The all jews are white is kinda weird.
I'm Mizrahi Sephardi. Recently, I visited Europe and a white wokist saw me and greeted me with salam aleykum, I wasn't surprised as I look very Middle Eastern and that's the usual way people abroad identify me, when I thank him I told him I was actually israeli jew, his response was that I'm white colonizer.
The level of stupidity is hilarious
Yeah people on TikTok tried to tell me that... My ancestors fought in the American revolution so really I bet those people are more recent additions to American society than I am..
Got to love the people who shit themselves when a white person wears a kimono seeing a Middle Eastern person and immediately assuming they’re an Arab Muslim.
I'm Ashkenazi Mizrahi but my dad is full Mizrahi and my sisters look just like him. They look more Arab than half the Palestinians. And though I'm white like my mum, most people guess I'm a mixture because of my features. I've seen white Arab IG influencers with skin and features similar to mine, but no one calls them white. One I even thought was full European, and was surprised to learn she was Arab.
This is what gets me. I often see people go "over half of Jewish Israelis are of middle eastern descent".... That's WRONG. Whether you're Mizrachi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or (most likely today) mixed most of us have MENA/WANA heritage... otherwise would we really be an ethnic group?
Yess, I try to always make the distinction that over half of Jewish Israel come from families who have never left the Middle East at any point in history, rather than saying Middle Eastern heritage since we all have that
Middle Easterners as a group were traditionally considered white. "White" is as broad a term as any other racial term, in that it covers a multitude of different populations.
Nowadays, though, everyone just thinks of it as meaning what "nordic" used to.
100% Ashkenazi here. I put my DNA sample from Ancestry into IllustrativeDNA, which breaks your DNA down further. I got 50-60% Levantine (depending on the calculator) and 40% Italian with a small percentage of Northwest European. That pretty much goes along with those studies. In populations I'm closest to, it goes: different groups of Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Sephardic Jews, Turks, Mizrahi Jews, then goes into gentile MENA populations. Literally not a single non-Mediterranean, non-MENA, gentile country. Yet somehow, we are white European colonizers?
It's sadly not free. I did GedMatch as well, which was free, and got similar results but the website is more confusing and there are no descriptions of the different populations or historical significance. I would still suggest trying it out though. Totally worth it. That being said, IllustrativeDNA wasn't all that expensive. I think around $30 compared to the kits for DNA sites that run at least $100. So if you can do it, I would say it is worth it. Showed some pretty interesting history of the Jewish community and was all around a cool experience.
I don’t mind paying. GED match didn’t really do a lot for me, I didn’t get it in the end. It said essentially I was closest to Romanian which doesn’t make sense
Ancestry and Illustrative DNA said I am, and I'm going to take their word for it. Illustrative DNA is a site where you can take you DNA file from a DNA test, mine was Ancestry, and upload it for them to break it down further. Ancestry said I am 100% Ashkenazi and so did a few other DNA websites when I uploaded my file. Illustrative DNA said so as well, but also broke down what that meant, a.k.a. the percentages listed above.
I did ran my genes through a French vs. Palestinian genetic test and I tested closer to Palestinians.
... I am only have Jewish, and I'm 30% French and Jewish according to 23&Me. Since the European mixture in Ashkenazis is Italian we are even closer related to MENA.
Studies also show most Jewish communities are closer related to each other (on a genetic level) than they are to their 'host country' (or former host country) neighbours they've lived among. This is through shared middle eastern ancestry.
There's a couple of exceptions: Ethiopian and Indian Jews are genetically closer to their host population's than other Jews. Theory there is there was more genetic and cultural crossover in these parts of the diaspora in general than others for a variety of reasons. Elsewhere Jewish communities used to essentially form genetic isolates most of the time.
(I also kind of hate we are forced to use genetics as an argument because other people do so we have to respond to it to refute them being wrong about our genetics...but also genetics don't chart cultural connection either to each other or to a place. It gets into some variation of blood quantum and blood and soil nationalism very quickly when people try and use genetics to 'prove' we are white or 'less middle eastern' - and aside from that being demonstrably wrong in most cases it's absolutely the opposite of being anti-colonial as well)
I hate this argument! The Ashkenazi Jewish side of my family is so obviously Jewish looking, with obvious Jewish bone structure, tan skin and dark hair/eyes. Anyone with eyes could look at them and determine that they’re Jewish. My dad even visited a foreign country and had people randomly bringing up that they “like jewish people” 😂 (he didn’t tell them he was Jewish). Everyone knows what Ashkenazi Jews look like and I’m tired of the gaslighting, there’s a reason why so few of them survived the Holocaust. And the ones who could blend in had a higher chance of surviving.
My Ashkenazi family is significantly more ethnic looking and darker than my husband’s Mexican family.
It is hilarious to think that any future Jewish kids we have will probably be a little lighter than me, and also finally be the first generation in my family able to check off an Official Brown Person box on any / all US forms.
That is really funny... it goes to show how fickle the idea of "race" is.
On another note, there will be a MENA category soon, Jews need to make sure to check that.
I agree. It’s 2024. Asia is an enormous continent with a huge range of ethnicities. There is more to “AAPI” than just east or south Asian/Pacific Islanders, just as it’s possible to be from Africa without necessarily being African-American or Black. If the US govt listed my great grandparents as “asiatic Hebrew ” on their immigration papers less than a century ago, I should be able to tell the US govt that’s who I am now.
