I am going to email my cousin who is married to a Israeli half Ethiopian, half Sephardic Jew. He lives in the US. He get identified as “African-American” all the time, which he has given up on correcting people over, He is 100% Israeli, and 100% Jewish. He also holds a green card, and is planning on applying for US citizenship; his father is still alive, and he’d like either have him come live here, or keep the visiting channels open while he is still alive. He did his military service, so he has no problem going back.
I’m going to ask her how awkward it is in shul for them.
I know that they go to a very egalitarian (women called to Torah) synagogue that is observant, and once identified as modern Orthodox, but I think has moved away from any identification with a movement. But they are Sephardic. My cousin is the only Yiddish speaker there.
Leo Frank was a Jew from somewhere else (raised in NY, educated at Cornell), so was not only Jewish but a Damyankee. Not one of the Good Jews who had a Southern ancestry and was an excellent banker or dentist.
The Second Klan – which arose in the 1920s and was the largest and most influential Klan of all – elevated hatred of Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and urbanites up to the level of their hatred of black people. Fear of the Unamerican Other. Hi there, Mister Trump.
I’m a Sicilian. It’s true we are infused with plenty of African ancestry, mostly Berber and Arab. There were Black Africans and Persians as well in Arab Sicily, in addition to the usual Greeks, Jews, and Italians. The Arabs in Sicily synthesized all these cultural influences and introduced Italian poetry, Hindu-Arabic numerals and the zero, and pasta, among many other advances in civilization. When the Normans took it from the Arabs, they kept all that and synthesized it with Latin Catholicism, which in turn fed directly into the Italian Renaissance.
I can usually pass for white. I’ve been read as Arab and told to go back to the Middle East where I came from. White is not an identity I can embrace. I’m conscious of Sicilians’ history in America and how we were considered nonwhite.
Until the 1919 Versailles Conference, when the Sicilian prime minister of Italy, Vittorio Orlando, got to hobnob with the Great White Fathers themselves, Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau as an equal. My grandfather left Sicily to fight in the US Army in WWI. Following the war we were effectively promoted to so-called white. I’m not buying it.
Study of Sicilian and Sicilian-American history has made plain to me what a con job racial classification was all along. Arabs share an ethnic identity with no color line. Arabs cover the entire color range from African black to European white. What other ethnicity can cover that spread? Berber, perhaps. This has opened to me a whole different way to view human diversity, away from America’s historical poisonous obsession with the color line.
My mom and I have researched our genealogy together. I’m too conscious of being descended from mixed-race ancestors on both sides than I can’t pick one as a sole identity. I identify with no race. Each person should decide for themselves how to process their racial mixture. I supported President Obama’s checking “Black” on the 2010 Census, though mixed-race activists decried it.
As a Gentile I read that a little differently than you do.
To the degree “white” is used as a codeword by white supremacists for the One Chosen Group, ie. the white Anglo social conservative (reactionary semi-MRA actually) often fundamentalist Christians, the typical Jewish person wants none of that. As you say. And rightly so.
In the more fuzzy mainstream uses of “white” ISTM that many European / American Jewish folks will adopt that meaning of “white” since it’s less inapt than the other choices commonly on offer.
IOW, I tell strangers I grew up in Southern California. I tell Californians I grew up in Orange County. I tell Orange Countians I grew up in Newport Beach. They’re all true statements. Some are just more finely graded than others.
Heh. Reminds me of that episode of FAMILY GUY, where Peter takes the stand and gets asked terrible questions by the attorney: Which of the following two phrases best describes the defendant: Problem Drinker or African-American Haberdasher? “Uh, do I – I guess ‘problem drinker’, but that’s, uh…” ‘Sexual Deviant’ or ‘One Of Those Magic Eye Paintings That If You Stare At It Long Enough You See A Sailboat’? “Well, ‘sexual deviant’, but that other one’s not even a…” No further questions.
That’s not my experience. As a Jew of eastern European ancestry I have always felt “White” in our society and most of the Jews I know feel the same way. I don’t think of White as equivalent to Christian so that hasn’t been an issue. But I have felt “Other” many times related to my religion.
