On Jewish Identity

[gaudior]

The other night, I dreamed that someone (I think thespooniest, actually) was telling me I hadn't updated my journal with anything meaningful in way too long. Which is accurate. So, therefore:

Last Friday, as my (you know that stage where you know someone, but s/he's not quite a friend yet, but s/he definitely could be and probably will be when you know him/her better? She's like that.) K and I drove home from field placement, she brought up something she had been wondering about. In our class's many discussions of race, one of our classmates had frequently argued that as a Jew, he wasn't white. This puzzled her, because he certainly looks white (he doesn't even "look Jewish"), and he'd occasionally mention that he had white male privilege. So, she asked, what's going on?



Jews, I explained, have a long history of being Everyone's Favorite Group to Hate in Europe. Oh, there were certainly other groups who were treated badly, but when I went to Sunday School (I was Reform. I don't think I ever went to Saturday morning services in my entire childhood until my Bat Mitzvah, but I was sent to get a Jewish Education one day a week from the ages of about six to thirteen), the impression we got was certainly that Jews got it most and worst. We learned about pogroms, exiles and blood libel in detail-- spent an entire year studying the Holocaust. Jews, we were taught, have always struggled on against persecution, and have never really been safe anywhere. That's why Isreal is so crucial-- it's the first country that we can't get kicked out of, and so would be our safe haven if America ever turns against us.

Which is interesting because America seems, at the moment, extremely unlikely to do so. True, when the first waves of Jewish immigrants came to the country, there was a fair amount of discrimination. My grandmother told stories about want ads making it clear (usually through questions about "regular church attendance") that Jews were not wanted, and my grandfather told about hitting a man ranting on a streetcorner about how Hitler was right. There's a movie (I wish I remembered the title), sort of a precurser to "Black Like Me," about a Gentile reporter who posed as a Jew for six weeks just to see what all the discrimination was like. But even then, the persecution was just not as bad as it had been in Europe at its worst. There were, as far as I know, no massacres of American Jews. And time went on, and Jews took advantage of the educational system, and gained power and prestige and acceptance. Jews were neither a threat to the Christian majority nor sufficiently different to be scapegoats (especially as Reform and Conservative Jews shaved their beards, moved out of the Jewish neighborhoods, and, at least on the part of Reform Jews, started eating cheeseburgers and working on Saturdays and being pretty much indistinguishable from non-Jews), and other groups came to the prejudice-forefront, and anti-Semitism... kind of melted away. I'm sure that it depends on where you are, but for me, growing up in Shorewood, WI, I never faced any anti-Semitism of any kind. No-one has ever in my life called me a "kike," or a "dirty Jew," or a "Christ-killer." No-one has set fire to my synagogue or even spray-painted it. The closest I have ever, ever gotten to prejudice was my step-mother's friend earnestly informing me that "Judaism is an ancient and beautiful religion!" As victimization goes, that just doesn't cut it.

And yet, in the back of my head is the firm conviction that, as a Jew, I am a member of an oppressed minority. Despite never having personally faced any oppression of any kind based on the religion of my birth, I still remember the lessons to me taught by Sunday school teacher and family stories and hundreds and hundreds of Jewish jokes about outwitting Cossacks and Nazis and country-club owners, and those lessons teach me that Jews are just as hated as Blacks or Arabs or any other group.

The problem with this, I think, is that some Jews hold onto the idea of ourselves as victims, or at very least potential victims, and so tend to think of ourselves as a minority. This is obviously true in terms of numbers (2% of the population last time I checked), and it often gives Jews a splendid sort of solidarity with oppressed peoples and makes us do things like be very involved in the Civil Rights movement. However, I think it also gives us a somewhat unrealistic idea of what oppression actually is. I don't have statistics for this, but my impression is that Jews are strongly divided on affirmative action, with some of affirmative action's strongest opponents being Jewish. I suspect that this has much to do with said people saying, "Look, my ancestors were discriminated against-- Jews are hated, too-- but we got over it through hard work. Why can't you?" The answer to which is, of course, that hatred against Jews in this country was just not as bad, historically, as hatred against Jews in other countries or hatred against other groups here. Here, Jews have not been massacred, enslaved, imprisoned, systematically raped and beaten, etc. We've had some nastiness here, definitely, but nothing as bad as we talk about.

