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Shelah Horvitz's avatar

I am old enough to remember when no Jews were considered white. I remember when we weren’t allowed to drive through certain white towns — this in New England! I am Ashkenazi but I’ve seen photos of Iraqi Jews who look like me. As a child we always filled in “Other” in government forms because we were not considered white by anyone, and there was no “Middle-Eastern” or “Jewish” on the forms. And then suddenly we were white, which at the time I thought was strange, but I figured it’s the same as what happened to the Irish and the Italians, who originally also were not considered white. What constitutes whiteness? Is it class? Accent? I have no idea. Now our transitive whiteness is being used against us, but in my mind we were never white because whiteness can be given and whiteness can be taken away.

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Heshy's avatar

Well written and nuanced. Another example of non-white Jews not fitting into Simple American narratives about race is that Florida, not a hotbed of progressives, has Jewish communities much more diverse than NYC.

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