A familiar argument now circulates in Jewish and pro-Israel spaces: Judaism is not a religion.
People say it for understandable reasons. Many Jews who do not believe in God still regard themselves as Jews. Many who rarely set foot in synagogue still feel bound to Jewish history, Jewish family, Jewish memory, and the fate of other Jews. Antisemites have never cared whether their targets were observant. And modern liberal categories, especially in the English-speaking world, often feel too narrow to describe a civilization that contains prayer, law, ancestry, argument, food, language, exile, homeland, and peoplehood.
So the slogan points at something true.
Still, it becomes misleading when it is stated too cleanly. Judaism is not only a religion. But it is also plainly a religion. The better answer is not either-or. It is both-and, plus a few other things.
Why the "not a religion" line resonates
The strongest argument for the slogan is not theoretical. It is descriptive.
Pew Research Center's major 2020 survey of U.S. Jews found that 27% of Jewish adults are "Jews of no religion." In Pew's terms, these are people who identify religiously as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, but still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion and have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish. Among younger Jewish adults, the share is even higher.
That tells you immediately why many Jews resist a narrow religious definition.
If Jewish identity disappeared the moment belief weakened, large parts of the Jewish world would vanish from the picture. But they do not vanish. They show up at Passover seders, argue about Israel, worry about antisemitism, marry other Jews or don't, inherit family stories, cook Jewish food, support Jewish institutions, and often feel implicated in Jewish fate even when they reject theology.
In ordinary life, many Jews already live as if Jewishness cannot be reduced to creed.
History reinforces the point. Jews existed for long stretches without sovereignty, often without shared vernacular, and with enormous variation in practice. Yet they remained a recognizable collective. Modern race science, Christian anti-Judaism, and nationalist antisemitism all treated Jews as a people, not merely as members of a faith community who could disappear into private belief.
That is why the slogan keeps returning. It answers a real pressure point.
Why calling Judaism only a people is also incomplete
The problem comes when the correction becomes an overcorrection.
The National Library of Israel describes Judaism as a broad and diverse set of traditions, beliefs, perceptions, and values shared by the Jewish people. It adds that Jewish identity was long based largely on religious faith, even as nationality and culture became stronger bases of identity from the eighteenth century onward.
That is a better starting point than the slogan. It does not flatten Judaism into belief alone. But it also does not pretend religion is optional to the definition.
Judaism includes God-language, sacred text, commandments, prayer, festivals, law, and ritual obligations. Shabbat is not just ethnic nostalgia. Yom Kippur is not only group memory. Kashrut, mourning, marriage, Torah reading, and liturgy all developed within a religious framework, even when Jews observe them selectively or reinterpret them.
The old texts show the overlap clearly.
Ruth's declaration to Naomi is one of the classic Jewish formulas of belonging: "Your people shall be my people and your God my God." The verse binds collective identity and religious commitment in one sentence. Rabbinic tradition later built conversion law around that dual structure. In Yevamot 47b, the Talmud describes the process for a person who comes to convert, including acceptance of commandments and entry into the people of Israel. In Kiddushin 68b, rabbinic law treats Jewish status as a matter of communal boundary, not private opinion.
In other words, classical Judaism did not separate membership, law, and faith into tidy modern boxes.
That is why the phrase "Judaism is not a religion" sounds sharper than it really is. It imports a modern debate into a much older civilization and then pretends only one side of the inheritance is real.
The civilization argument is stronger
If the slogan is too blunt, what language works better?
One useful answer comes from Mordecai Kaplan and Reconstructionism. Reconstructing Judaism still describes Judaism as "the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people." The phrase matters because it preserves the religious core while making room for much more than religion.
Kaplan's point was not that religion was irrelevant. It was that Jewish life also includes language, literature, music, ethics, land, politics, memory, and communal structures. Reconstructing Judaism says plainly that "the religion of Judaism is centrally important and it is not the entirety of the Jewish experience." That formula gets closer to how many Jews actually live.
It also helps explain why the same person can be secular in belief, deeply Jewish in identity, and still drawn to Jewish ritual or text. Judaism can operate as worship, law, kinship, inherited memory, minority culture, moral vocabulary, and peoplehood at the same time.
Modern Zionism added another layer. Once Jews re-entered history as a sovereign majority in a Jewish state, nationality and collective power became unavoidable parts of the conversation. But even that did not erase the religious dimension. Israeli public life still runs on Jewish calendars, Jewish symbols, Jewish texts, and disputes about Jewish law.
So the better claim is not that Judaism is not a religion.
It is that Judaism exceeds religion.
Why the categories keep breaking down
Part of the confusion comes from the word "religion" itself.
In modern Western usage, religion often means a private set of beliefs plus voluntary worship. That model fits some Protestant assumptions better than it fits Judaism. Jewish life has never been only about assent to doctrine. It is also about practice, law, collective memory, family lines, communal norms, sacred time, and a long argument about how a people should live.
Once religion gets defined too narrowly, Jews understandably reject the label.
But there is no need to solve the problem by discarding the religious dimension altogether. Better to admit that English categories only get you so far. Judaism is a religion, but not only a religion. It is a people, but not only a people. It is a culture, but not only a culture. In Kaplan's language, it is a civilization. In older Jewish language, it is the life of Am Yisrael under covenant, text, and history.
That sounds messier than a slogan because it is messier.
It is also more accurate.
The most useful short answer
If someone asks whether Judaism is a religion, a people, or a civilization, the most honest short answer is yes.
The emphasis changes with the question.
If you are asking about prayer, commandments, theology, and sacred texts, Judaism is a religion.
If you are asking why an atheist with one Jewish parent still feels implicated in Jewish history, antisemitism, and family continuity, Jewish peoplehood is the better lens.
If you are trying to explain why Jewish life also includes food, music, law, language, ethics, festivals, memory, land, and public institutions, civilization is the strongest word.
The slogan "Judaism is not a religion" survives because it is reacting against a real reduction. But it makes its point by creating a new distortion.
Judaism has always been more than religion. That does not make religion incidental. It makes Judaism larger than the categories people keep trying to force onto it.