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1 Are Jews White?
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Are Jews White? People have suggested that if I have experienced racism , I am of color. But what if I have experienced racism in Israel and white privilege in the United States? I read essays that describe Arab Jews as Jews of color, but still I feel confused. If I am light-skinned, am I of color? What if I am light, but others in my family are dark? —Julie Iny (Iraqi-Indian/Russian-American Jew), “Ashkenazi Eyes” No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations , and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. It is probable that it is the Jewish community—or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here in part because they were not white; and incontestably—in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white. . . . —James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . .” If I were to snap my fingers and bring every Jewish person in this world into the room, we’d be more colorful than a rainbow, but when I walk into the average mainstream synagogue in the United States and talk about Jews of Color I often encounter the assumption that to be a Jew of Color one must be a convert or adopted. — Yavilah McCoy, interview In the early 1980s, as an experienced antiracist activist, I began thinking and writing about being a Jew, and became engaged in progressive Jewish politics. As I wrestled with racism and anti-semitism, people asked [1] Julie Iny. Courtesy Julia Caplan. the colors of jews me constantly, Are Jews white? Are they? Are they white? The urgency and anxiety behind the question were palpable and took me a while to understand . First assumption, there was one answer for all Jews. Second, the answer was either yes or no: Jews were white or they were of color. Third, whichever category one chose to file Jews into was a political decision: Jews were either down with the people of color, innocent and victimized, or lumped in with whites, guilty and victimizing. The more I have learned about Jews, anti-semitism, and race and racialization, the more complex the situation gets. I still get asked, but now I want to give several simultaneous answers, and they are all questions : Have you heard of Arab, African, Indian, Asian, Latin Jews? Were European Jews white in Europe? What do you mean by white? Why are you asking? What does it matter? And when I answer tersely and correctly, Jews are a multiracial multiethnic people, the asker most frequently succumbs to a tempting shorthand: Yeah, but white Jews: Are white Jews white? What’s White? 1952: I am seven, and my ex-dancer mother enrolls me in dance class. The teacher, Ronnie All, is a tall graceful young man. His most important characteristic from my point of view is: he is not mean. I am a clumsy child and he does not mock me. On parents’ day, my mother comes to observe. Afterwards she gushes to me, my father, all her friends, and the gush content is this: I have not noticed or mentioned that Ronnie All is Negro. For my ever self-reflexive mother, not saying/not noticing means that she has raised an unprejudiced child. Let me credit her aspiration, more than most Jewish housewives in Flatbush aspired to in the early fifties, “niggerlovingcommiejew” stereotypes not withstanding. The truth is I don’t notice not because I am color blind—who by age seven is?—but because I come from a Jewish family and neighborhood with wide varieties of skin color in which someone like Ronnie All—a light-skinned black man—does not stand out as different (except maybe for being gay which I realize now he probably was). Had his skin been darker, would I have noticed? Probably. Would I have mentioned it? I’m not sure. Might I have already absorbed the polite hushed [44.213.75.78] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:30 GMT) norm? I certainly knew that my mother’s response was peculiar, that not noticing was a weird thing to get credit for. In 1964, at a Freedom School organized in a Harlem Church as part of a public school boycott, I lead a discussion with half...