California May Add 'Jewish' as Ethnicity

El-Sayed's rally partners wouldn't say the name Hasan Piker. Campaigning with Reps. Jamie Raskin and Debbie Dingell in Michigan on Wednesday, nobody on stage mentioned the streamer who's backed the Senate candidate. Dingell told reporters not to ask her about him again; El-Sayed called him "a streamer in California." ¹

Nearly every Senate Democrat asked Netanyahu to rein in West Bank settlers. A letter led by Sens. Schiff, Schumer and Booker cites nine American citizens killed by settler violence and calls for prosecutions and a settlement freeze. Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman didn't sign. ²

A new AJC report says Germany's AfD built antisemitism into its platform. The party leans on coded terms like "globalist elites," a Great Replacement narrative starring George Soros, and Holocaust remembrance dismissed as a "cult of guilt," per political scientist Lars Rensmann. ³

California state Sen. Henry Stern, with Sen. Ben Allen and Assemblymembers Marc Berman and Josh Lowenthal, introduced SB 1387, which would add "Jewish" as an ethnicity option on state forms: school enrollment, unemployment claims, prison intake, anywhere an agency collects voluntary demographic data. It includes de-identification rules and wouldn't take effect until 2030. The Assembly has until Monday to vote; the governor would then have until Sept. 30 to sign or veto. ⁴

The case for it: more than half of American Jews describe their Jewish identity through ancestry and culture, not religion, so classifying Jews as solely a religious group leaves gaps in how the state tracks hate crimes and civil-rights complaints. David Bocarsly, who runs the group Jewish California, put it plainly: "When state law misrepresents us and puts us in this box of just a religion, there are a number of implications." ⁴

The case against: Jewish Voice for Peace chapters call the ethnicity label "factually wrong," and UC Berkeley demographer Joshua Goldstein warned the data California collects isn't always de-identified in practice, so a "Jewish" checkbox becomes a list of Jews for whoever gets the database. ⁵

Both sides are really arguing about who gets to say what a Jew is, and what happens to that answer once a government owns it. ⁴⁵

Johnny Knoxville's next movie is set at Jewish sleepaway camp. "Tiny Fugitives," out Sept. 18, follows a pack of 12-year-old boys scheming to make camp never end, with Knoxville playing Bob, the fifty-year-old lifer counselor standing in their way. Kveller's early read: it gets Color War and a mock wedding, chuppah and tallis included, right in a way most camp movies don't bother with. Benjamin Pajak and Aaron Harris lead the kid cast; Michael Lewen, who produced "Trainwreck" and "The King of Staten Island," directs. ⁶

Same money funded a neo-Nazi's congressional campaign and some of the country's most prominent anti-Israel progressives. Dan Bilzerian lost his Florida primary by 39 points running an ad that praised Hitler; new reporting shows Georgia attorneys Rawan and Ibrahim Awad gave his campaign $25,303 combined, while Ibrahim separately wrote checks for $7,000 to Abdul El-Sayed and $4,000 to Cori Bush. Former CAIR Florida director Hassan Shibly sent Bilzerian $12,000 and used to back Ilhan Omar. ⁷

These donors don't agree on party or policy. They agree that opposing Israel is worth a check, and they'll write it to a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi as fast as to a progressive favorite. That's our opinion: antisemitism isn't a left problem or a right problem. It's whichever wallet is closest. ⁷

Germany is building its first foreign military base since World War II, and it landed in the Lithuanian forest where about 400 Jewish partisans hid out and sabotaged Nazi convoys after escaping the Vilnius ghetto. Five thousand German soldiers move in this fall. The eight surviving bunkers sit behind "Dangerous area" signs now, reachable only with military clearance. Lithuania's Ministry of Culture won't grant the site heritage protection either, arguing the bunkers "aren't located at their original sites" and crediting the resistance mostly to Soviet partisans instead. A guide who used to lead tours there, Aušra Mikulskienė, said it's "becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest." ⁸

Hero: Dana Nessel. Michigan's attorney general, its first Jewish one, said on a podcast with The Atlantic's David Frum what her own party mostly wouldn't: Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's "hurt people hurt people" response to March's attack on Temple Israel read to her as "making excuses for somebody who sought to murder over 100 pre-K school children." She's still never voting Republican; asked about backing Mike Rogers instead of El-Sayed, she said she'd "amputate my right arm" first. A Democrat criticizing her own party's nominee by name, six weeks out. ⁹

Villain: Hasan Piker. He's the streamer El-Sayed's own surrogates spent Wednesday's Michigan rallies avoiding by name, the one who told American Jews on a recent stream: "If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going to come around and take action... against American Jews." A warning to American Jews, delivered with a shrug. ¹

Parashat Ki Tavo, 15 Elul. It's the portion with the bikkurim first-fruits ritual, plus the long list of blessings and curses for keeping or breaking the covenant. Selichot, the penitential prayers that count down to Rosh Hashanah, start a week from tonight. ¹⁰¹¹¹²