This seems to be one of the loud discussions now. Also, are Jews white ? Please, pretty please, can anyone explain me what in the American culture requires such questions?
Is it for calibrating the colour balance ? She is Israeli and looks a bit tanned in the posters. Maybe 3500K.
It ain’t binary, and we don’t use the “one drop of blood” test any longer.
Her heritage and ancestry would seem to be “caucasian” in whatever technical sense remains to that term. Jews (and Arabs, and Persians, and Indians) and generally considered “white” in the 19th and 20th century sense of the word.
You could ask her for her opinion, and I’d happily go with what she says.
But where is the line drawn? I self identify as an A10 thunderbolt gunship, but i still have to use the same bathrooms as non-A10 thunderbolt gunships. It’s not fair.
Since a factual answer is unlikely, let’s move this from General Questions to IMHO.
samclem, moderator
I read one of the articles and was confused by the whole thing, probably because I remember history.
One of the elements of Nazi racialist doctrine - not that they were in the least unique about it before or after - was that Jews were not Aryan and not even really white at all. Some radical Christians called them “mud people,” with the rationalization that only white people have souls and all non-whites were made from mud along with animals.
That the religion started in the Middle East so that the original Jews were Semites was ignored except for lending its name to anti-semitism, a term that to this day some complain about on the ground that anti-semites don’t hate Arabs so the term is a misnomer. None of these thought processes are sane; you have to have a good sense of topology to follow the curves.
The American problem is the continued confusion of religion and ethnicity. Many people, including many Jews, insist there is a Jewish culture. When pressed they can’t offer any aspects of it that aren’t derived from religion but they maintain its truth. My take is that there is a Yiddish culture, the culture of Eastern European shtetl Jews who fled to New York specifically and eventually formed 10-20% of the total population at their peak. These Jews formed a semi-cohesive identity and spread that cultural identity though show business, books, and popular culture.
This is far from an ethnicity. Other Jewish populations around the country shared these identifiers and stereotypes only to a small degree and Jews in other countries formed identities based on local culture and not New York culture.
Asking whether Jews are white is a question with null meaning, like asking whether Christians are white. Insisting that Jews are non-white, which seems to be the point of the current brouhaha, is a bizarre twist of history, but it also has no meaning. It might be a club with which to slam others. A wiffle bat is sturdier.
I’m trying to decide if the OP wants an answer for Gadot specifically, Jews in general, or instead wants to know why the American facebook-o-sphere loves to ask these kinds of questions.
We’ll have a very different discussion depending on which question we’re supposed to talk about.
OP?
Anyone can be who, or what, ever they want to be. Anyone who disagrees is either commiting an act of …ism or is already an …ist.
Of course there’s a Jewish culture, and of course most of it comes from religion. So what?
If I tell you of a man named Patrick O’Brien, and further tell you that his favorite song is “O Danny Boy”, and his favorite food is colcannon, just like his gramma used to make, and speaking of his gramma, her native language was Gaelic. Would you have any difficulty telling me what ethnicity this man was?
Now suppose I tell you of another man, named David Cohen. His favorite song is “Hava Negilla”, his favorite food is gefilte fish, just like his gramma used to make, and his gramma’s native language was Yiddish. Can you tell me his ethnicity?
Would either of your answers change if I told you that Patrick attends synagogue every Sabbath, and David is a devout Roman Catholic?
At the moment, Gal Gadot is white-hot.
She’s’ quite a gal!
I have a Jewish friend who doesn’t consider herself white, even though she’s from Russian stock and doesn’t visually stick out from other white people other than having frizzy hair.
On the couple of occasions when she’s corrected me for lumping her in with white people, I didn’t argue with her. For one thing, it’s not important to me how someone wants to self-identify. And two, I think there’s still enough anti-Semitism out there to justify her position. Despite whatever my eye might say, she doesn’t feel kinship to a generic white person, but rather to people who share her culture, who she can trust not to give her a side-eye once they find out her background. I can certainly respect that position.
What is weird, though, is that she doesn’t understand why I identify as black. “But you’re not really black,” she’ll say, seemingly forgetting all the previous conversations we’ve had about the offensiveness of those words. So I don’t know how she can be so racially conscious when it comes to herself, but be so clueless when it comes to others.
(Despite this one area, she’s really a good person.)
A few years ago I came across this Wikipedia articleon Racial classifications of South Asians in the US. Until the mid 20’s when a SCOTUS precedent held that they were not White the decision was made by a Federal Judge on a case to case basis (since only Whites could be naturalized this was important).
Looking at the decisions, a common one seemed to be based on “Ocular inspection of skin”. So, avoid the sun for the three weeks before your Court date and hope that on that day the lighting hid it.
“White” means primarily of European descent. It has little to do with skin colour or looks. I lived with a German and an Irishman as flatmates and I was lighter skinned than either; they were White, I was not. I am of South Asian descent.
Her grandparents were Jews who lived in what is now Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Most people in the U.S. with that ancestry, if asked what their race was, would say that they are white. If asked what their ethnic ancestry was, they would probably say that they are of German, Austrian, Polish, and Czech ancestry or that they are of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. That’s an arbitrary way of classifying someone’s race and ethnic ancestry, but it’s the typical American arbitrary way of classifying it. Claiming that she’s nonwhite is deliberately messing with the typical American arbitrary way of classifying race:
What does she think you should identify as?
Americans get weird about race when they meet or see someone whom they can’t readily fit into one of the currently used racial boxes. That’s becoming more and more common. For me, just looking at GG doesn’t ping any boxes other than “white”. But then, it would also never occur to me think that a white-looking Israeli might not actually be white.
Remember how the good white folks of the Confederacy screamed bloody when Judah Benjamin was named Attorney General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State? Remember how they insisted Jews aren’t white?
Me neither.
Damn, is this our fault again? I had a feeling it might be.
In the traditional classification scheme, if you’re not Oriental, and you’re not African, then you’re Caucasian, which is synonymous with white. Thus Hispanics and Jews are white.
No one is white. Even albinos are pinkish.
And everyone is descended from people who started out in Africa, unless you subscribe to the space-alien-colonist notion, or you are religious, but think the Bible lied, and that there were LOTS of different people created by God.
I asked her this once and she didn’t give me an answer (unless you count shrugging). But I’m guessing she thinks I fit better in the “biracial” category. Which doesn’t work for me since I’m not biracial–a fact she knows on an intellectual level, but perhaps still doesn’t really get.