Are Ashkenazi Jews White?

1) No. And 2) If the answer to this question affects whether you think they deserve to live, please seek help

Image of the author

This is a repost of an essay I wrote on Medium exactly one year ago. Jewish people are like Schrödinger's race — we’re deemed collectively white or nonwhite depending on which is considered most evil at any given time. It’s a bunch of hateful malarkey, and it’s time to address and correct the disinformation.

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“What are you?” It’s a question that many Middle Eastern and mixed-race people (and Sookie Stackhouse) are accustomed to hearing. When you’re a Jewish person answering this question, sometimes you have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Identity is a strange business in America; aside from the fact that race is a construct based on everchanging power dynamics, there are simply too many ways to codify identity-based patterns among human beings. And yet, our precious little brains can’t stop doing it! It’s not wrong, but it’s rarely the full picture.

I was a child of the 90s and 00s — the era of “colorblindness” in the War on Drugs. It was that saccharine, bubble-gum moment of late capitalism that preceded the bursting bubble of Treyvon Martin’s murder and the national reckoning of American racism that ultimately brought us Donald Trump and the widespread protests against the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And America has a lot to reckon with.

But even as a “Caucasian” or “white” Jewish American who was raised in an era of unprecedented assimilation, I saw through the myth of colorblindness early on. I knew I was different than my German and Italian best friends; I knew I was uniquely mocked in the homogeneous suburb where I grew up for my big nose, laughed at for my “frizzy poodle hair,” and made fun of for my darker skin.

And I certainly knew how the general public received me and my family after 9/11, after which we all proceeded to get stopped like clockwork every time we went to the airport; where we felt the ire of ignorant white people who may or may not know what Jews look like, but knew they hated us the same way they hated Arabs.

Fast forward to these Roaring 20s, and now the global eye of antisemitic Sauron rests upon the Jews who comprise a mere 0.2% of the world population, spreading sophistic bigotry to undermine our existence; impelling me to publicly, once and for all, answer that question of “What are we?”

What’s in an ethnoreligion?

An ethnoreligion is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — it’s an ethnic group that is also characterized by a generally unified practice of a religion. Jewish people are an ethnoreligion, much like Yazidis or Assyrians (who you also may never have heard of), and Israel is our indigenous homeland. This connection is reinforced by genealogy, archaeology, history, culture and continued painstaking presence there even after forced diaspora following the Arab conquests of the 7th century (among others).

Judaism is a closed practice. This means that, while religious Jewish law accepts and recognizes converts as completely equal religious Jews, it is absolutely not kosher to proselytize; also, intermarriage was highly discouraged (and in some cases, forbidden by the ruling gentiles, and even religious leaders) until assimilation gained more momentum in the diaspora of the 20th century following the Holocaust.

That has changed substantially as traumatized Jews in America mobilized to assimilate in order to protect themselves from the horrors of genocide. Now, 42% of all Jewish American families are intermarried with non-Jewish spouses. This is not a bad thing, but it is a testament to the impact of secularism in American Jewish culture. For comparison, 98% of orthodox (religious) American Jews are married to another Jewish person.

This makes for a very confusing reality in public discourse. Being a somewhat reclusive people, in spite of malarkey about “Judeo-Christian” anything, little is actually known about Jews among most gentiles, other than ingrained hatred and antisemitic blood libels.

Hence, while most of the world categorizes Judaism as merely a “religion,” that is simply not the full picture. Today, there are converts who are religious Jews, but they will never be ethnically Jewish (again, not a bad thing), and that is an important distinction.

Specifically naming the ethnic component of Judaism is critical because Jewish people have been racialized across time and space (and persecuted and killed regardless of whether they were practicing religious Judaism). It’s why antisemitic caricatures are so easily recognizable.

The Nazis literally measured Jewish features and explicitly registered Jewish race as diametrically opposed to the allegedly “superior” Aryan race in the Nuremberg Laws. Hitler and the Nazis, much like the KKK in the United States, were greatly influenced by the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which originated in Russia — a country that had long been murdering and torturing the Jews who resided there through violent pogroms.

The bestselling book series Hebrews to Negroes, which was adapted into the antisemitic film notoriously promulgated by Kyrie Irving in 2022, featured quotes from the Protocols. David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan was a fierce proponent of the Protocols as well, even illustrating a version of the book in 2014.

Ironically, there are many nonwhite people who eagerly buy into these vicious antisemitic conspiracy theories and keep this philosophical component of the KKK alive and popular. Celebrated Black author Alice Walker named David Icke’s And the Truth Will Set You Free, a contemporary summary of The Protocols, as the book at her bedside when asked by The New York Times in 2018 what she was reading.