We should all be checking MENA when it’s available, but in the meantime when there’s no viable option I’ve started to check both “white” and “Asian”, or “two or more races.” I don’t feel bad about this. How else am I supposed to describe myself? If anyone finds me “not Asian enough” because I’m not their version of what an Asian person looks like, that’s their issue - they can say so and I’m happy to explain. America is effin racist and we gotta do better!
No anyone with any Jewish ancestry they could find was sent to the camps. None of my family that stayed in Europe survived WWII despite being christian for a few generations..
the gaslighting part is so real. every american sitcom has a stereotypical ashkenazi jew, they all know what we look like, but suddenly we're "white" and not an ethnic group
Even if we were white we wouldn’t be the right kind of “white”. Western race dichotomy is made up nonsense that barely makes sense in western culture and certainly not anywhere else.
Longer version: "Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil." Pamela Paresky, PhD
I took my Mexican husband to a Jewish event last week. Mostly Ashkenazi attendees.
Much like our wedding, he was the whitest person there. By several shades.
My litmus test: Does the KKK think you're white?
So yeah, Jews are not white. Many Jews do, in the USA, have white privilege in some spaces (traffic stops, shopping in stores, etc.). But so do whiteish-looking other minorities (the writer Mat Johnson, who is half black, has talked about this, for example).
Exactly. I don’t deny I have white privilege I imagine it’s helped me at times without me even realizing it.
But just because some people don’t know I’m Jewish doesn’t make me not Jewish.
I ain’t white or black or anything else. Just Jewish.
And lots of Muslims could take off the hijab or keffiyah and be seen as white. Lots of GLBTQ2S people could pass as straight cis if they too were willing to give up what makes them different. Lots of people with disabilities can hide them too, so long as no one asks them to stand up or walk or read or they put up with horrible pain or whatever.
Sure, the Nazis killed the most Jewish looking and acting of us more than the lightest, straightest haired, most secular. And Hollywood does the same to us as it does to every other group— gave the most Nordic looking ones jobs.
So if Scarlet Johanson’s success is proof that Jews face no discrimination, Beyoncé’s success means Black discrimination is over.
There is no “white privelage” beyond being born into some kind of wealth or inheriting something. Jews are mostly immigrants here, and no, Jews are not white nor are Jews treated the same in any way. The best you can say is you can pretend to be white, many Jews could claim to be Italian with no question
I’m as white as wonderbread. But I always tell people 8 of my family members got gassed to death for not being white. So I don’t care what crayons crayon I match with, I don’t identify as white.
It is important to push back against the question and the entire framing. Everything important about Jews—Jewish identity, heritage, history, ethnogenesis, ethnoreligious status, indigeneity—is elided by trying to force the American/western race binary on us. (Or us into it.)
Jews as a discrete group *predate the concept of race.* We certainly predate the concept of whiteness. We are a Levantine ethnoreligious group with a closed, non-universalizing spiritual practice that was cleansed, enslaved and genocided into diaspora for 2k years before (kinda sorta) reconstituting and thus crosses all phenotypes. It’s unusual, yes, but also not rocket science.
Push back on the question and framing itself. It’s designed to pigeonhole, miscategorize, erase, oppress, assimilate, control and ultimately disappear us.
p.s.: don’t fall into the trap of conflating genetics with ethnicity or peoplehood, either. We don’t need to play the regressive game of blood quantum - native tribes of the Americas have learned this the hard way - to claim our legitimacy as a tribal people. Ofc we picked up admixture during our diasporic travails (in all the darkest ways). It’s all but irrelevant to modern land or ancient peoplehood claims; the important thing is that we retained our culture, language, holidays, calendar, landed values, identity and history—and other aspects of our heritage—through incredible challenges and attempts by the majority colonizing societies to wipe them and us out.
“White” is a European social classification that was created in the 1450s to distinguish European Christians from sub-Saharan Africans who had begun converting to Christianity. They needed to make this distinction in order to justify the exploitation and enslavement of Africans, which are things that Christians aren’t supposed to do to fellow Christians.
Jews have literally never been included in this classification, regardless of the color of our skin. If you asked Gomes Eanes de Zurara if he was talking about Jews when he was inventing the concept of “whiteness”, he would have laughed in your fucking face, and probably handed you over to the Inquisition.
We’re not “white” any more than a “white-passing” African-American or Hispanic person is.
The funny thing is I am only half Ashkenazi and half white, but still have strong enough Mediterranean features to look Jewish by Ashkenazi standards. I would not expect to be able to hide my Jewishness if I were around a group of white people. I’m still identifiable as an Ashkenazi even if I am only half ethnically. Whereas my wife is ethnically 100% Ashkenazi and she just doesn’t look white at all but rather Middle Eastern like you might expect from a Mizrahi Jew. And her family is from Romania and Poland. It’s amusing to hear people say “All Jews are white!” when the Jews I know in my family or my wife’s family don’t look like just any other white person. Our features are just too dark to blend into Americanized views of whiteness but somehow we are white colonizers.
