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

[breadandroses.livejournal.com]

we trusted in liberal democracy once, and (to be literal but tasteless) we got burned.
Ouch. But I do think this is the key. A lot of people took the Holocaust to be an object lesson that paranoids have enemies too, and see another one waiting behind every anti-Semitic comment. It's a hard mindset to get past.

Coupla responses to the main entry: I think it's worth remembering, when discussing socially construction of race and such, that this conversation about who is and isn't white is much larger. Italians, Eastern Europeans, even Irish people weren't considered white for a long time in this country. And there was, in fact, systematic discrimination against them and against Jews, in terms of housing, employment, education and so forth. I'm not saying that it's comparable to segregation and the racism faced by African Americans because it clearly wasn't, just a clarification.

Another thing to think about is the way that negative stereotypes of Jews differ from stereotypes of other groups. It's not that we're dirty / stupid / poor / what-have-you, it's the opposite. Jews are too powerful, they're running the world secretly, etc. It's been a justification for a lot of violence. I can see understand a gut-level response that "we're oppressed too!", as obnoxious as it is. The one thing you don't want is for your power to be overestimated.

Someone who's written very well on the nature of anti-Semitism and how it relates to other prejudices (particularly racism and sexism) is Letty Cottin Pogrebin in Deborah, Golda and Me. Worth checking out.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

(Came here from q10's post):

Honestly, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Irish people were always still considered white. Even during the worst of discrimination against them, if they had to go to the bathroom, they did not go to the "colored persons" bathroom, they went into the white one. To tell the truth, my guess is that Asians did too. There's no equivalent to Jim Crow laws in the white-ethnic-minority-in-America experience.

I know you're acknowledging the difference, but I feel like in today's society every ethnically-based discriminatory practice is lumped into "race," whereas back-in-the-day, there definitely was a pretty serious distinction. I'm still not sure that I accept, even now, the practice that people make of lumping the Hispanic/Latino population into some separate race, when such a large proportion of that population is not recognizable as such on sight, and a lot of the bases for discrimination are clearly language, culture, and immigrant status, not physical features. I'm aware that stereotypes about language/culture also true of racial minorities, but a black person who behaves indistinguishably from most white people will still be treated as black, and an Asian person who has never learned a language other than English will still run into people who assume, on sight, that they will understand Chinese. It's just a very different phenomenon.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Honestly, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Irish people were always still considered white.

Um, no, actually. No, they weren't. My professor told us fascinating stories about how Irish orphans in the nineteenth century could not be adopted on the East Coast by non-Irish people, because they wanted "White babies," not Irish ones. So they were put on trains and sent West, out to where people would adopt them because they looked White-- until they got to New Mexico, where Mexican-American parents wanted to adopt them, and the adoption agencies were upset, because "non-White" people wanted to adopt these formerly-non-White-but-now-White babies.

I'll agree that the easiest way to distinguish race is on sight by skin color, but skin color varies. Some of the White people I know have darker skin and heavier features than the Black people I know.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Are you sure the word they used was "white"?

I've also heard 20th-century stories in which Asian families had to choose between "white" or "black" on the census, and expressed confusion, and were asked, "are you black? No? Then check 'white.'" Obviously those same people were discriminated against, and probably their children would not get adopted by people who wanted "white babies." But what I'm trying to say is that the American government at the very least considered all European people to be white, for a very long time. Were there always bigots who didn't feel that way? Sure. There will always be random bigots. But it's a little bit different to be a race that was considered by the law, from the beginning of the country's existence, to be altogether another species of human.

I'll grant that there were weird hazy lines, and possibly that certain non-black minorities were considered "white" for some purposes (like whether or not they could legally marry a WASP) and "not white" for others (like whether or not they'd get discriminated against by individuals).

I'll agree that the easiest way to distinguish race is on sight by skin color, but skin color varies. Some of the White people I know have darker skin and heavier features than the Black people I know.

Of course. But you can still tell that they're white, just by looking at them. If you can't, then they probably suffer a lot of the same crap that racial minorities suffer, regardless of their actual ethnic heritage. And in fact, the fact that a European who "looks black/Hispanic/whatever" will get discriminated against on sight anyway is kind of my point- our understanding of "race" is tied up with culture/class/ethnic heritage/language/whatever, and stereotypes about that feed into racist beliefs, but targets of racism can be targeted immediately, based on appearance. This point was sort of tangential in any case because a lot of Irish and Jews back in the day were instantly recognizable by facial features as such, but every once in a while I've been confused by people who are not at all easily recognizable as non-white, who have experienced ethnicity-based discrimination, and called it "racism." It's like racism, but the whole "people can drive by you, see that you're Black/Asian/whatever, and scream ethnic slurs at you, or police will be more likely to ticket you and search your car because of how you look, or people in stores will follow you around/etc." really seems important to me.

[breadandroses.livejournal.com]

what gaudior said, and there were also some laws restricting Asians' freedoms in the nineteenth century (when they weren't completely banned from entering the country, or for that matter interned).

Just for example:
With the rise in the number of Asians in the United States, a backlash grew among native-born “whites.” This rising tide of discrimination resulted in violence and a series of legal restrictions imposed upon Asian-Pacific immigrants. As far back as the Naturalization Act of 1790, the right of naturalization was reserved for "free white persons" only, in order to deny slaves the opportunity to become citizens. When confronted with Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were neither white nor black, special laws were passed declaring them ineligible for citizenship and denying them the right to hold office, own land, or file mining claims. NOTE 6 Although the Naturalization Act of 1870 granted the right of naturalization to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” Chinese immigrants would be forced to wait until 1943 before obtaining the right to become citizens. Filipinos and Indians would not gain the right of naturalization until 1946.

Much of the early hostility towards Asian immigrants was directed against Chinese workers, who were attacked in mining camps and subjected to special onerous taxes and laws that excluded “Asiatics and South Sea Islanders” from mining activities. “Chinese Quarters” were established in cities. In 1860 California forbade Chinese American children from attending public schools. Despite these enormous hardships, immigration continued, but with limitations negotiated by the Chinese and U.S. governments under the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, California suffered an economic depression, and Chinese rail workers were blamed. Nineteen Chinese died in the Los Angeles Massacre of October 24, 1871, followed by anti-Chinese fires and riots throughout the state.

from here.



I understand your discomfort, but I'm not saying that anything was equivalent to Jim Crow. That experience was unique, and I'm not trying to trivialize it. But the history of institutionalized discrimination in this country is a lot more complex than that.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

That's actually really interesting. Thanks for the links. For the most part I had thought most institutionalized discrimination against Asians (including internment) was based on immigrant status, not race, and I hadn't known that people were explicitly prohibited from being naturalized. I think my point still stands, though, when applied to European immigrants. Discrimination that comes from individuals is certainly serious, but it's a new kind of special when you're defined as a different class of human by your own government.

(oh, and by the way, if you get me talking about Europe, I'll argue that, because they were for hundreds of years defined as second-class citizens, Jews weren't white. I really am mainly talking about America).

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

You're right about the systematic discrimination-- do you mind if I go back and edit my original post so that I don't say there wasn't? (When I do an entry like this, I like for it to reflect what I actually feel about the issues, which changes when people make good points.) And you're right about the difference in stereotypes.

Ooooh, book. I needed more books. (Been reading terrifying amounts of non-fiction lately...)

[breadandroses.livejournal.com]

Sure. And this book is nonfiction, but an easy and fascinating read, IMO.