I don’t really see a disagreement. The problem IMO is when being ‘the other’ in some sense is signified by using the particular rhetoric ‘I’m not white’ for groups which over the social evolution of that term were in fact considered ‘white’ relative to blacks, when and where the black/white divide dwarfed the intra-white ‘who’s the mainstream?’ divide. It’s a kind of rewriting of history IMO. And not just based on reading history though it would corroborate, but living it in what I think was a fairly typical place in the US in the 60’s, certainly a fairly typical place for American Jews to live, the NY area. And in that place and time black/white was a big deal, and Jews were definitely ‘white’.
I as ‘Irish’ could point back to where the Irish (in NY, my ancestors have lived in this area for generations) weren’t quite ‘white’. And definitely ‘the other’. Directly comparable to the history of the Jewish people? no, but no such analogy is going to be exact. But I know I’d be fooling around with history to justify saying ‘I’m not white’ now based, ‘well it’s fluid and at one time…’. Italians could do that not going back as far as the Irish, but similarly ridiculous IMO for them to now say ‘don’t call me white’.
Whereas your construction seems entirely reasonable.
Although, my grandparents and even parents were conscious of ‘otherness’ as Irish Catholics. My dad was a brilliant guy, his best friend from work, as NY public school teachers, was a Jewish guy perhaps more remarkable than he (author, musician, amazing guy). Jobs like prestige Wall Street in those days still discriminated against ‘RC’ as well as Jews and, not to justify it, that’s probably one reason more remarkable individuals used to end up as PS teachers. This was guys choosing a career in the '30’s-40’s, and sure my dad’s impression Irish were still discriminated against is ‘so he said’ but so is every similar expression on this thread. Peas in a pod, the Jews and the Irish in NY? again no. But ‘white but not mainstream’ isn’t a one off of one group in all time. I don’t consider myself ‘other’ in any serious way though.
There are white anti-Semites, there are black anti-Semites (Nation of Islam) and various other colors. The fact that some anti-Semites are white doesn’t mean Jews aren’t white.
The fact that anti-Semites despise Jews isn’t what’s interesting.
The fact that white supremacists despise Jews – is.
If a group of white supremacists announces that they’re recruiting, it’s unremarkable that a white guy can show up and join, and it’s unremarkable that a black guy can’t. But the fact that a Jew can’t join up? That’s not unremarkable; I’m going to make remarks based on that; it strikes me as downright – remark-able?
I mean, yeah, it’s maybe just historical trivia that whites in country clubs were banning Jews back when whites at American universities were establishing quotas to keep Jews out, and half-a-hundred other details of how things used to be; but the point is, here and now, there’s a reason why white supremacists don’t include us.
The key thing, as so many have said, is that “white supremacists” is itself a misnomer.
They aren’t “pale pinkish-skin supremacists.” They are “pale pinkish-skin, semi-purebred Anglo/Northern European, social conservative, MRA women-in-their-place, fundamentalist Christian, violence-is-good supremacists”
They just abbreviate that mouthful to “white” because it sounds more attractive to the mainstream that way. Kinda like when Trump spouts some nonsense about supporting jobs while he’s killing trade that results in exports. The name being used doesn’t describe the reality it applies to.
And one of the sure ways to identify a scoundrel is how far the names he/she uses hide the reality of what he/she is talking about.
Ashkenazi Jews check exactly one square of the six inherent in “pale pinkish-skin, semi-purebred Anglo/Northern European, social conservative, MRA women-in-their-place fundamentalist Christian, violence-is-good” and flunk the other five. Blacks do only a little worse, flunking six for six.
It’s not surprising (to me at least) that Jewish people aren’t welcomed into those groups.
A substantial percentage of people who call themselves evangelicals and whose political beliefs are very conservative aren’t really even Christians. They are atheists who want to continue to hang out with other people with their political opinions. The easiest way to do that in many American communities is to belong to an evangelical Christian church. The majority of the members of the church will be at least fairly conservative in their political opinions. As long as the secret atheist continues to at least mumble something that sounds Christian when asked about their religious beliefs, the conservative evangelicals will believe that they must be Christian, since they think that any real Christian must be politically conservative:
Yeah. Don’t confuse my use of the words “fundamentalist Christian” with me thinking any of them have any idea what Jesus was rattling on about so long ago.