And lest anyone make the mistake of thinking that racialization of Jews and antisemitism was restricted to Europe, let it be known that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had a relationship with Hitler, and Nazism was widely influential in shaping Arab sentiments and actions towards Jewish people in Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, in part culminating in the genocide of many North African Jews during the Holocaust (though the dhimmi status of Jews in Arab lands throughout the diaspora speaks for itself about how Jews were registered by Arab Muslims before that, in addition to violent expulsions).

Ethnoreligious and racially diverse af

To make matters more complicated here, and to convey why the title of this article is not “Are Jews white?” but more specifically “Are Ashkenazi Jews white?” there are many different types of ethnic Jews. Ashkenazi Jews generally spent the last thousand years of the diaspora distributed across Eastern Europe, as opposed to Sephardi Jews who were largely in Spain and Portugal, Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, and Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia, to name some of the major ones.

Mizrahi Jews constitute the largest ethnic population in Israel at around 45%, distantly followed by Ashkenazi Jews, who account for about 32% of the population. There are certainly other racial minorities of Jews who can be captured in the category of Mizrahim but aren’t quite that, including Bukharan Jews and Bene Israel Indian Jews. And 3% of Israel’s population, or over 160,000 people, are Beta Israel, who are ethnic, Black, Ethiopian Jews. There’s even an ancient tribe of Jews in China.

In addition to these distinct ethnic groups, the aforementioned increasingly common practice of intermarriage means that today, there are Jews of literally every color and culture. That is why it is completely asinine and reductive to refer to Israeli or any Jews generally as “white.”

If you’re from the Middle East, why do you look white?

Studies have found that phenotypic expression of dark skin is an adaptation closely linked to UV radiation, which is why populations that have lived closer to the equator for more generations tend to have darker skin. Living against your will in shtetls in the frigid corners of Russia and Poland and Austria for a thousand years doesn’t exactly saturate the skin with melanin.

Furthermore, being a persecuted minority on the margins of societies that are constantly trying to torture, maim, kill and expel you doesn’t make for a very easy or stable life. Here’s one example that is merely a blip among the dark history of Jews in Europe: Around the 1917 Russian revolution, Jews in Ukraine experienced one of worst massacres in Jewish history. As many as 100,000 were killed, raped and tortured over several years, and many more were left homeless when their towns were burned.

This is not a unique story. As many Black and Native Americans can tragically relate, Jewish people living on the margins of societies with no self-defense were subject to atrocities like rape. The sheer magnitude of rape on that scale would absolutely create a more heterogeneous racial admixture. Does that make any of us less Jewish? Absolutely not — on the contrary, we have survived and thrived despite the most gruesome attempts to erode our identities and culture.

The American conception of race is historically tied to the one-drop rule, which proclaimed that even a drop of Black blood would disqualify someone from the privileges of whiteness. This concept was codified into American law in some states in the early 20th century, until it was outlawed in 1967.

Blood quantum, relatedly, originated as a measure to diminish Native American citizenship, and has become a federal demarcation for Native American ancestry, and can affect a person’s ability to be a member of a tribe or apply for federal benefits.

Notwithstanding the sexual violence that underscored much of the early multiracialism in America, we live in a society that is ever more of a melting pot (and increasingly racially diverse as white people march steadily towards minority status). As race is a construct, it is intuitive for it to evolve, but there is no logical reason that doesn’t involve an antisemitic canard such as “Jews are rich and privileged” to de facto absorb Jews into the category of whiteness — and getting a masturbatory, vindictive joy doesn’t qualify as a “logical reason.”

Color me this

No group is a monolith, and skin color does not precisely translate to race, hence why racism is different from colorism. While racism is characterized by discrimination against a group of people (typically a minority group) based on their ethnicity or race, colorism refers to the global phenomenon of systemically favoring lighter skin — anyone of any identity can suffer from or perpetuate colorism.

In light of how rabid and entrenched antisemitism is in Western culture, I’m unsurprised that few of those dedicated to “social justice” who have spent years “educating” themselves and others about racism can hold space for the nuances of colorism when there are light-skinned and white-passing Black people or Latino people or Native people, but who refuse to hold that same nuance for Jewish people.

The fact is, however, while there are indeed many Ashkenazi Jews who benefit from white privilege because they have light skin, there are literally countless Ashkenazi Jews like myself, who are fully Ashkenazi, and who very much do not look white.