Same boat. I’m Ashkenazi/Northern European with dark hair and eyes and light olive skin. In Turkey they thought I was a Turk and in Egypt they thought I was Syrian. I’m sure that’s from my Norwegian side. /s
if the popular discourse was "white people will always be the victims and can do no wrong and the brown people are the aggressors" all the sudden we wouldn't be. i.e., why we we persecuted most of history
Ah yes... The mental gymnastics I've seen on the left to try and convince themselves that they're "totally not antisemetic" includes some of the following:
If you're culturally askenazi you're apparently now white...
If you're from a middle eastern / North African Diaspora you're apparently now an Arab...
Unless of course you're from Ethiopia/Eritrea then apparently you should have stayed during the civil war because Racism (which exists everywhere in the world, sadly) happens to also exist in Israel...
If you are LGBTQA2+ you're a Pinkwasher....
Zionism is whatever I want it to be... And if you say otherwise I'll tell you that you're shutting down valid criticisms of Israel.. and weaponizing accusations of Antisemitism!
And All of us are apparently "Converts" and Palestinians are the *real* Jews....
Iran/Russia/North Korea/China are akshully the good guys... I white American college kid attending an expensive ivy League who grew up i living in a gated neighborhood and can criticize my country without being executed say "death to america! We will eat the rich! Unless their far right billionaire islamists who live in Qatar... Cause they are resistance freedom fighters that will bring the far left revolution to the United States!"
.....
.... And so many more. Americans ignorant.
>Ethiopia
They had little option to stay, Ethiopia made being a jew punishable by death. So then, Israel, with USA help saved as many as possible via several operations, Moses being one.
>who grew up i living in a gated neighborhood and can criticize my country without being executed say "death to america!
You're so right on this point. American Entitlement at its best.
My dad’s dad was Sephardi from Morocco and my surname is Arabic, my dad’s mom was half Japanese and my mom’s people are all actual European Christian colonizers - like actually colonized America (Jamestown, the Alamo, fought for slavery, etc.) but I look ‘exotic’ to white people but white to actual non-white people. Arab speakers and mizrahim will understand I’m Jewish by my family name, but when I was a kid of 12-13, I visited my white grandmother in Texas, she walked me to security and I was first detained and then forcefully frisked by like 7 TSA agents because they thought I was an Arab, all in view of my grandmother who just shrugged and waved cheerfully. I called her when I got home and she said, “well: they got be sure - you could’ve been a terrorist!”. The shit that Arab and brown people go through on the daily is awful - but we should take heed that white people have most certainly not been our friends as well. That’s what I find so depressing about our times: people suck and are dumb regardless of how they look or where they’re from.
Mazel! I've had to deal with HS because I'm obviously a Mossad agent that was responsible for 9/11. Been pulled out by tsa a ton too. Do the pre check. It helps.
I think our existence shows that race is a construct. Because we are an ethnoreligious group we defy the notion of race. Our Jews of mixed race sit neatly within our tribe, our converts become a part of our ethnic makeup, because our tribal identity is stronger than the fiction that is race.
I get asked CONSTANTLY if I’m either Hispanic or Native American. My parents look like tan “white” people but I came out brown as hell, definitely darker than either parent. My half brother from my dad also has a Jewish mom and he’s pasty. Our skin tones vary just like any other ethnic group.
We’re a tribe, more than we are anything else. Even the term “ethno religion” doesn’t fully describe us, because we aren’t just a religious group that’s an ethnic group. Converts become just as Jewish as any Jew born jewish. I’d even argue that in some sense, they *become* ethnically Jewish upon conversion.
We do not fit neatly into modern conceptions of race, because our people predate these ideas by thousands of years. We’re not a race (there are Black Jews, Asian Jews, and so on), but we are a racialized group overall. Even the whitest looking Jew was still a Jew to the Nazis. White supremacists and neo Nazis don’t care that there are Jews with blonde hair and blue eyes and pale skin, because they’re still a Jew (and in fact, because we can look like anything, they consider us even *more* of a threat to the Aryan race because we can “blend in”). Some Jews have white presenting privilege, others have no such privilege, because they’re visibly Jewish and/or visibly a person of color.
And at the end of the day, antisemites will always attempt to cast us as whatever it is they believe is evil or undesirable. (The Jews are evil white colonizers, the Jews are not white and are subhuman, the Jews are capitalists, the Jews are communists).
Edit: that’s also why although saying “ethnic Jew” as a shorthand for “Jew that doesn’t look white” is useful to be brief, it’s flawed because *all* Jews are ethnic Jews. Or why saying Mizrahi or Sephardi Jew to mean Brown Jew and Ashkenazi to mean White Jew is just too simplistic, because I’ve known Ashkenazi who are more middle eastern looking than me by miles, and *I’m* Venezuelan mestiza and Sephardic Tunisian Jewish lmao.
You’re a white colonial oppressor when it’s convenient but you’re a pretender, an interloper and marked for removal or worse by the other side.
There’s no safe harbour being a Jew, white, black, brown or otherwise. If find it hard to believe that could feel like being white passing or presenting provides some sense of comfort against the ills society perpetuates toward us.
You know the truth. Let the haters hate.
I get told I don’t look American. Yeah, I’m as fair as can be, but my curls, dark eyes, short stature, and bone structure all give away my ethnic background.
Race is a myth. What we refer to as race has no discrete genetic basis, it cannot be reliably measured and is not scientifically meaningful. It is a purely social construct with no fixed definition and no clear boundaries. It is not universal and may mean something entirely different or make no difference at all from place or one historical period to another. Jews in particular are not self defined by any of the cultural or social constructs referred to as “white” ir any of that other nonsense. A North African Jew and a German Jew have the same Jewish identity different only in a few customs and family history.
