Here’s where it’s at, Homegirl:
When you greet them with, “Y’all come in and set a spell. Ah jus’ got done fixin’ some sweet tea and there’s 'mater gravy fer the biscuits.”, well, it’s a dead giveaway.
PS: You and your mom been settin’ any trains on fire lately? 
I thought “bubalah” was the Bawstin way of saying “water fountain.”
You probably didn’t fit that stereotypical Sammy Davis Jr. Jewish profile.
When I lived in Germany, people always assumed (incorrectly) that I was Jewish simply because of my first name.
Bubkis, feh, schlep, drek and yutz are also yiddish-- not to mention words I use (like, say, mensch or keppie) that that specifically register as yiddish in my head. It can be phrasing, too. Apparently when being sarastic I tend to re-arrange my words, as in “Not so much with the brains, is he?”
My family is working-class, Brooklyn based Sicillian, and my dad was raised elbow to elbow with the little jewish kids whose parents and grandparents came through Ellis Island along side his. It didn’t take them very long to become one similar-sounding band of New Yorkers.
Oddly enough, I was once in DC at the holocaust museum with my college boyfriend (who was Russian Jewish) and they showed us a physical traits measuring test used by the Nazis to determine a persons level of Jewish-ness. My boyfriend, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with high, aristocratic cheekbones, registered as aryan. Stocky, olive toned Italian that I am, I ‘failed’ nearly every test. It was a creepy and sobering moment.
Did someone say tall and blonde?
A couple years back, I was working as a consultant for several US factories. One of them was in Chicago and included these two women: very close friends, very different-looking. Linda was a gypsy, would happily proclaim so to anybody within earshot, would offer to read the cards for you, and well, all she was missing to look like anybody’s idea of a ballgazer was the loads of shawls. H
Laura was a natural blonde, blue-eyed, quite elegant (not by her clothes, which were regular “factory worker” fare, but by her general attitude and movements). Nobody’s idea of a ballgazer, that’s for sure.
So one day I am with them and I say “Linda, Laura won’t happen to be a gypsy too, is she? I don’t know where I got this idea, but I’ve had it from the start.” Linda laughs, calls Laura and says “she’s found you out, I told you this girl was a witch as well.”
They’re second cousins on one side, first cousins on the other, and yes, Laura is a gypsy. She doesn’t look the part and no matter how hard I looked at them I couldn’t see a single physical resemblance, not even gestures. Their accents are very different, in Linda you can hear their central-europe immigrant parents and in Laura no way. I still have no idea why I was so absolutely convinced that Laura was a gypsy, must have been those celtic and basque witch ancestors of mine…
I’ve had people peg all kind of genetic backgrounds on me; well, they were all white, but anything from arabic to irish via finnish, and I have no idea where the “finnish” came from, no finnish blood in me that I know of. My own method for detecting non-Hispanics is easy: just take a look at their faces when I say something in Spanish 
here- brown curly hair, kinky brown beard, medium nose, fat, blue eyes- and totally German-Irish, I’ve had Jews welcome me like a cousin from the Lost Tribes
(and who knows? maybe I am! L) ;j
Straight black (now salt-pepper) hair, brown eyes, slightly fleshy nose, narrow shoulders, nearsighted, highly verbal, quick sense of humor, slightly awkward and/or pedantic at times, Germanic last name - I’ve been mistaken for Jewish more times than I can count. During the Dukakis campaign I was occasionally pegged as Greek, though.
The question that should also be asked is what precisely is the definition of “Jewish” that these people are using? I’ve got enough Jewish blood that I would have been executed in Nazi Germany, but I don’t think of myself as being Jewish, nor even half Jewish. I’m proud of my Jewish ancestry, but Judaism is a religion and a culture, not a race. There’s even a part of me that really balks at the idea of people being athiest Jews. (Further hijack, if that is a legitimate category: why do people get upset at the idea of “Christian Jews?”)
I think for most Americans, though, the standard Jewish person is descended from the eastern European Ashkenazim. Thus if someone doesn’t share that racial look or even feel, they’ll assume that the person in question is not Jewish. Also, considering that while it is possible to convert to the Jewish faith, it’s not an evangelical faith; conversions outside the lineages of the various Jewish tribes are unusual enough to be dealt with in most people’s minds as exceptions.
I’ve known a couple of people who have the look of Hitler’s Aryan who were actually Jewish. So I know they’re more common than many people realize - but even though I know better, I still find it surprising to meet new acquaintances of that type. :dubious:
The next time someone asks, why not simply ask them, “how do you know?” I have a feeling all these parents have already gossiped out who is or isn’t Jewish, and the question is really meant to just lead to other questions, like “is your BF/fiance/husband Jewish? If not, wanna meet my son/nephew/brother/cousin?”
Sarah Michelle Gellar?
I grew up in a place where there weren’t that many Jewish people, but I was good friends with one of the Jewish families in town. I hung out with them a lot. I was over for shabbat dinner sometimes, and for chanukkah. Later at school I lived with a number of Jews over the years.
I have a bit of a Jewdar, not unfailing, but I often find out that I am right when I assume someone is Jewish. Part of it is comparing the person to other Jews I know (especially my childhood friends) and then also listen for other clues such as first and last name, mannerisms, speech, that sort of thing.
I’m sure there are some people I assume aren’t Jewish that are, and probably some people who I think are Jewish that aren’t. However, I’ve been right often enough to think that I’m doing better than just guessing.
Even though many of the Jewish people I know look quite different from each other, I tend to see subtle commonalities that ascribe to their Jewish heritage.
In a class I was in there was a Russian woman who said she kept wanting to address me in Russian because I looked very Russian to her. I’m Irish-Italian and I don’t know any Russian, but something signalled “Russian” to her, I don’t know what. People make very unwarranted assumptions about our backgrounds all the time, sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong.
This used to happen to me as well. So far as I know, I’m Scots-Irish-English, yet on more than one occasion, people have guessed Russian. Which is kind of cool, because I do speak Russian, and it was fun when I was actually in Russia, never being taken for American or Brit. After a few words, maybe I was from “somewhere else” in the Russian republics. After a more lengthy conversation, no, not from Russia, but surely you have Russian parents, da?