And we do talk about it, too. As soon as any discussion of race and discrimination comes up, Jews will talk about our experiences as Jews, and how left out we feel when all the other kids have Christmas trees. In fact, in my experience (particularly this semester), Jews will talk more about our discrimination than members of other groups. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that if people have had really bad experiences in the past, they tend to want to keep that from happening again. Someone who is talking to members of other groups about his/her past experiences with discrimination is running the risk that one of the people to whom s/he is talking will have precisely the prejudices s/he is talking about, and will try to hurt him/her again just as s/he has been hurt before. If, like me, one hasn't had many bad experiences, that possibility doesn't seem that scary, so I'm pretty comfortable talking at length. If one has been hurt that way, I could see being more reluctant to speak up. My (see above re: almost friends) M is a good example of this. She and I are both queer, but I came out in a very supportive environment and time, and have never had that much trouble from it (though certainly more than I have from being Jewish). However, she's about fifteen years older than me, much more butch (there is no mistaking her on sight for a straight woman), and grew up on a rural sheep farm. I talk about being queer all the time at school-- I mention my wife in the first or second conversation, and I loved talking about things from "the queer perspective" in class when issues of sexual orientation and gender came up. She barely mentions it until you get to know her well enough to talk about families and she mentions that her son and daughter are actually the biological children of her partner from her partner's previous marriage. Now, much of this undoubtedly has to do with personality-- but she's fairly outspoken about other things. So I think a great deal of it has to do with the fact that I feel safe talking about being queer, and she doesn't. So I talk about it a lot.

The other thing K said which surprised me was how prominent Jews are at my school. I honestly hadn't noticed, although when I think about it, we're definitely much more than 2% of the school's population. I'm not sure why there are more Jews getting PsyDs in Boston than is proportionate to the general population, but there it is. And K said that some of the students who are members of other minorities-- Muslims and Latinas, to take the example of the people she'd talked to-- feel that discussions of dealing with other races/religions get hijacked by discussions of Judaism. K said that she personally feels no objection to the lack of sensitivity to Scottish people, but that it seems like a shame that people don't talk about their experiences because the discussions that are supposed to be about their experiences--

--are taken over by the experiences of people who have had much less negative ones, I said.

She agreed, and I got out of the car feeling my head spinning a little. Questioning your assumptions is odd.

Comments

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Because the weird thing is, in Europe, Jews weren't White. Jews were Hebrews and Semites and very definitely a different race from the Russians or Germans or French or Poles or whoever. Here, we're White. It's that thing where race and skin color have, like, nothing to do with each other. Is all socially constructed. Is weird.

(Also, "catsacks"? *snerk.* Fond of that movie. Hate the sequel.)

[homasse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is all weird, isn't it. It's all a construct.

And I read an article recently that said in about fifty years in America, Hispanics will probably be considered "White," too.

(And I avoided the sequel on principle. Just NO. GYAH.)

[khava.livejournal.com]

I consider as White anyone who isn't Black. That includes Asians and Hispanics and even dark-skinned South Asians.

I didn't actually realize that I do this until sometime in the middle of college, when I overheard someone on my hall (A) complaining that another woman (b) didn't like A because A was "dark-skinned." My immediate thought was, "What is A talking about? She's White." Then I looked at A again and noticed, for the first time, that A was a very dark-skinned South Asian woman.

[q10.livejournal.com]

well, our culture doesn't mostly acknowledge that South Asians even exist, so that's sort of a distinct case.

under this system, do, say, second-generation Ethiopian immigrants also count as white?

[khava.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. I think it must be something like that I identify blacks by characteristic African features, excluding skin color. It doesn't matter how they act, dress, or talk, or how dark or light their skin is. So a second-generation Ethiopian-American would still look black to me.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Which is, I think, the thing about socially-contructed race which is so odd-- that what you consider someone to be may be wildly different from what they consider themselves to be, both of which are different from what a third person thinks they are. I mean, I suspect that the South Asian woman you're talking about would be really startled to hear that she's White.

On the other hand, as I said above, a lot of Jews think we aren't White, while lots of other people think we are.

Ideally, I think I'd like to consider everyone to be what they say they are, but thinking about it that way exclusively rather seems to miss some of the complexity of what's really going on. Hm.

[breadandroses.livejournal.com]

That would be nice, but it totally misses the wider context, both historical and present-day. Which is really why any kind of racial identification is relevant. I mean, you or I or khava can not notice someone's ethnicity, but that doesn't mean that the world at large doesn't notice it, and that it doesn't affect them in ways that us three completely miss.

Which is ultimately why I have a problem with the idea that Jews of European ancestry aren't white. My history and experience might be a bit different than your average WASP but the person on the street sees me as white, and treats me accordingly. This gives me a lot of privilege, likely a lot more than I realize. I don't treat being white as some kind of self-identification, but it is a powerful category that the world at large places me in and I think it's important to be aware of that.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'd actually picked Ethiopians as an example because they lack many of the stereotypical subsaharan-African physical traits. (they also speak a language from a different family, and have tended to have a lot more in common, culturally and religiously, with north-Africans and middle-easterners.)