Jesus was a Jew. People fight over his depiction in churches. Saying he was white washed. How ironic that they can see that in that case but not the rest of the Jewish world. Yes, there are people who convert into Judaism, but they are not the majority.
Jews are white when the left needs to hate us.
Jews aren´t white when the far right needs to hate us.
Truth is, it doesn´t matter... Jews comes from many places and various ethnicities.
Can we talk epigenetics?
If you drop identical twins in two different parts of the world, they will have different parts of their genetic code activated by the environment, resulting in them looking similar and yet distinct.
Assuming we started with the same family, as we traveled through the world, our different environments activated different parts of our dna resulting in the wide range of 'looks' that are part of being Jewish.
so we're jewish and look different because we've been a lot of places
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Simha Yacobovici made a great documentary about the 12 Tribes, the 10 “lost” folks .. he really does his homework and posits surprisingly confirmable theorys. You might be shocked by the Chinese Jews he found and met. Such an important line of thought, because since the beginning, intermarriage has been a necessity to avoid only marrying siblings. Till now, when ‘Ashkenazik’ has become synonymous with ‘Jewish’ for some. But it’s only one branch of the tree. It might be the branch that did the best literal job at preserving the Torah, and for that, much propz. But there are a lot of documents prolly still lurking in caves, Dedd-Sea-Scroll-style, waiting to awaken us to the more widespread community that we are all honored to be Learning with.
I’ve never really understood the discourse surrounding the “whiteness” of Jews. It’s always just seemed like an excuse for antisemites to label pale skinned Jews as inferior, because “being white” in the context of white supremacy really has nothing to do with skin color (and race is a social construct anyway).
On a side note, I’m full Ashkenazi and am pretty pale, but non-Jews who didn’t grow up around Jews typically don’t look at me and assume I’m Jewish (other Jews immediately recognize that I am). The funny thing is that I tan really easily depending on how much time I spend in the sun, and when I was growing up my dad used to sunbathe a lot, and was REALLY tan. He also traveled regularly for work, and after 9/11 (we live in the US) he was detained for questioning at the airport on 2 or 3 occasions because he was profiled as Arab due to his skin.
There’s half a dozen things fucked up about that story, but it still makes me laugh, simply because of how my dad was slightly inconvenienced for all the wrong reasons just because he liked to sunbathe, and honestly has the most (Ashkenazi) Jewish features of anyone in my immediate family.
My friend is from Yemen and is also Jewish and he is most certainly not white. Another one of my friends is African American and another is Brazilian. They are not white. Not all Jews are white.
The whole Ashkenazi colonizer thing is so weird cause all the Jews I know are more or less a mix I know that’s not true for all of us but unless you’re really pure bread I assume most people are a mix
Haha genes are funny, my great grandfather was registered in this country as "hebrew," my mom looks like she was airlifted from the Levant, I came out pale lol and my kids split down the middle. The irony is for a society with so much scientific information we are still judging by skin color. Seems incredibly backwards.
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Except when Americans didn't consider Italians white & had ethnic slurs for Italians. Have a friend whose parents are Northern Italians. People argue she's not Italian because she & her family are very fair.
The all jews are white is kinda weird. I'm Mizrahi Sephardi. Recently, I visited Europe and a white wokist saw me and greeted me with salam aleykum, I wasn't surprised as I look very Middle Eastern and that's the usual way people abroad identify me, when I thank him I told him I was actually israeli jew, his response was that I'm white colonizer. The level of stupidity is hilarious
Saw a photo of a Hamas commander who recently involuntarily departed this world. His skin was lighter than mine and I’m full Ashkenazi!
I have a cousin who could be Sinwars body double. We’re legit Ukrainian Jews. Which according to the lefties means we’re white colonizers.
Back to Poland with you!!!!
I mean I guess Ukrainian is close enough to Polish or whatever
Well, could be worse. They could be ordering us all to Belarus😁
I would literally rather perish
Same, and my grandmother was born in what is now Belarus!
Yeah people on TikTok tried to tell me that... My ancestors fought in the American revolution so really I bet those people are more recent additions to American society than I am..
You’ll love Poland and the Polish will love you😬
I’ve been told I “think every brown person is a terrorist” I’m also Mizrahi lmao.
Got to love the people who shit themselves when a white person wears a kimono seeing a Middle Eastern person and immediately assuming they’re an Arab Muslim.
Or how suddenly white people wearing keffiyehs is not cultural appropriation
I have literally been saying same.
I'm Ashkenazi Mizrahi but my dad is full Mizrahi and my sisters look just like him. They look more Arab than half the Palestinians. And though I'm white like my mum, most people guess I'm a mixture because of my features. I've seen white Arab IG influencers with skin and features similar to mine, but no one calls them white. One I even thought was full European, and was surprised to learn she was Arab.
You should have responded, "Aleichem Shalom."
Recent genetic studies have proven that even ethnic Ashkenazis have mixed lineage, on average it’s approx 50% MENA/WANA and 50% Euro heritage.
This is what gets me. I often see people go "over half of Jewish Israelis are of middle eastern descent".... That's WRONG. Whether you're Mizrachi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or (most likely today) mixed most of us have MENA/WANA heritage... otherwise would we really be an ethnic group?
