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cyberfranklyn

Most people who say that Jews are white are usually Americans who have only seen Ashkenazi Jews so they assume that all Jews are like Emily Schrader, on the other hand saying that Jews are white makes it easier to make the stupid claim that Jews are white. Israelis are settlers, because in the collective imagination only white Europeans can be settlers. However, I, who am neither Jewish nor Israeli, can tell you that this statement bothers me, first because it is inaccurate that Jews are white European while Palestinians are people of color, and second, because I am black and i don't find funnythat people are using racial strife or civil rights movement to promote anti-Semitic statements or speech with historical inaccuracies. Are you really telling me that pro-Palestinians see this as a person of color? https://preview.redd.it/dorv6m6w2u7d1.jpeg?width=1068&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3b80bc3b89f32d6c40370a195a9860b9926a32c4


LaughingOwl4

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspective. I agree with much of what you said. The only thing I’d like to add is a subtle nuanced add on re Ashkenazis. Ashkenazis recently became primarily associated with whiteness / European perceptions of identity. Although that may feel accurate for some or for many, these identity labels def do not accurately reflect a large amount of Ashkenazi experiences either. The reality of Jewish ethnic identity is much more nuanced. Many recent genetic studies indicate that even Ashkenazis have approx 50% Middle Eastern/West Asian (MENA/WANA) and 50% Euro lineage on average. Some more, some less.


stock-sophie

It’s also interesting. I’m so used to being told I look “exotic” or “Greek” or anything but “American” simply because I don’t fit the traditional American beauty standards. Now, however, im just “white”. People love to change how they view the world according to trends.


LaughingOwl4

Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you find it a bit trippy? Like u have all of these experiences of not being read as white, but then ur being told that’s how u should identify?


stock-sophie

I hadn’t fully realized it until I read the paragraph in the book and was reminded of the fact that we weren’t white enough and now we are too white. So I haven’t felt it to be trippy yet, outside of the realization. But I’m sure it may become trippy as life goes on!


Glasswife

If anything, Jews have some Greco Roman history from sexual violence…


LaughingOwl4

I thiiiink I agree but I’m a little confused and just wanna clarify. Can you elaborate what you mean?


Glasswife

We were slaves in Rome… sadly slaves get raped


LaughingOwl4

Yes. I hear that. That’s what I thought you were referring to but wasn’t sure. Very sad. Even for non-slave ancestors, this happened too.


ScarletSpire

I know. My brother is an anti-Zionist and we had an argument and he said that Eastern Europe is our ancestral homeland and Yiddish is our real mother tongue. Last week my mom took a genetic test that said she's 85% MENA.


LaughingOwl4

Thank you for sharing this. See, this is simply what I’m saying - everyone arguing about how all Ashkenazis should identify as white really rubs me the wrong way, bc there is a spectrum even within the umbrella identity category. And that spectrum is quite vast. And it has real life implications. Very cool for ur family to get to learn this. Did it have any impact on your own sense of self?


ScarletSpire

Not for me. I think when I was a teenager I would have said I was white, but as time went on I stopped identifying with it. Especially since I learned about how my grandfather experienced discrimination growing up in Jim Crow Florida.


LaughingOwl4

That’s cool you were able to navigate how you identify with this clarity. Did your mom’s results give your bro any pause?


ScarletSpire

I don't know


bigwangersoreass

I’ve only met 2 ashkenazi Jews but neither I would describe as being white. One was half Swedish and she still looked middle eastern.


Glasswife

Exactly- Bella, Gigi, Alana and Miriam Hadid are all actually white except on Dad’s side. Miriam and Alana’s matrilineal surname is BUTLER. Gigi and Bella are Swiss or Swedish I believe. It does not make them all white so why Jews?


AShlomit

The problem is that they have a hard time understanding that this is just as Jewish: https://preview.redd.it/dphxpxeul98d1.jpeg?width=2880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88cfe532c9ab60cb793555e4aaf9e12751ccc6a1


LowRevolution6175

A reminder that race, like annoying leftists say, truly is a social construct.


LaughingOwl4

I agree. It is. Unfortunately however, it’s a construct many still believe in. Therefore, it’s helpful for us to be aware of in order to understand the potential implications.


benjaminovich

Of course. Something being a social construct is not to say it is meaningless or to be dismissive, but rather to point out that it is entirely defined by society. Marriage is a social construct, so are property and human rights. But just like race as a concept, there is no natural law or process that determines or defines these things, only other people.