Image from Decolonial Zionism on Instagram

Jews are constantly being subjected to double-standards and abhorrent projections pertaining to race; we are enemies of the “superior” white race who are ominously seeking to replace white people with minorities, and then we are also white puppeteers of a global cabal seeking to subjugate and oppress minorities. It’s absurd, and it’s exhausting.

Image from Trizzmatic on Facebook

“You white, you Ben Affleck.”

Meanwhile, as guilt-ridden, lazy Americans scramble to understand the nonexistent nuances of infographic-based social justice and adopt it as their personality, they miss many points in their rush to whitewash Jews.

First of all, let’s pretend for a moment that there weren’t countless 100% Ashkenazi Jews like me who are dark-skinned and appear ethnically non-white. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that white skin, despite the commonality of prototypically Jewish features like our curly hair, our big noses, our hirsuteness, our sunken eyes, etc. simply made us “ugly” white people by Western standards.

In that already racist and absurd logic, given the disproportionate number of Asians with skin as light as most white people, what makes Asian people racialized, if not dark skin? Is it… their facial features such as their eyes and noses and hair? And relatedly, what makes light-skinned Mexican and Central and Southern American Latino people racialized?

Again, race is a construct, so there are a lot of nuances to this subject, and it’s important to hold space for complexity. I’m less concerned with how some Black people might generally frame anyone not visibly Black as white, but significantly more concerned with the intentional and malicious whitewashing of Jews, especially by pseudo-intellectual duds who are using their half-baked attempts at “social justice” to practice politically correct antisemitism.

Let’s invoke the most famous Black Jew in the world here in order to further examine the nuance of race versus color. Here’s a photo of Drake with his son, Adonis:

Drake with Adonis and Sophie Brussaux. (Screenshot: Drake via Instagram)

Drake is Black, and his adorable son has textured hair, but very light skin. Is he still Black? Of course he is; and, of course he won’t have the same life experiences as a dark-skinned Black person. And I honestly don’t think that non-Black people should be writing articles analyzing whether or not Black people qualify as the race they identify as (except in the case of a Rachel Dolezal or Elizabeth Warren using her infinitesimal Native ancestry to get a prestigious job at Harvard), but unfortunately, we’re in a time where critical thinking is lacking.

So, I draw this comparison not to insult Drake or his little guy, but to invite in more compassion and critical thought pertaining to Jewish people (including Adonis since he’s at least a quarter!) and people of all races.

Even if we WERE white…

Before I continue, let’s take a moment to entertain some Leftist antisemitic talking points. Okay, so you want Jews to be white. GREAT! We’re not. But you want to make Jews white so that you can feel more comfortable sitting in your privileged shell of ignorance while spewing hatred against us and inciting genocide against us worldwide (“globalizing the intifada”). Shame on you. For two reasons — the most obvious of which being gleeful, unabashed antisemitism.

But the second reason is a bit more insidious. The second reason can best be summed up by a comment I recently saw on a Medium article:

“I’m ashamed of my white skin. My privilege is pasted all over my skin.”

The guilty conscience of white people in the West has mutated into an inversion of white supremacy that, in its very deliberate and calculated oppositionality to the historical hierarchy of white supremacy, still functions as and perpetuates white supremacy.

Hating white skin and putting all Black people or people of color up on a pedestal to the point where no individual of any non-white race is capable of any wrongdoing is… infantilization of minorities, and very much still a function of white supremacy (even if it’s in its bashful era).

Sacrificing Jews as if we were a collective Jesus as a balm for the guilt you feel for how white supremacy has harmed the world is not going to bring about peace or the Rapture. It’s just going to make you even more of a shameful shmuck.

But we’re not white!

It’s interesting that American “progressives” can grok how slavery, which culminated almost 160 years ago — or even the Jim Crow laws that ended almost 60 years ago, still systemically and materially affect culture and the construct of race in America today, but they draw a line at the Holocaust, which ended 78 years ago (there are still actual, original Nazis alive today).

Never mind that the Nazis were very much inspired by Jim Crow laws, that the KKK had already persistently and historically targeted Jews alongside Black people, that the very white populace that made up the majority of America were extremely similar in ancestry, culture and values to the Europeans complicit in the Holocaust (or that America refused to give access to countless Jews who proceeded to die in the Holocaust because of gross systemic antisemitism).

Forty years before the harrowing lynching of Emmett Till, a 29-year-old Jewish factory superintendent named Leo Frank was wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering one of his employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. Crowds around the courthouse chanted “Hang the Jew!” When Georgia governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence in 1915, a mob broke into the jail and lynched him.