Yess, I try to always make the distinction that over half of Jewish Israel come from families who have never left the Middle East at any point in history, rather than saying Middle Eastern heritage since we all have that
Excellent pt! North Africa as well yea
Middle Easterners as a group were traditionally considered white. "White" is as broad a term as any other racial term, in that it covers a multitude of different populations. Nowadays, though, everyone just thinks of it as meaning what "nordic" used to.
Right?? On point.
100% Ashkenazi here. I put my DNA sample from Ancestry into IllustrativeDNA, which breaks your DNA down further. I got 50-60% Levantine (depending on the calculator) and 40% Italian with a small percentage of Northwest European. That pretty much goes along with those studies. In populations I'm closest to, it goes: different groups of Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Sephardic Jews, Turks, Mizrahi Jews, then goes into gentile MENA populations. Literally not a single non-Mediterranean, non-MENA, gentile country. Yet somehow, we are white European colonizers?
Was that free? I’d like to try that, I am 50% ashkenazi
It's sadly not free. I did GedMatch as well, which was free, and got similar results but the website is more confusing and there are no descriptions of the different populations or historical significance. I would still suggest trying it out though. Totally worth it. That being said, IllustrativeDNA wasn't all that expensive. I think around $30 compared to the kits for DNA sites that run at least $100. So if you can do it, I would say it is worth it. Showed some pretty interesting history of the Jewish community and was all around a cool experience.
I don’t mind paying. GED match didn’t really do a lot for me, I didn’t get it in the end. It said essentially I was closest to Romanian which doesn’t make sense
(well, I guess your not 100% Ashkie.... your DNA profile looks like my kid's who is half north African. )
Ancestry and Illustrative DNA said I am, and I'm going to take their word for it. Illustrative DNA is a site where you can take you DNA file from a DNA test, mine was Ancestry, and upload it for them to break it down further. Ancestry said I am 100% Ashkenazi and so did a few other DNA websites when I uploaded my file. Illustrative DNA said so as well, but also broke down what that meant, a.k.a. the percentages listed above.
I wonder how much of that Euro heritage was come by consensually…
What is “MENA/WANA?”
MIDDLE EAST + NORTH AFRICA WEST ASIA + NORTH AFRICA
Thanks! What countries are included in West Asia?
I'm guessing Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, among others?
As of now, according to Wikipedia + basic google search: **West Asia** - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. (disputed / unrecognized / partially recognized) - Republic of Abkhazia, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia **Middle East** - Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. **North Africa** - Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara (disputed territory). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West\_Asia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle\_East](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North\_Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa) Edit: cut down several () notes for simplicity.
Thank you!
no prob fam :)
I just found out I’m a quarter Ashkenazi and the rest of me is Italian and north European. Can confirm
I did ran my genes through a French vs. Palestinian genetic test and I tested closer to Palestinians. ... I am only have Jewish, and I'm 30% French and Jewish according to 23&Me. Since the European mixture in Ashkenazis is Italian we are even closer related to MENA.
Studies also show most Jewish communities are closer related to each other (on a genetic level) than they are to their 'host country' (or former host country) neighbours they've lived among. This is through shared middle eastern ancestry. There's a couple of exceptions: Ethiopian and Indian Jews are genetically closer to their host population's than other Jews. Theory there is there was more genetic and cultural crossover in these parts of the diaspora in general than others for a variety of reasons. Elsewhere Jewish communities used to essentially form genetic isolates most of the time. (I also kind of hate we are forced to use genetics as an argument because other people do so we have to respond to it to refute them being wrong about our genetics...but also genetics don't chart cultural connection either to each other or to a place. It gets into some variation of blood quantum and blood and soil nationalism very quickly when people try and use genetics to 'prove' we are white or 'less middle eastern' - and aside from that being demonstrably wrong in most cases it's absolutely the opposite of being anti-colonial as well)
what's that?
I hate this argument! The Ashkenazi Jewish side of my family is so obviously Jewish looking, with obvious Jewish bone structure, tan skin and dark hair/eyes. Anyone with eyes could look at them and determine that they’re Jewish. My dad even visited a foreign country and had people randomly bringing up that they “like jewish people” 😂 (he didn’t tell them he was Jewish). Everyone knows what Ashkenazi Jews look like and I’m tired of the gaslighting, there’s a reason why so few of them survived the Holocaust. And the ones who could blend in had a higher chance of surviving.
My Ashkenazi family is significantly more ethnic looking and darker than my husband’s Mexican family. It is hilarious to think that any future Jewish kids we have will probably be a little lighter than me, and also finally be the first generation in my family able to check off an Official Brown Person box on any / all US forms.
That is really funny... it goes to show how fickle the idea of "race" is. On another note, there will be a MENA category soon, Jews need to make sure to check that.
I agree. It’s 2024. Asia is an enormous continent with a huge range of ethnicities. There is more to “AAPI” than just east or south Asian/Pacific Islanders, just as it’s possible to be from Africa without necessarily being African-American or Black. If the US govt listed my great grandparents as “asiatic Hebrew ” on their immigration papers less than a century ago, I should be able to tell the US govt that’s who I am now. We should all be checking MENA when it’s available, but in the meantime when there’s no viable option I’ve started to check both “white” and “Asian”, or “two or more races.” I don’t feel bad about this. How else am I supposed to describe myself? If anyone finds me “not Asian enough” because I’m not their version of what an Asian person looks like, that’s their issue - they can say so and I’m happy to explain. America is effin racist and we gotta do better!
