The Indefinability of Jew
American law is caught in a bizarre identity crisis: It cannot define what a “Jew” is. As antisemitism soars, prosecutors and politicians sound alarms, but they can’t answer the basic question their laws require. Is a Jew a race? A religion? An ethnicity? All of the above? None? Hate-crime statutes demand clear subject classes—like Black, Woman, Gay, or Muslim. But “Jew” defies every legal box. If we can’t define the protected class, we can’t define the crime. And unless lawmakers solve this definitional black hole fast, America may discover that its antisemitism protections were built on sand.