Jews have long been on the receiving end of discriminatory tropes about sexual perversion (add it to the pile of everything else we did wrong by breathing). I don’t bring up this story to invalidate Emmett Till or engage in oppression Olympics; I bring it up to convey that it’s not merely the 40-year gap that differentiates the collective memory or compassion pertaining to the ethnic groups affected by these kinds of horrific lynchings.

Jews (of which the majority are Ashkenazi in America) have historically experienced horrific antisemitism in America. In fact, some of the discrimination Jews have encountered is not unlike what Black people have encountered.

The Jewish Vacation Guide in 1916, actually inspired the “Green Book” famously used by Black vacationers in America, who were similarly barred from establishments across the country. The entire college admissions process as you know it was essentially created in order to prevent Jews from accessing higher education.

And although legal discrimination theoretically ended against Blacks and Jews and other minorities following the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, many neighborhoods and country clubs notoriously didn’t allow Blacks and Jews and other minorities through the 70s and 90s respectively.

Even today, Jews are the most targeted minority group per capita in America; these numbers are from 2019, and with the 400% increase in antisemitic incidents following the October 7th massacre, it’s likely this disparity is even larger now.

Data from 2019 FBI, Census Bureau, Pew Research and Brandeis University

And aside from being the most targeted (and ostensibly most gaslit) minority in America, despite spurious claims that Jews dominate every industry, a survey from 2022 found that about one quarter of hiring managers want less Jewish people in the workplace, and don’t want to advance Jewish people in the hiring process.

And still, American Jews are expected to merely sit back in our David Duke-coined “Jewish supremacist” “privilege,” constantly managing material fears of being targeted while also constantly being gaslit.

The Caucasian problem

Because race is a continuously changing construct, all discourse depends on unremitting sociopolitical changes of the times. The United States Census began as an ugly way to track free people versus slaves. Eventually, it was turned on its head to become what it most ideally represents today, which is a means of proportionally representing a diverse populace. But it remains frustratingly imperfect.

Jewish people are not the only ones who are robbed of self-identification beyond “Caucasian,” aka “white” on the Census. All Middle Eastern and North African people who don’t technically qualify as South Asian or Black African find themselves effectively unrepresented on the Census. That is, unless they mark the broad “Caucasus” where they are technically from.

Hence, we have visibly Brown Iranians and Egyptians and Iraqis… and Jews! who are objectively non-white, but from the moment we are taught to self-identify on any kind of institutional forms (school, work, government), we are already told that we are white. And yet, our experiences constantly suggest otherwise.

And Middle Eastern people are not the only ones deprived of more nuanced self-determination from this institutionalized contemporary racialization. The labeling of Hispanic in the Census is also problematically broad; many people in America may not comprehend that “Hispanic” refers to people who speak Spanish, which incidentally includes the white Spanish people who violently colonized Latin America.

Nowadays, “Latinx” (or Latino/Latina) is often invoked in culture, media and non-institutional self-identification as a better umbrella for the indigenous peoples whose cultures were affected by Spanish colonialism, but then there are people like the obnoxious, rabidly antisemitic Spanish girl I knew from a multi-generational family in New Mexico (if you know, you know) who had the audacity to refer to herself as “Latina.” It’s all imperfect.

But here we are now, in a post-2020 world of racial reckoning, where even the non-Jewish model minorities have generally been absorbed into the protective coalition of “people of color,” and the centrality of combating Islamophobia and centering Arab voices has unconditionally afforded Arab people the coveted status of “Brown” or “POC.” That includes people like the vicious Hadid’s — feast your eyes upon this Brownness!

Picture from Stop The Hadids on Instagram

Never mind that the Hadid’s are billionaires with money suspected to come from associations with terrorism. Never mind that they each look significantly whiter than Ashkenazi Jews like Natalie Portman or Ben Stiller. They have been deemed “marginalized” by those who have personally decided that Jews are to blame for all ills in the world, therefore Jews are white! This is the state of critical thinking right now among the hateful American Left.

Hateful stereotypes

There are countless hateful stereotypes about Jews that have festered in America and the West, and that could be an essay of its own. But the problem, as it pertains to the racialization and self-identification of American Jews, is where harmful self-loathing enters the frame.

When your people only comprise 2% of the population of the country you live in, there’s always a chance that you’re the only [whatever you are] that people around you have ever met. You’re constantly representing an entire group, whether you think so or not, and you’re constantly looking to a narrow sliver of representatives from your group in order to help inform that broader puzzle of who you are.