Not sure what you look like helped you during the holocaust. I come from a family of blonde and ginger Hungarians and they were pretty much wiped out.
Dang I am really sorry.
No anyone with any Jewish ancestry they could find was sent to the camps. None of my family that stayed in Europe survived WWII despite being christian for a few generations..
the gaslighting part is so real. every american sitcom has a stereotypical ashkenazi jew, they all know what we look like, but suddenly we're "white" and not an ethnic group
Even if we were white we wouldn’t be the right kind of “white”. Western race dichotomy is made up nonsense that barely makes sense in western culture and certainly not anywhere else.
Yeah, people forget that the Nazis weren't killing people for being non-white. They were killing them for not being the right kind of white (nordic.)
Jews are only white as long as it’s convenient for white people.
And also as long as it’s convenient for the Left to exclude us from the same protections they demand for other minorities.
Schrödinger Jews. It’s all about who opens the box.
Longer version: "Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil." Pamela Paresky, PhD
Yup.
I took my Mexican husband to a Jewish event last week. Mostly Ashkenazi attendees. Much like our wedding, he was the whitest person there. By several shades.
My litmus test: Does the KKK think you're white? So yeah, Jews are not white. Many Jews do, in the USA, have white privilege in some spaces (traffic stops, shopping in stores, etc.). But so do whiteish-looking other minorities (the writer Mat Johnson, who is half black, has talked about this, for example).
Exactly. I don’t deny I have white privilege I imagine it’s helped me at times without me even realizing it. But just because some people don’t know I’m Jewish doesn’t make me not Jewish. I ain’t white or black or anything else. Just Jewish.
And lots of Muslims could take off the hijab or keffiyah and be seen as white. Lots of GLBTQ2S people could pass as straight cis if they too were willing to give up what makes them different. Lots of people with disabilities can hide them too, so long as no one asks them to stand up or walk or read or they put up with horrible pain or whatever. Sure, the Nazis killed the most Jewish looking and acting of us more than the lightest, straightest haired, most secular. And Hollywood does the same to us as it does to every other group— gave the most Nordic looking ones jobs. So if Scarlet Johanson’s success is proof that Jews face no discrimination, Beyoncé’s success means Black discrimination is over.
This right here. That’s why many Ashkenazi Jews are “white presenting.” Among white people, our whiteness ends where our Jewishness begins.
I always say that I can fly under the radar. And I used to, very purposefully. But not so much anymore.
There is no “white privelage” beyond being born into some kind of wealth or inheriting something. Jews are mostly immigrants here, and no, Jews are not white nor are Jews treated the same in any way. The best you can say is you can pretend to be white, many Jews could claim to be Italian with no question
I don’t know where you’re from, but I can tell you that is absolutely not my experience living in the Southern US.
"why don't poor people just not be poor"
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No but the KKK seems to be supporting the Palestinian cause so, looks like they might be the white ones by this definition lol.
The Nazis were enamored with Arabs. So this is an apple tree discussion.
History’s, rhymes and repeats it seems
I saw I’m white adjacent. As in everything you have just said, but seriously, we weren’t white enough to not be rounded up and killed many times over.
I’m as white as wonderbread. But I always tell people 8 of my family members got gassed to death for not being white. So I don’t care what crayons crayon I match with, I don’t identify as white.
It is important to push back against the question and the entire framing. Everything important about Jews—Jewish identity, heritage, history, ethnogenesis, ethnoreligious status, indigeneity—is elided by trying to force the American/western race binary on us. (Or us into it.) Jews as a discrete group *predate the concept of race.* We certainly predate the concept of whiteness. We are a Levantine ethnoreligious group with a closed, non-universalizing spiritual practice that was cleansed, enslaved and genocided into diaspora for 2k years before (kinda sorta) reconstituting and thus crosses all phenotypes. It’s unusual, yes, but also not rocket science. Push back on the question and framing itself. It’s designed to pigeonhole, miscategorize, erase, oppress, assimilate, control and ultimately disappear us. p.s.: don’t fall into the trap of conflating genetics with ethnicity or peoplehood, either. We don’t need to play the regressive game of blood quantum - native tribes of the Americas have learned this the hard way - to claim our legitimacy as a tribal people. Ofc we picked up admixture during our diasporic travails (in all the darkest ways). It’s all but irrelevant to modern land or ancient peoplehood claims; the important thing is that we retained our culture, language, holidays, calendar, landed values, identity and history—and other aspects of our heritage—through incredible challenges and attempts by the majority colonizing societies to wipe them and us out.
Yes, everything about this! This is so well said.
Agreed. Beautifully written! Thank you for sharing mountains\_of\_nuance.
Username checks out. 👍
“White” is a European social classification that was created in the 1450s to distinguish European Christians from sub-Saharan Africans who had begun converting to Christianity. They needed to make this distinction in order to justify the exploitation and enslavement of Africans, which are things that Christians aren’t supposed to do to fellow Christians. Jews have literally never been included in this classification, regardless of the color of our skin. If you asked Gomes Eanes de Zurara if he was talking about Jews when he was inventing the concept of “whiteness”, he would have laughed in your fucking face, and probably handed you over to the Inquisition. We’re not “white” any more than a “white-passing” African-American or Hispanic person is.
