I was a tenth grader completing my first class research project on Jews in the media. I had a kick-ass plan to flip through every periodical in the house, record oodles of TV shows and movies to capture even the slightest reference, and present them in a multimedia scrapbook. I was proud of my sleuthing, but disturbed by my findings— the Jews in American pop culture are a pretty homogenous lot. Not only was every famous Jew in my portfolio ‘white,’ each appeared to have been pulled straight from the Bronx, with a thick Nyoo Yawk accent and a proclivity for answering one question with another.

Wait a sec, weren’t our forebears nomads in the African desert? Wasn’t the first synagogue in the U.S. founded by Sephardi Jews who fled the Inquisition? So what’s with the parade of Woody Allens and Jerry Stillers? I began noticing how the non-‘white’ Jews around me stood out as different, yet were somehow still invisible. An active member of our Jewish youth group introduced herself as “half Black and half Jewish.” Congregants eyed the Chinese man in the back and whispered, “Who is he here with?” I wondered how Jews in other countries celebrate, and what “a good Jewish name” in Greek is. I doubted it was “Goldberg.”

The perception of American Jews as ‘white’ has only begun to be challenged in mainstream Judaism, yet individuals and organizations have been struggling for years to make the presence of Sephardim, Mizrachim, and ‘Jews of color’ known.
Take New Yorker Jennifer Chau, a Jew of Chinese and European American ancestry who shared with the Jewish Week the prejudice her family experienced during her Bat Mitzvah (11/09/2001, by Rivka Gewirtz). Wendell Gee told the J Weekly that his Chinese origin might thwart his marriage chances, even though he’s an Orthodox Jew. Particia Lin, a professor of religion, doubted her Jewishness would be questioned if she were ‘white.’ Even Jews, she said, share “this overwhelming belief that Jews all come from Eastern Europe” (2/3/05, by Lydia Lee).
That is exactly why members of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago prefer going by ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Israelite.’ According to the website, these terms “do not wrongly associate Jewishness with whiteness.”

How did ‘Jew’ go from meaning ethnic outsider to ‘white’?

Sociologist Karen Brodkin has an answer. In How Jews Became White Folks, Brodkin proposes that in America, whiteness is a political space that certain ethnic groups can assimilate into over time…but only if, as a whole, they ‘look white.’ What would ‘Jew’ mean today if the Islamic Revolution preceded Russia’s pogroms?

While waves of Eastern European immigration in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s explain the cultural crest of Yiddishkite, they don’t explain the blockade to Jewish cultures of later tides. For example, the steady immigration of Middle Eastern Jews to the United States during the Islamic Revolution and the rising numbers of Black Jewish congregations in major U.S. cities has seemingly passed unnoticed. Emily Blanck, director of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa,) estimates that 500,000-750,000 Jews of Middle Eastern origin currently live in the US, though you would never know it by turning on the TV.

Of course, some activists and organizations are shouting out. Writer and educator Loolwa Khazzoom prepared multicultural resources for Jewish educators to integrate into their classrooms, and JIMENA routinely organizes discussions about Sephardi and Mizrachi issues. New Yorkers are lucky to have Makor’s Judios Latinos social group and Jews of Color Network.

And for the thousands of Jews raised in interracial, interethnic and interfaith households? Some will be like Alice Walker’s daughter Rebecca and speak out. Others will be on the receiving end of synagogue whispers, an isolating place for the future and current parents of vibrant generations.

My opinion? Let’s embrace this multicultural Jewish country with its branching histories and colorful traditions. Why not celebrate the Jewishness we grew up with and expand it out to create something fuller? After all, we are part of a world religion. There’s no reason mainstream American Judaism can’t have the bagel, and eat the curry too.

Resources

The Jewish Week
J Weekly
B’nai Zaken, Black Hebrew Synagogue
www.BlackJews.org
Karen Brodkin- How Jews Became White Folks
www.jimena.org
Loolwa Khazzoom
Jews of Color Network and Judios Latinos
Black, White, and Jewish, by Rebecca Walker

Jessica Dolcourt holds an MA in Race and Ethnic Relations from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England