Two years ago, a horrific podcast by Black fashion designer Recho Omondi aired, in which she was interviewing Man Repeller Mizrahi Jew Leandra Medine Cohen. In her conclusion, she said, “I couldn’t stomach another white, assimilated Jewish-American Princess who’s wildly privileged but thinks she’s oppressed… If I had a dime for every time a Jewish girl in fashion was like, Oh my god, my nose is so big like yours, oh my god, my Jew-fro, it’s so nappy — at the end of the day, you guys are going to get your nose jobs and your keratin treatments and change your last name from Ralph Lipshitz to Ralph Lauren and you will be fine.”

Thankfully she apologized, but the damage was done (and we all know she said what most people think and feel). Aside from her total ignorance of the fact that Cohen is a Mizrahi Jew whose family was in Turkey and Iran in the diaspora, enduring endless persecution until the eventual violent expulsion of Jews from Iran, her ugly words spoke to a more nefarious double-standard that American Jews must endure.

Whether we are Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi, and whether we are white-passing or not, an image of grotesque wealth and privilege is projected onto us. We are the only ethnic minority where it’s acceptable to suggest that it is a “privilege” that we ought to (and are assumed to have the means and obligation to) undergo surgery and painful, expensive cosmetic procedures in order to assimilate to whiteness.

I have news for whomever justifies and leverages this obtuse kind of thinking: Michael Jackson dyed his skin white, and in spite of the plethora of wealthy Black people in America, it would be racist and bizarre to go around suggesting that the very fact that large swaths of wealthy Black people could dye their skin and relax their hair means that they are not marginalized, and that any discrimination or insecurity they face from possessing natural traits that don’t align with white supremacist beauty standards are their own faults. It’s maddening.

But the “pick me” Jews said they’re white?

Ilana Glazer posted some disgusting screed on social media recently, vehemently doubling down on her self-proclaimed white identity in a conversation where literally no one asked her about anything:

Image from Ilana Glazer on Instagram

Aside from the sheer lunacy of her words, and the fact that in the same post where she condemns collective punishment against a people, she asserts that global antisemitism is implicitly justifiable and/or natural and inevitable as a collective punishment against Jews worldwide for the actions of Israel (lol), I really don’t care how Ilana Glazer, or any other self-loathing Jewish person racially identifies.

First of all, Ilana Glazer is still very identifiable as an ethnic Jew, mainly owing to her textured hair, but I also speculate she would never have made it in Hollywood if she didn’t benefit from closer proximity to white supremacist beauty standards (e.g. having a small nose, and having the body of a porn star, which many goyim have an affinity towards).

I recommend this phenomenal essay about the whitewashing of Jews more broadly in Hollywood, and there is also a phenomenon referred to as “Ashkenormativity” in mainstream media spaces where Jews exist, which typically give access and benefits to the most white-passing Jews. Even recently, the New York Times wrote a piece about Jews in theatre, but literally only highlighted Ashkenazi Jews.

All of this to say, there is an entrenched narrative in American culture that Jews are white, and there are indeed many white-passing Jews who do wield privilege (not because they are Jewish) who embrace those narratives. And every person is allowed self-determination, but if you were never given the language or indeed even the option to think of yourself beyond whatever narrow box was given to you throughout your life, then retroactively agreeing with whatever identity was foisted upon you (especially when you have lived a generally cushy life) doesn’t really meet what I would qualify as a reasonable standard for free, independent thought.

America is a white supremacist society, like an unfortunate majority of the globalized world. This means that people who are more closely aligned to whiteness will be given more favorability and popularity in the media (a phenomenon which happens for every other race in America as well).

Leave the Jews alone

I hate that I had to write this essay. Jewish people are a tiny minority of the population, and I personally prefer when goyim don’t know how to identify Jews, because it makes me feel safer. I am usually presumed to be mixed-Black or Persian or Latina or Egyptian, and I would rather that random people in public assume I’m one of those identities than that I am Jewish, because I sincerely believe someone somewhere would try to hurt me if they knew the truth.

And yet, it’s a relief to write. It’s a relief because of how insulting it has been to be gaslit about who I am and what I look like and what my experience is; because Arab people are rightfully experiencing the reckoning they deserve from the backlash of post-9/11 Islamophobia in the United States, but us Jews — including Ashkenazim — who also look so much like our Arab siblings are completely excluded from any kind of meaningful reckoning.

I’m disgusted at what widespread hatred of white people in American and Western culture has incited. This is not progress. And whitewashing and vilifying Jewish people and the state of Israel to mollify a collective white guilt will benefit precisely no one. Do better.