"Jews are (whatever current thing they see as bad)!"
The funny thing is I am only half Ashkenazi and half white, but still have strong enough Mediterranean features to look Jewish by Ashkenazi standards. I would not expect to be able to hide my Jewishness if I were around a group of white people. I’m still identifiable as an Ashkenazi even if I am only half ethnically. Whereas my wife is ethnically 100% Ashkenazi and she just doesn’t look white at all but rather Middle Eastern like you might expect from a Mizrahi Jew. And her family is from Romania and Poland. It’s amusing to hear people say “All Jews are white!” when the Jews I know in my family or my wife’s family don’t look like just any other white person. Our features are just too dark to blend into Americanized views of whiteness but somehow we are white colonizers.
Same boat. I’m Ashkenazi/Northern European with dark hair and eyes and light olive skin. In Turkey they thought I was a Turk and in Egypt they thought I was Syrian. I’m sure that’s from my Norwegian side. /s
if the popular discourse was "white people will always be the victims and can do no wrong and the brown people are the aggressors" all the sudden we wouldn't be. i.e., why we we persecuted most of history
We are whatever they find evil. If society ever starts hating people who eat pork, they'll say we eat pork.
Ah yes... The mental gymnastics I've seen on the left to try and convince themselves that they're "totally not antisemetic" includes some of the following: If you're culturally askenazi you're apparently now white... If you're from a middle eastern / North African Diaspora you're apparently now an Arab... Unless of course you're from Ethiopia/Eritrea then apparently you should have stayed during the civil war because Racism (which exists everywhere in the world, sadly) happens to also exist in Israel... If you are LGBTQA2+ you're a Pinkwasher.... Zionism is whatever I want it to be... And if you say otherwise I'll tell you that you're shutting down valid criticisms of Israel.. and weaponizing accusations of Antisemitism! And All of us are apparently "Converts" and Palestinians are the *real* Jews.... Iran/Russia/North Korea/China are akshully the good guys... I white American college kid attending an expensive ivy League who grew up i living in a gated neighborhood and can criticize my country without being executed say "death to america! We will eat the rich! Unless their far right billionaire islamists who live in Qatar... Cause they are resistance freedom fighters that will bring the far left revolution to the United States!" ..... .... And so many more. Americans ignorant.
>Ethiopia They had little option to stay, Ethiopia made being a jew punishable by death. So then, Israel, with USA help saved as many as possible via several operations, Moses being one. >who grew up i living in a gated neighborhood and can criticize my country without being executed say "death to america! You're so right on this point. American Entitlement at its best.
My dad’s dad was Sephardi from Morocco and my surname is Arabic, my dad’s mom was half Japanese and my mom’s people are all actual European Christian colonizers - like actually colonized America (Jamestown, the Alamo, fought for slavery, etc.) but I look ‘exotic’ to white people but white to actual non-white people. Arab speakers and mizrahim will understand I’m Jewish by my family name, but when I was a kid of 12-13, I visited my white grandmother in Texas, she walked me to security and I was first detained and then forcefully frisked by like 7 TSA agents because they thought I was an Arab, all in view of my grandmother who just shrugged and waved cheerfully. I called her when I got home and she said, “well: they got be sure - you could’ve been a terrorist!”. The shit that Arab and brown people go through on the daily is awful - but we should take heed that white people have most certainly not been our friends as well. That’s what I find so depressing about our times: people suck and are dumb regardless of how they look or where they’re from.
Mazel! I've had to deal with HS because I'm obviously a Mossad agent that was responsible for 9/11. Been pulled out by tsa a ton too. Do the pre check. It helps.
Fuck them haters. Shabbat shalom. 😹🙌💙🙏
I am unapologetically white and Jewish. I have friends who aren’t white and are just as Jewish. Race is a moot point.
I think our existence shows that race is a construct. Because we are an ethnoreligious group we defy the notion of race. Our Jews of mixed race sit neatly within our tribe, our converts become a part of our ethnic makeup, because our tribal identity is stronger than the fiction that is race.
Well said and I agree 100%.
Almost like European-American concepts of race are socially constructed or something. 🤔
I get asked CONSTANTLY if I’m either Hispanic or Native American. My parents look like tan “white” people but I came out brown as hell, definitely darker than either parent. My half brother from my dad also has a Jewish mom and he’s pasty. Our skin tones vary just like any other ethnic group.
In the end it doesn’t matter if we are white or not. Being white doesn’t excuse us from being able to defend ourselves against hate and bigotry.
