Who is a Jew of Color? It depends who you ask

Jews have been categorizing and counting ourselves since Bamidbar, when we were counted, sorted and organized by gender, age, and tribe. In Biblical eras, we counted and sorted ourselves to build armies and assign land. Centuries later, in 1790 in the United States, the census tradition began, and since 1899’s first American Jewish Year Book (AJYR), American Jews have been categorizing, sorting and counting the US Jewish community.

For Jews, and Jewish Americans specifically, counting and learning about who we are counting is a powerful and purposeful technology hardwired into communal life. According to historians Jonathan Sarna and Jonathan J. Golden, the AJYR is an “Annual Record of American Jewish Civilization,” serving as a preeminent resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners at Jewish institutions, the media (both Jewish and secular), educated leaders and lay persons, libraries, and more.

These population study endeavors have also led to important undertakings in the Jewish community, demonstrating the power of demographic data in driving communal action. In 1988, for example, the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), the precursor to the Jewish Federations of North America, recognized “significant changes have taken place…in the social, demographic and religious structure of the American Jewish community …”, and commissioned the 1990 National Jewish Population Study (NJPS). After the NJPS identified signs of eroding Jewish identity and commitment to Israel, key philanthropists and leaders coalesced to found the transformative Birthright Israel initiative.

A counterpart to the NJPS, the American Jewish Population Project (AJPP) launched in 2010 to help provide reliable demographic population and characteristic estimates of the US Jewish community, providing foundational demographic data for every contemporary demographic study of US Jews. As a practice, the AJPP uses US Census population estimates to inform their data. Since 1790, when Jews began participating in the U.S. Census, U.S. Jewish racial identity has been forced into a construct framed by the concept of Whiteness, requiring the full diversity of individuals present in the country to be reduced to three categories: “free white people”, “all other persons”, and “slaves.” AJPP followed a similar three-category blueprint in 2010, using the three categories of “White non-Hispanic,” “Hispanic”, and “other non-Hispanic.” This is an identifiable limitation of the study.

How We Count Ourselves Today

These past demographic research efforts bring us to 2025, when questions around race and identity are more expansive than ever. The Jews of Color Initiative, a national leader in opening communal space for racially and ethnically diverse Jews, has been critiquing and making meaning of communal demographic studies and data since our 2019 study, Counting Inconsistencies, a systematic meta-analysis of best-in-class Jewish population studies. That study, which analyzed available data to approximate the number of Jews in the United States who do not align with the categories of white and Jewish, posited that at least 12-15% of American Jews could fit into another category: Jews of Color. The study also revealed previous studies’ pedagogical and research inconsistencies that likely resulted in a systematic undercounting of many Jews, including Jews of Color—such as the AJPP’s limited racial categories.

When we released Counting Inconsistencies, we noted that the available community data was limited and flawed, setting off a six-year (and counting) Jewish communal debate about who gets to engage in discussions about Jewish self-identity and demography. Counting Inconsistencies energized a collective of communal researchers who frequently critique the Jews of Color Initiative for examining existing data through new lenses. They critique the Stanford-based research team that critically analyzed other peoples’ data and opened what should be a constructive conversation about data quality. Their critique extended to the term “Jews of Color” itself, despite the fact that none of the researchers who have publicly criticized Counting Inconsistencies identify as a Jew of Color. It’s also worth noting that none of these critiques are directed at the best-in-class demographers responsible for the flawed and inconsistent data at the center of the debate.

While we welcome the robust dialogue, an important point seems to have been strategically omitted from the communal conversation: even the best-in-class communal researchers acknowledge that demographic analyses are inherently limited and flawed. The 1990 NJPS Survey viewed its work as not more than “a still frame photograph” subject to “errors” associated with their use of the population sample to “represent the entire universe of American Jewry”. In 2003 Mark Schulman, founding partner of Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, a prominent polling firm, also critiqued the survey as likely undercounting the number of Jews.

