Are you Jewish? California considers asking on official state forms

This story was originally published in the Forward . Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Ever since the Holocaust demonstrated the danger of appearing on state registries, many Jews have been wary of self-identifying to the government.

But a bill racing through California’s state legislature would let Jewish people do just that — and it was a coalition of Jewish groups who proposed it.

California’s SB 1387 would mandate that any state agency collecting demographic data on ethnicity — whether on unemployment forms or college applications — add an option for Jewish ancestry.

Its supporters say the benefits of having data about the Jewish population will allow the state and Jewish community groups to better support them. The increase in antisemitic hate crimes during the Israel-Hamas war provided the initial thrust, according to California State Sen. Henry Stern, who introduced the bill.

“We were reaching for data that we didn’t have,” Stern told the Forward . “We had the data on hate crime incidents, but we didn’t have the demographic data to show that for such a small population with this number of incidents, you’ve got a…