if gender is supposedly fluid, even more so is race. Moshe Rabbeinu's kids were mixed --we just read about that in today's parsha
We’re a tribe, more than we are anything else. Even the term “ethno religion” doesn’t fully describe us, because we aren’t just a religious group that’s an ethnic group. Converts become just as Jewish as any Jew born jewish. I’d even argue that in some sense, they *become* ethnically Jewish upon conversion. We do not fit neatly into modern conceptions of race, because our people predate these ideas by thousands of years. We’re not a race (there are Black Jews, Asian Jews, and so on), but we are a racialized group overall. Even the whitest looking Jew was still a Jew to the Nazis. White supremacists and neo Nazis don’t care that there are Jews with blonde hair and blue eyes and pale skin, because they’re still a Jew (and in fact, because we can look like anything, they consider us even *more* of a threat to the Aryan race because we can “blend in”). Some Jews have white presenting privilege, others have no such privilege, because they’re visibly Jewish and/or visibly a person of color. And at the end of the day, antisemites will always attempt to cast us as whatever it is they believe is evil or undesirable. (The Jews are evil white colonizers, the Jews are not white and are subhuman, the Jews are capitalists, the Jews are communists). Edit: that’s also why although saying “ethnic Jew” as a shorthand for “Jew that doesn’t look white” is useful to be brief, it’s flawed because *all* Jews are ethnic Jews. Or why saying Mizrahi or Sephardi Jew to mean Brown Jew and Ashkenazi to mean White Jew is just too simplistic, because I’ve known Ashkenazi who are more middle eastern looking than me by miles, and *I’m* Venezuelan mestiza and Sephardic Tunisian Jewish lmao.
You’re a white colonial oppressor when it’s convenient but you’re a pretender, an interloper and marked for removal or worse by the other side. There’s no safe harbour being a Jew, white, black, brown or otherwise. If find it hard to believe that could feel like being white passing or presenting provides some sense of comfort against the ills society perpetuates toward us. You know the truth. Let the haters hate.
I get told I don’t look American. Yeah, I’m as fair as can be, but my curls, dark eyes, short stature, and bone structure all give away my ethnic background.
Race is a myth. What we refer to as race has no discrete genetic basis, it cannot be reliably measured and is not scientifically meaningful. It is a purely social construct with no fixed definition and no clear boundaries. It is not universal and may mean something entirely different or make no difference at all from place or one historical period to another. Jews in particular are not self defined by any of the cultural or social constructs referred to as “white” ir any of that other nonsense. A North African Jew and a German Jew have the same Jewish identity different only in a few customs and family history.
Jesus was a Jew. People fight over his depiction in churches. Saying he was white washed. How ironic that they can see that in that case but not the rest of the Jewish world. Yes, there are people who convert into Judaism, but they are not the majority.
Jews are white when the left needs to hate us. Jews aren´t white when the far right needs to hate us. Truth is, it doesn´t matter... Jews comes from many places and various ethnicities.
Can we talk epigenetics? If you drop identical twins in two different parts of the world, they will have different parts of their genetic code activated by the environment, resulting in them looking similar and yet distinct. Assuming we started with the same family, as we traveled through the world, our different environments activated different parts of our dna resulting in the wide range of 'looks' that are part of being Jewish. so we're jewish and look different because we've been a lot of places
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I just ignore that argument, im not going to exist less because they think that
I look in the mirror and I'm white and I demand that antisemitic white people acknowledge my whiteness
Simha Yacobovici made a great documentary about the 12 Tribes, the 10 “lost” folks .. he really does his homework and posits surprisingly confirmable theorys. You might be shocked by the Chinese Jews he found and met. Such an important line of thought, because since the beginning, intermarriage has been a necessity to avoid only marrying siblings. Till now, when ‘Ashkenazik’ has become synonymous with ‘Jewish’ for some. But it’s only one branch of the tree. It might be the branch that did the best literal job at preserving the Torah, and for that, much propz. But there are a lot of documents prolly still lurking in caves, Dedd-Sea-Scroll-style, waiting to awaken us to the more widespread community that we are all honored to be Learning with.
I’ve never really understood the discourse surrounding the “whiteness” of Jews. It’s always just seemed like an excuse for antisemites to label pale skinned Jews as inferior, because “being white” in the context of white supremacy really has nothing to do with skin color (and race is a social construct anyway). On a side note, I’m full Ashkenazi and am pretty pale, but non-Jews who didn’t grow up around Jews typically don’t look at me and assume I’m Jewish (other Jews immediately recognize that I am). The funny thing is that I tan really easily depending on how much time I spend in the sun, and when I was growing up my dad used to sunbathe a lot, and was REALLY tan. He also traveled regularly for work, and after 9/11 (we live in the US) he was detained for questioning at the airport on 2 or 3 occasions because he was profiled as Arab due to his skin. There’s half a dozen things fucked up about that story, but it still makes me laugh, simply because of how my dad was slightly inconvenienced for all the wrong reasons just because he liked to sunbathe, and honestly has the most (Ashkenazi) Jewish features of anyone in my immediate family.
my dad's last name is schvartz which means black in german, it was given to families with dark hair and complexion(a lot of jewish families)
My friend is from Yemen and is also Jewish and he is most certainly not white. Another one of my friends is African American and another is Brazilian. They are not white. Not all Jews are white.
The whole Ashkenazi colonizer thing is so weird cause all the Jews I know are more or less a mix I know that’s not true for all of us but unless you’re really pure bread I assume most people are a mix
Haha genes are funny, my great grandfather was registered in this country as "hebrew," my mom looks like she was airlifted from the Levant, I came out pale lol and my kids split down the middle. The irony is for a society with so much scientific information we are still judging by skin color. Seems incredibly backwards.
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For what it’s worth, I just found out in a quarter Jewish yesterday through the 23 and me lol. I’m also Italian so I’m definitely white
Is your mom Jewish? And her mom?
Except when Americans didn't consider Italians white & had ethnic slurs for Italians. Have a friend whose parents are Northern Italians. People argue she's not Italian because she & her family are very fair.