The American Jewish Population Project, which informs every US Jewish communal demographic study, also has structural limitations, as its data does not interact with characteristics of race or ethnicity. This has led even the most esteemed research teams to seriously qualify their own work. A Blueprint for our Future: The 2022 San Diego Jewish Community Study, conducted by the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies (CMJS) at Brandeis University, for example, built the study’s population estimates based on the AJPP to inform “the best planning decisions.” However, the study’s Limitations section notes, “Due to the methodology used to reach community members, some groups were likely to have been undercounted and/or underrepresented.”

It is critical that communal leaders at every level have access to essential, up-to-date, accurate data about the composition and size of the US Jewish population. Just as the Council of Jewish Federations determined in 1988 that “significant changes” in the American Jewish community warranted a new study, for the past six years the Jews of Color Initiative has spotlighted who communal data leaves out. We wonder out loud, how can communal leaders plan for our community of the future if our essential planning tools do not interact with the diversity of our community?

Who Decides Who a Jew of Color Is?

In Moment Magazine’s the Jewish Word | Jews of Color The power—and limitations—of a porous term, author Sarah Breger wonders out loud, “does the term ‘Jews of color’ remain useful?” Rachel Sumekh, Iranian-American, Mizrahi Jew and founder of Swipe Out Hunger, which addresses food insecurity among college students, is legally classified as white but ‘when it comes to moments in life, someone can label me very differently from what a form says I am.’ Sumekh identifies as a Jew of color and finds it odd that people assume she would rather be considered white. Her identity, she says, ‘is much more nuanced. That’s why I love the phrase ‘Jews of color,’ she explains. ‘It creates a sense of solidarity and support.'”

In Why I Am Not a Jew of Color: On Jewish peoplehood and resistance to assimilation, Mijal Bitton, a self-described “immigrant from South America with Middle Eastern ancestry, brown skin, an accent, and personal experiences of racialization,” who has “encountered racial bias in grocery stores and Jewish institutional settings alike” has a different perspective. “As a non-white Jew,” she states, “I don’t identify as a Jew of color because the term often feels more focused on ‘white’ Jews than on people like me.”

The term “Jews of color” entered the canon in 2001 when Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends published an issue titled “Writing and Art by and for Jewish Women of Color.” Journal editor Shahanna McKinney-Baldon encouraged use of the term as a way for people to tell their stories, think critically about identity, and “have conversations about things like the personal and political significance of labeling oneself and being labeled.”

In 1000 BCE, the 12 Tribes of Israel in the Land of Canaan were not White

In 70 CE, when the Romans conquered the Second Temple and Jerusalem, the majority of Jews left the land known today as Israel/Palestine and scattered across the globe in Diaspora. In Diaspora, there was no Central Temple and no single leader to whom all Jews turned for religious direction. Jewish migrants made home in North Africa, Spain, Italy, Asia, the Balkans and the Americas. Diaspora is not a single event, but a social-political context. The cyclical nature of dislocation, relocation and adaptation also further complicates the evolution of Jewish identities.

These physics of diaspora instilled a global phenomenon of Jewish communal adaptive diversity, not only allowing for, but ensuring that, particularly when under threat, the Jewish people are able to seamlessly adapt to our regional, cultural and communal contexts. Once the 12 Tribes of Israel, contemporary expressions of this adaptive diversity include Bnai Israel, Beta Israel, Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews.

The term Jews of Color, like Bnai Israel, Beta Israel, Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Jews, is a communal technology which enables Jewish communal cohesion, camaraderie and awareness of our distinctive cultural adaptations in a diasporic context. While impermanent and imperfect, the term helps Jews who also identify as People of Color to find ourselves and each other. Yoshi Silverstein, Executive Director of the Mitsui Collective, speaks poignantly and purposefully about the term Jews of Color: “It’s a way to uplift the identities and the experiences of people of color in the Jewish community and to push the Jewish community to recognize how multiracial we are.” Someday, Silverstein hopes, Jews of Color “will be so commonly understood that if you’re talking about Jews, you’re talking about a multiracial community, that we won’t need ‘Jews of Color’ in the same way.”