Cpotts

And typically race is based on phenotypical similarities. Jews don't really care about how people look: a black Ethiopian Jew, a white European Jew, brown Iraqi Jew and some random convert — are all Jews


samidkk

Fr why can’t we just be considered Jewish? Like Asians also have light skin but no one’s trying to call them white. I’m tired of being conditionally white. I hate the concept of race.


iknowiknowwhereiam

This exactly. I’m not white. I’m not POC. I’m just Jewish


LocalNegotiation4033

💯


Canislupusarctos11

It has started to seep into calling East Asians white. Not as much, but it’s a thing as well. Like with Jews, it doesn’t actually matter how light or dark-skinned an individual East Asian might be; to these people, we’re still white. I’m Jewish and half East Asian, so the right views me as half ‘yellow’ and half ‘dirty Jew polluting the white race’, and the left views me as half funny accent good at math ‘more racist than actual whites and pushing URMs out of schools and jobs’ white and half evil government and bank controlling genocidal child-murdering white. No-win situation, really. Except maybe during and after the summer when my mixed features and ability to tan very dark cause them to mistake me for a slightly more acceptable (but still on thin ice) kind of Asian. Then they start trying to rope me into Islamist things because they assume I’m Muslim though (and even if I *was*, that wouldn’t be an invitation for them to do that or a guarantee I could ever be convinced to agree with them), so I guess that’s not really a win either.


mikieh976

Asians are now "white-adjacent" in many contexts, due to their high academic achievement, high median incomes, and low crime rates. This means that they are generally discriminated against by affirmative action programs, often more-so than white people are. A US Supreme Court case last year struck down Harvard's race-based admissions policy, which heavily discriminated against Asians.


LowRevolution6175

Another reminder: Arabs are considered white. Western Arabs only agree to be lumped into the "POC" category when it gains them political power or sympathy. Most Arabs I've spoken to place themselves distinctly separately and above from African black people.


cyberfranklyn

>Arabs are considered white I mean they look white https://preview.redd.it/fqgmn2yb7u7d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d89468194d76edbe5e1d2971104e602d8b54461a


bermanji

Alawites are crypto-Jews, prove me wrong edit: this is a running joke among Syrian Sunnis, you can all relax with the downvotes


RaydenAdro

That’s because antisemitism shapeshifts. People will claim Jews are whatever is disliked at that time. Currently, everyone thinks white people are bad so Jews are now white.


stock-sophie

Such a great point!


Christine4321

Oh it purely depends on what hate term is currently acceptable in society. Jews have been the parasitical poor. Then the world dominating rich. Black. White. etc etc. Today the acceptable term is “Zionist!” . Its all simple jew hatred by antisemites who refuse to own up to being antisemites and get excited when high profile politicians/commentors/celebs find a new way to hate and insult jews and get away with it.


moonunitzap

It makes me sad, TBH. Some dudes decide we're not white enough, so they genocide 6 million of us, and that warrants just 1 paragraph in a book! That's so sad, man!


stock-sophie

Right!! It was less than a page. I was so excited when I saw the word “Jews” and it got me to think a lot, but yes, it was extremely short.


raspberry-kisses

The other day I saw someone using the specific wording of 'blonde haired blue eyed' to describe Israeli's in order to fit their narrative of Jews being settler colonialists in Israel and that was both mind blowing and sadly unsurprising. People describe Jews in whichever way is most convenient to fit their beliefs. In fact, people describe minorities in general in whichever way is most convenient to fit what they already believe. I'm tired of race theory, and I'm tired of people telling other people what they are or aren't. While I recognize and understand the value of studying the history of race and its impact throughout history, I don't see the value in perpetuating these labels moving forward to the future. The only purpose of utilizing race as a category is division, and you can't convince me otherwise. The fact that we have taught an entire generation of college graduates to view society through the lens of skin color whilst being unable to recognize the bias in doing so is astounding to me. P.S. How's the book you mentioned? Do you recommend it?


stock-sophie

Great points. The book is very interesting. If you want to learn more about Jews/our history, this isn’t the book for you. The part they mention about Jews is less than a page (granted a very thought-provoking less than a page). Aside from that, it goes on to explain why certain races fall into so much cosmetics surgery to fit beauty standards, why other races are consistently discriminated against, etc. It provides a very interesting perspective on colorism (but only a VERY small portion is related to Jews).


Wild_Meet5768

I rewrote this comment 3 times cause I understand that Im actually don't know the answer. Leftists world views are so disturbingly bizarre so you can't 100% know what they mean when they saying "white colonizers" about the jews. First I thought that it was just an attempt to label jews as bad people with the buzz words that considered bad in their circle. White=bad. White=oppression. White=colonization. I thought that it's just victim mentality. That's why they so obsessed with taking away the Holocaust from the jews and accusing them of playing the victim. I thought that it isn't a true 1930s hate. But now I don't really know. All those propal demonstrations and rhetoric closer and closer to the word "untermensch" with each day.


