A Question of Blood and Belief - Part Two

By David Tamas-Parris, Candidate for A.A. at the University of Vermont

(Link to part 1: http://51ststateofmind.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-question-of-blood-and-belief.html)

Jews are very frequently identifiable as Jews. To be considered a separate racial entity, Jews would have to experience separate racism, and for this to happen, those seeking to apply this strain would have to know whom to apply it to. This does not always happen, especially in comparison to “Blacks,” who have the label applied to them simply through the presence of substantially darker skin pigmentation; I certainly am not immediately identifiable as Jewish. Although I have brown hair and brown eyes, my hair is straight and my I don’t have a “Jew nose.” I spent my senior year in Hungary, during which I experienced tremendous amounts of antisemitism. People spewed things such as “All Jews are bad people” and “what can you expect from a Jew?” but I was never once the direct target of an antisemitic slur or insult. This was despite my classmates’ frequent honing of their abilities at identifying Jews by using celebrities as practice. People knew I was Jewish only if I told them. 

My father, though, has quite a different story to tell. He does have a “Jew nose.” His black hair left unchecked would develop into a “Jew-fro,” and in his youth it did. His appearance makes bald men in dark parks suddenly curious about his status of Jewishness. I strongly believe that my friend Joseph, the one who feels “pretty white,” would be immediately identified as Jewish by an interested party. The author of the tumblr blog This Is Not Jewish adds this: “As a blonde, blue-eyed Jew with an Anglo last name living in metropolitan America I have undeniable white passing/white privilege. But my Jewish friends with dark curly hair, ‘swarthy’ skin, and ‘Semitic’ noses? My friends with last names like Weber and Katz and Rosen? They don’t pass in America, let alone in Europe (and I feel 100% confident in stating that you know jack-all about how Europeans view race, but spoiler alert: Jews definitely don’t make the white people shortlist there, light skinned or not). Ever notice how white supremacist groups always include Jews on their list of ‘enemies of the white race?’ Or how the place where Jews are really overrepresented is in hate crime victim statistics? Millennia of rape and forced assimilation in diaspora may have lightened some of our skins (fun fact: many Jews, including many Ashkenazim, are people of color), but neither we nor white Gentiles have forgotten that our ethnicity and culture stem from the Levant” (Anonymous). Jews do not all share these physical characteristics, but many do, and if one so desired, he could identify a Jew and target him for racism.

The only remaining question is whether people exist who want to make the identification, and whether they use this identification, knowingly or unknowingly, to do harm. There is an unfortunately vast amount of evidence that the answer to both questions is yes. Mostly, wherever Jews have gone in the world, they have at one point or another been met with exclusion from society, violence, and worse. Nazi Germany took this pattern to its logical conclusion: the slaughter of six million Jews along with five million other “undesirables.” In this process, the word “Judenhass” (Jew-hatred) was ditched to make room for the word “Antisemitism” in an effort to ascribe the difference to the Jews themselves, instead of to German perception. It would be one thing if this racism was confined to the past, but, again unfortunately, it isn’t. According to a recent survey conducted by the ADL, “1.09 billion people have anti-Semitic attitudes.” It is not believed the men in the park inquiring about my father’s heritage were seeking cultural exchange. “Jew” was an insult at my middle school, and fair few of the student body of my high school thought “Jew noses” were undesirable and to be laughed at. It is clear that people, currently and throughout history, have applied harmful ideas and actions towards Jews.