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Too Many Jews Are Being Silenced About Our Racialized Experiences

For most of elementary school, I was the only Jewish girl in a class of over eighty kids. There were a couple of Jewish boys. While I was secular during my childhood, everyone in school knew I was a Jew. A neighbor called me a “Jewish jerk” and made guttural noises one day to explain that he was speaking my language. A girl in my fourth grade class told me that Jewish people howl at the moon and pray to the devil.

On top of the antisemitism I faced, my year-round olive skin made me into a curiosity throughout my childhood. Kids would frequently ask, “Why are you so dark?” “Did your mother eat too much chocolate when she was pregnant with you?” “Where are you from?” implying that I must be from somewhere exotic.

Although my skin color didn’t exactly give away my Jewish identity, it caused questions to be asked. And then I had a choice to make. Do I answer, “Russian,” or do I say, “Jewish?” If I said my family is from Russia, the response would always be, “But you don’t look Russian.” Which meant I had to answer more questions.

My town growing up was mostly Catholic Italian. So anything Italian was considered cool. In fifth grade, a new boy came to school. He was cute, and I could tell he liked me. Like everyone else who met me and saw my brown skin, he wanted to know where I was from. He was hoping I was Italian like him, but I said “no.”

He moved onto other brown minorities, and I kept being coy. I always thought of myself as a proud Jew, yet when I recently began to recall these memories, I realized that I rarely offered up “Jewish” right away when the questions would start. In the middle of the boy’s guessing game, another boy who knew my identity walked by. He quickly put the inquiry to rest. “She’s a Jew,” he blurted out, and then the boy who liked me and wanted to know who I was, looked disgusted and walked away.

I wrote an article last week about Jews not being white and it went viral. I described the confusing position brown Ashkenazi Jews like me have had to negotiate. Our lived experiences have shown us that our skin has been a topic of conversation, often outing us as Jews, yet because our families lived in Eastern Europe after they were forcibly exiled from previous lands, we have gotten labeled as “white.” We have both endured racialized experiences as Jews, yet have been told they weren’t possible because a few generations ago our ancestors lived in Europe. Some of us have Sephardic heritage somewhere in the mix, but because of systemic Jew hatred, records of our ancestors were destroyed. Some of us look dark simply because we are an indigenous people from the Levant.

I believe the article went viral because there are so many Ashkenazi Jews like me, who have both lived through numerous racialized experiences, yet are scared to speak about them because we are told they’re not possible. For many of us, we come from families where some of our siblings or parents are white-passing. So even our family may not understand what we have lived through.

One Ashkenazi man posted a comment that his grandmother was tortured by friends because of how dark his Ashkenazi mother was and he was thrilled and relieved that an Orthodox Jewish public figure was “finally, finally, finally” discussing the racialized experiences many Ashkenazi Jews live through. Another man posted that he’s frustrated because he’s Jewish and Mexican and people only consider him a Jew of color because of his Mexican part, when in fact it’s his Ashkenazi features that make him look so ethnic. (Even beyond skin color, many Ashkanazi Jews feel outed as Jews by their Semitic features and “Jewfros.” And of course, like other minorities have taken to skin-lightening treatments and eye surgeries, so too, many lighter Ashkenazi Jews have gotten nose jobs and straightened their hair in order to “blend.”)

The lifelong questions I had to answer about the color of my skin was something I rarely discussed with anyone, but I just started speaking to my parents about it. Apparently both of my parents also got comments about their brown skin and were the brown ones among their siblings like I am.

My paternal grandmother had a blond-haired, fair-skinned daughter, and was eating a lot of chocolate when she was pregnant with my father, her second pregnancy. My grandmother’s friends all joked that if she didn’t stop eating so much chocolate, when her baby was born, it would come out brown. When my father did, my grandmother’s friends were hysterical.

My mother’s mother was also olive-skinned. This grandmother, who died when I was ten, would call me her “little black one,” in Yiddish when I was growing up, as a term of endearment, though that word should not be used today as it can have racist undertones. I believe my grandmother was proud to have another brown person in the family. My mother just told me her mother would call her the same when she was growing up. Her sister (my aunt) had blond hair and blue eyes.

You may be wondering why any of this matters, and here’s why it does: The Jewish people have been stripped of our ethnic identity and our millennia-old persecution and marginalization with the minority narrative that has become popularized in recent years. Yes, some Jews are white-passing and have been able to benefit from that. But none of us have a white gentile experience.

We are considered privileged because in the U.S. right now, we are doing pretty well financially overall. This is a ignorant way to see our people. Our Haggadah – the national storytelling of the Jewish people – states that in every generation our enemies rise up to destroy us. All Jews live with this fear and insecurity, but since we don’t perfectly fit into any of the oppressed categories that exist right now, we are left out of the conversation.

So our community continues to be negatively depicted in media, and although Jews continue to feel less and less safe in the world, our fears are invalidated. I get that the Jewish experience complicates the intersectionality model, but for an initiative that was created for the goal of inclusivity, it is pretty hypocritical to not take the time to learn what makes being a Jew different and what non-Jewish allies can do to make us feel safe.

