Jews Weren't White Until They Were

usatoday |  If race were real – in a biological sense – it would stay the same across history. But it doesn't. It changes.

That's how people like me became white. Yes, you read that right. Jews weren't white … until we were.

 The horror of the Holocaust thoroughly discredited the idea of Jews as a race. But race itself – as a concept – was still going strong. Slowly, and unevenly, white Americans welcomed Jews into theirs.

Tensions between Jewish and Black people

That has been a source of tension between Jews and African Americans ever since. James Baldwin wrote in 1967 that Black people were tired of Jews claiming that their own experience of prejudice was “as great as the American Negro’s suffering.” That was false, Baldwin wrote, and it fueled Black antisemitism.

“The most ironical thing,” Baldwin added, “is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.”

You could hear echoes of that frustration in Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on Monday, when she denied the racial dimensions of the Nazi genocide against Jews.

“This is white people doing it to white people,” she said, when challenged on the claim, “so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”

She was wrong about that, and – to her credit – she apologized for it. But she was right that most Jews have changed their race since that time, which has never been an option for African Americans.

Race makes us imagine that our differences are inherent. And from there, it's just a short step to the idea that some people are inherently superior – or inferior – to each other. We need a new language to talk about all of this, openly and honestly. Jews aren’t a separate race, biologically speaking. But neither is anyone else.