{"id":95486,"date":"2022-06-08T17:05:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95486"},"modified":"2022-05-30T08:43:15","modified_gmt":"2022-05-30T06:43:15","slug":"30-05-67","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95486","title":{"rendered":"Are Jews a Race Under U.S. Law?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Are Jews a Race Under U.S. Law?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nEUGENE VOLOKH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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How the United States has attempted to settle the question of whether antisemitism is racism or mere animus<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

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\nLOU ROCCO\/DISNEY GENERAL ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT VIA GETTY IMAGE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Is being Jewish a race? A national origin? An ethnicity? A religion? All four?<\/span><\/p>\n

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The answer is: It\u2019s complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To begin with, in late 1800s America, \u201crace\u201d was often used<\/a> to include groups such as Jews, Arabs, Swedes, Italians, and the like. That\u2019s important, because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided that \u201cAll persons\u201d have the same rights \u201cto make and enforce contracts … and to the full and equal benefit of all laws,\u201d \u201cas is enjoyed by white citizens.\u201d And in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb<\/em> (1987), the Supreme Court held<\/a> that this covered discrimination against Jews (even though most of us would today be generally viewed as \u201cwhite\u201d) and not just against, say, Blacks or Asians:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[T]he question before us is not whether Jews are considered to be a separate race by today\u2019s standards, but whether, at the time [the Civil Rights Act of 1866] was adopted, Jews constituted a group of people that Congress intended to protect. \u2026 Jews and Arabs were among the peoples then considered to be distinct races and hence within the protection of the statute.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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This view of Jews as a race was also of course the view held by the Nazis as late as the 1930s and 1940s, but it was common even among non-antisemites in 1800s America\u2014the term \u201crace\u201d was often used more broadly then that it is now.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lower courts have naturally followed the Supreme Court on this, and \u201chave regularly found<\/a> that antisemitic harassment and discrimination amount to racial discrimination,\u201d at least under such post-Civil War statutes, which have also been read as covering employment discrimination. And courts have sometimes<\/a> imported this definition into more recent statutes, though not always.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These days, Jews, Arabs, and the like aren\u2019t usually labeled a \u201crace\u201d in America (though hostility to those groups is sometimes labeled \u201cracism<\/a>\u201d). As a result, where the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination based on race, it might not be understood as covering discrimination against Jews. But such modern statutes, including the 1964 act, also generally ban discrimination based on national origin and religion. If someone discriminates against Jews because he disapproves of their religious beliefs, that\u2019s prohibited religious discrimination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What if someone (like many antisemites) discriminates against all Jews, whether religious or secular? Some courts<\/a> say this is prohibited national origin discrimination, but others disagree<\/a>, reasoning that \u201cJews, like Catholics and Protestants, hail from a variety of different countries.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A 2010 letter from the Obama administration\u2019s Education Department<\/a> took the view that discrimination based on \u201cancestry or ethnic identity as Jews\u201d qualifies as national origin discrimination. Likewise, Donald Trump\u2019s 2019 Executive Order<\/a> says that such antisemitic discrimination may be illegal \u201cwhen the discrimination is based on an individual\u2019s race, color, or national origin,\u201d though it ultimately leaves it to the courts to resolve<\/a> whether discrimination against Jews really does qualify as national origin discrimination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cEthnicity\u201d is the most common modern American term for referring to this quality of being Jewish apart from religion, just as it\u2019s a common way to refer to being of Hispanic, Arab, or Italian extraction. Some modern antidiscrimination laws, such as the California constitutional provision<\/a> banning discrimination or preferential treatment in public employment, education, and contracting, indeed expressly prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity. But the federal antidiscrimination statutes don\u2019t mention ethnicity (though some courts have effectively equated national origin and ethnicity, covering discrimination against Hispanics<\/a> and thus, by implication, also discrimination against ethnic Jews).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So in most situations, discrimination against Jews in employment, hate crimes, and the like counts as illegal discrimination. If the discriminator is targeting people because of their Judaism, that\u2019s discrimination based on religion. If the discriminator is targeting people because of their Jewish ethnicity, that\u2019s discrimination based on race (under the post-Civil War statutes) or, often, national origin (under the more recent statutes), and sometimes ethnicity. And, of course, much antisemitic behavior targets Jews based on both their religion and ethnicity, in which case several of these laws might apply.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But every so often there are complications. For instance, religious institutions aren\u2019t barred from discriminating based on religion, but they are barred from discriminating based on race or national origin (at least as to their employees who don\u2019t teach religion); likewise, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which restricts discrimination based on race and national origin in federally funded programs\u2014including education\u2014doesn\u2019t cover religious discrimination. And the modern laws that ban national origin discrimination have particular procedural rules and damages provisions that the post-Civil War laws don\u2019t, so whether ethnic discrimination is labeled race discrimination or national origin discrimination might sometimes matter. This can lead to some complicated litigation, such as Bonadona v. Louisiana College <\/em>(2019), in which a religious college was allegedly<\/a> discriminating against the plaintiff (who had earlier converted to Christianity) because of his Jewish ethnicity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The court allowed Bonadona\u2019s race discrimination claim under the Civil Rights Act of 1866. But the court rejected Bonadona\u2019s claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because, \u201cUnder the canons of statutory construction, words should be given the meaning they had when the text was adopted. This canon was adhered to by the Supreme Court in Shaare Tefila Congregation<\/em>, when it noted that while Jews were a protected race in 1866, they are no longer thought of as members of a separate race.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What about national origin discrimination? The Bonadona court didn\u2019t deal with it, because Bonadona\u2019s lawyer hadn\u2019t mentioned it in his complaint<\/a>. And there was no talk of ethnicity\u2014again, likely because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn\u2019t expressly mention it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Incidentally, for whatever it\u2019s worth, here is what the Anti-Defamation League<\/a> had to say on the subject:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in both allegations against the College and the plaintiff\u2019s assertions in the lawsuit. According to a court filing, the administration was motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona\u2019s \u201cJewish blood\u201d and Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act\u2019s religious employer exemption by characterizing his \u201cJewish heritage\u201d as racial \u2026<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation\u2014regardless of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish \u201crace\u201d during the Holocaust.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Based on Congress\u2019 19th Century conception of race, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of \u201cnon-white races\u201d found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Italians. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these antiquated views. Although Mr. Bonadona\u2019s attorney certainly could try to bring claims under these 19th century laws, we believe that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews \u2026<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019m inclined to be skeptical about that; are such legal details likely to really affect public attitudes or stereotypes? In any event, the legal rule in the United States of 2022 is that discrimination against Jews based on their ethnicity rather than their religion is indeed \u201crace\u201d discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and it may also be discrimination based on \u201cnational origin\u201d under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Eugene Volokh<\/strong> is a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, and the co-founder of the law professor blog The Volokh Conspiracy<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Are Jews a Race Under U.S. Law? EUGENE VOLOKH How the United States has attempted to settle the question of whether antisemitism is racism or mere animus . LOU ROCCO\/DISNEY GENERAL ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT VIA GETTY IMAGE Is being Jewish a race? A national origin? An ethnicity? A religion? All four? The answer is: It\u2019s complicated. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95486"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95486"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95730,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95486\/revisions\/95730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}