We need to share our stories.

This was my experience growing up as a secular Ashkenazi Jewish girl with skin that made people comment and ask questions about my identity.

What’s your story of being outed or marginalized as a Jew?

 

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  • Avatar photo Yaffi Lvova says on October 19, 2021

    I was listening to a lecture today—it was a discussion about the book People Love Dead Jews (great book). The moderator mentioned at one point, that he has been outed as a Jew in the classroom. My response was, “Nu? Who hasn’t?”
    And then I started thinking about that.

    “Yaffi, can I share with the class that you’re Jewish?”
    You just did.

    My husband found out he was Jewish from a teacher, in front of his class of 11 year olds (in communist Belarus).

    This isn’t ok.

    Reply
    • Avatar photo Natalie says on October 20, 2021

      I was the only Jewish girl in my class in Bristol. I as 8 years old and was kicked constantly in the playground by around 15 kids shouting at me “you killed Christ”. The headmaster came out to see the fuss and just looked on and after a few minutes got the children to leave me alone. Then walked back inside the school. Obviously my parents sent me to another school.
      On another occasion I was walking in the park with the one non jewish friend I had (who was a lovely girl). I was around 10 at the time,, 2 big boys around 18 years of age with a big alsation dog came up behind us, called me an effing Jew and whipped me on my back with a big dog chain.
      News travelled far in Bristol. I was 7 years old on another occasion walking down the road to my house and a Nun came towards me and said “are you the littleJewish girl who lives down the road. News travelled fast in Bristol and it probably still does.

      Reply
    • Avatar photo Arielle says on February 3, 2022

      Totally relate to this. In my high school, I just got a lot of comments on body hair in the locker room and “wow, you are soo tan”, along with a couple “you are going to hell” that I ignored. One little girl said she wasnt allowed to be friends with me bc I was Jewish and I went home crying.

      As an adult, I receive “where are you *really* from?” several times a week when I’m meeting new people, including a lot of confused comments from darker skinned people when I say I’m Ashkenazi Jewish. I also get “Oh, I don’t see you as white”, often from either very white or black people, and a lot of categorizing and commenting on my skin tone (“Are you Greek? Brazilian? Pakistani? Persian? Lebanese? Etc), as well as a lot of assumptions that I’m not from this country. From people in countries with histories of extreme antisemitic racism, I have gotten things like “do you have horns?” And “do you drink children’s blood?”.

      While I wouldn’t say race is my most dominant experience when I’m meeting new people, it’s probably second to gender in how most people treat me and the way it affects my public life. When I’m in my own community it obviously matters less than when I’m meeting new people, and I l’m light enough to benefit from white privilege in that I’m not generally concerned that it will affect my opportunities.

      My brother has had the police called on him several times for no good reason, and I do wonder if his dark hair, olive skin, and beard have played a factor in that.

      Reply
  • Avatar photo Ruti Eastman says on October 20, 2021

    I have had an opposite experience. My mother was Irish Catholic, my father Ashkenazi Jewish from Poland. I took after my light-skinned mother in appearance. After my halachic conversion to Judaism, I would get the “you don’t look Jewish” remarks periodically from Jews. Once when my husband (also a convert, with exactly zero Jewish ancestry, but with a naturally more Jewish appearance) was asked by a Jew what he was doing married to a shiksa. We laugh, because most of our experiences are very positive. But my point is that as much as we would like it to be otherwise, human beings of every color and ethnicity seem to need to work on their acceptance of others.

    Reply
  • Avatar photo Alison Becher says on October 25, 2021

    In the UK the Jewish comedian David Baddiel recounted that as a kid he got beaten up on two different occasions on racist grounds; once for being Jewish, once for being Pakistani. Just about sums up the lunacy of the racist mindset when it comes to ethnic appearance!

    Reply
  • Avatar photo Callie Rabe says on January 12, 2024

    My Father was an Ashkenazi Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust. My Jewish identity was very skewed as we never went to Temple because my Father said that “It’s too many Jews in one place at the same time”, and he married a gentile. He was very dark olive skinned, as was I. Everyone thought he was Indian or Mexican and often asked me what language we spoke at home. My siblings were not dark skinned. Classmates made fun of me and said that my Mother had slept with the mailman with me. The most repeated line I have heard in my entire life is “You look different, what are you?” My siblings did not experience the same questions, treatment, so I couldn’t talk to them about it. I was never invited to friend’s houses, nor to a single birthday party. I just assumed that my friends were inviting other kids to get to know them, and that we were friends already so they didn’t need to invite me. I lived in a small rural town. In my 40’s, I moved back to the town I grew up in to be there for my parents. I reached out to my old friends and saw them. They told me “I’m so sorry that I never had you over to my house or to my birthday parties, but my parents said that they would never have a dirty Jew in their house.” My siblings all went to friend’s houses and parties, and it never dawned on me until my childhood best friend told me that. So yes, being mistreated, hated and oppressed as a Jew was definitely compounded by my dark skin. What the heck is the matter with people………

    Reply

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