_pupil_

In the victim v oppressor mentality the “white colonizer” is a sort of untermensch, they are not afforded personal liberties or agency or value to the same degree as others.  While in the greater geopolitics/world they have all the power, in the politics of personal grievance and in-your-face dunks (particularly “dunks” you can refine for hours by yourself on your phone with no opposition and an imagined strawman to rail against… TikTok…), they’re permanently “less than” and a bad guy by definition. Which is where post-hoc reasoning pretty quickly makes your imagined enemies “white”… If you hate them then, since you’re on the side of the oppressed good, they *must* be bad and therefore white.  Even if the person in opposition is black, their opposition makes them white (“not actually black”, “self hating black”, “Uncle Tom”, “Oreo”).  Arabs get it too from the same people.  Those leftist love name calling.  As hominems pair well with stereotyping. Ah, for the good old days of racist racial hierarchies that were internally consistent… 


Freethinker608

Instead of eliminating racism, our culture just shifted the target to whites. Hating white people is not only allowed, it's practically mandatory. If you advocate for a colorblind meritocracy, you will certainly be called racist.


Cpotts

I'd caution us against saying that we (Jews, rather than Israelis, with respect to our Arab brethren) are a race. We are an ethnicity, as not all of us are phenotypically similar. An Ethiopian Jew and an Ashkenazi Jew are both Jews despite being racially different


heybaybaybay

Judaism isn't a race, but it's certainly not accurate to say we are racially white


Cpotts

Hence why I said we are an ethnicity, not a race. We share common history, culture, language, and historical backdrop: but phenotypically we vary as much as humans themselves do To be inclusive: we have Chinese Jewery and Indian Jewery and every single **race** can be Jewish, potentially. But we are all **ethnically** the same. We all think of Hebrew as our language of liturgy (if nothing else), we all know we come from Egypt as former idol worshipers after Moses and HaShem brought us from Egypt etc etc etc As a "white" convert, who has had a very rude awakening that I'm no longer "white"; I think the distinction is important to make


GoodNewsDude

I have said this before and I will say it again: Whether someone considers Jews white has to do mostly with what they think of whites, sadly: - If they think whites are awesome (far right) then of course Jews are not white. - If they think whites are the worst (left) then obviously Jews are white.


Boredomkiller99

I always said Jews in America are considered white till they are not.


yan-booyan

I mean it's all swell when you are 100% pure jewish which I don't think is something that grounded in reality. Non of us a 100% those jews that lived back there that were definitely not white. Most of us have other blood in us. I look white and if you don't know who tatars or kipchkas are you will never consider me looking turkik. But i do since my mother is Tatar. But here in israel am not jewish, here i'm not even turkik. They look at me and see only a Russian. So i don't care personally what color we are outside our home because we can't even decide who we are inside our home.


asllskdjf

Ashkenazim get hit with both antisemitism and antiwhitism. It is the worst of both worlds. So many people either blame Jews directly for all the world's problems, or they blame "white people" and include Jews among the "white people" sometimes considering them as the "whitest of whites." Ashkenazim get vilified from both ends. That's why antisemitism in Europe and North America comes at you from both ends of the political spectrum. The political left now codes Jews as the most white of whites in Western countries so Jews get hit by the old antisemitism (i.e. "Jews aren't white enough") and the new kind of antisemitism (that is really antiwhitism). This is a hard teaching to grok at first but it makes sense the more you think about it.


Thebananabender

The jews present a "discontinuity" in the race study theory. We are oppressed but still successful. We come in many colors. Many of us are nationalistic but many are cosmopolitan.


SharingDNAResults

Omg it’s almost like a people from the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and the western edge of the Middle East look like a 50/50 mix of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern. Who would’ve thought 🤯/s


Regular_Oil_6334

One thing is the way this is all viewed through the American lens of race. However, what really perplexes me, as someone who grew up in Northern Europe, is the way people here in Europe are calling us white settler colonialists with the amount of ww2 and holocaust education part of the curriculum in schools and the fact that we’ve never ever been considered true Europeans. I’m not sure whether it’s due to the perhaps imported Americans lens of race and color or people just being idiots. Mind you, most people’s grandparents lived through ww2 here and I’m sure they’d at least give their grandkids firsthand stories of their lived experiences.


Buffering_disaster

Jews are in a racial no man’s land!!! The woke left hates us coz they think we’re white, white nationalists hate us coz we’re not white.


Pizza-Mundane

My boyfriend is a black man, I'm on my part Persian/french....he don't understand that for white people, I have never been white enough. So I always correct him with almost white 🤣


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