, no, I mean, in theory it’s pretty much just not Jewish.

Seeing non-Jewish family largely depended on where the extended family lived. For JewAsian participants most of the Asian relatives lived overseas. As a result, one participant reported being much closer to Jewish family because Asian relatives were too far away to visit.

Religious pressure from Christian relatives

A few white and JOC participants reported experiencing pressure to be Christian from family members. A white participant described their divorced father taking them back to his home community where they would go to church with the father’s family. A participant whose Black father had grown up in a Jehovah’s Witness family described being proselytized by an aunt:

So, my Aunt is definitely a Jehovah’s Witness … my aunt came to like stay with me for a couple of weeks after the surgery because I couldn’t be on my own…. And every day she talked to me about Jehovah, and Jesus, and that type of thing. And I was kind of like a captive audience because I couldn’t really tell her to go away because I couldn’t do anything for myself.

Reinforcing Black Identity

Participants with a non-Jewish Black parent were hyper-aware of race. One such participant described an experience similar to that of mixed-race young people in general: which box do I check on the Census? The white mother said racial identification was up to the individual. The Black father said there was no choice at all:

I remember going home and asking my parents what box do I check? … And my [white] mom gave me a great answer. My mom said, … let me explain to you the kinds of identities … which basically means, how close you feel connected to a particular identity at any given point in time. And someone who has many identities, you have the right to identify how you want to identify along your different identities depending on your mood and your situation. So some days you want to identify as black, you’re welcome to. And some days you want to identify as other, or as mixed, then you’re welcome to, or you are as white, you’re welcome to. You can check whatever box you want as long as it is true to yourself. And that’s what my mom told me, you know. And then I was like, I’m going to ask my dad. I was like, “Okay, Dad, like, you know, what box should I check?” And my dad said, “You check black. You check the black box.” (LAUGHS) You check black only.