(Jewish Group) What does it mean to be Jewish in the US?

When Zack Galifianakis asks Paul Rudd about his Jewishness in “Between Two Ferns: The Movie,” the actor responds with a quip.

“I’m not a practicing Jew,” he says with a smirk. “I perfected it.”

Rudd’s now widely referenced line nods to a sentiment felt by many Jews: There isn’t any one way to be Jewish. Judaism is one of the world’s oldest surviving religions. But Jewishness is more than that. Jews have shared customs, traditions and histories. People can be Jewish and secular. They can convert into the faith. There are Jews who consider themselves White and Jews who are people of color. At various points in time, the Jewish people have been characterized as a nation, an ethnicity and a race.

Trying to distill Jewishness into any one classification is unproductive – both because of how slippery these categories are to begin with and because Jews view their own identity in all kinds of different ways. But scholars and leaders who have spent time thinking about these questions generally agree that Jewishness is an expansive, intersectional identity that can’t quite be captured by a checkbox on a form. That’s especially the case in the US, where race is often discussed in Black and White terms and those outside the two categories are often overlooked.

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