The invisible identity

I am an American, Ashkenazi Jew. This identity is fairly common here at Duke, yet utterly underdeveloped in campus conversation. One of my favorite quotes is by the French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." My discussion is not intended to debase other real, legitimate concerns about race, but to shine a light on one that is so often invisible. There are many types of Jews, such as the Sephardim, Mizrahi, Esra'elawi and many others, but this column will be mostly concerned with Ashkenazi as I ponder my own identity. To my readers, Ashkenazi Jews or otherwise, my hope is that my column may inspire you to reconsider your previous framework for categorizing a particular identity that is, in so many ways, not categorizable.

Growing up, I had always thought my status as a minority was obvious. At Duke, I was exposed to the idea that my Jewish roots took a backseat to my overarching whiteness, with my family's ancestry traced back to Poland and Russia. Some even told me that, as a white American Jew, I was "the privileged of the privileged." After reading an article written by an Ashkenazi Jew who lives in Israel that loudly asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are not white, I have become more attuned to casual micro-aggressions such as this directed toward me and have thought at length about who I am.

In many respects, stereotypes about Ashkenazi Jews mirror those of Asian-Americans. The "model-minority" myth about Asian-Americans rings all too familiar. Asian-Americans and Ashkenazi Jews are often overrepresented at universities and in high-paying professions. In some respects, negative stereotypes about frugality and effeminacy have given way to positive stereotypes about success, hard work and intelligence. Yet, these prejudices can be just as damaging. They can be particularly damaging when the ethnicity has faced historical racism, like how Harvard invented the legacy admission system during the interwar years to keep Jews out or how there are companies today who are paid to help Asian students seem less "stereotypically Asian" to get admitted to top universities. They can be particularly damaging when individual voices are lost due to stereotypical ethnic success.

American, Ashkenazi Jews are also often referred to as members of the "Jewish Diaspora" which refers to the dispersion of Jewish communities after the Hebrews were expelled from the land of Israel millennia ago. Hereditary tests have revealed the Ashkenazi Jews originated in the Middle East and are the "genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese." Although the census still lumps Middle Eastern and North African identities in the 'White' category, many on campus would never call an Arab student white. Indeed, it seems so obvious—Arabs are clearly a distinct ethnic group, right? Yet this same belief rarely extends to Ashkenazi Jews, even though they originate from the Semitic people from the Middle East and even though they are closely genetically related to Arabs.

In other respects, Judaism is unique. In the West, identity is often simplified to either race or religion. Yet, in the Middle East, people also have strong tribal identities that often correlate to an ethno-religious one. Being a "part of The Tribe" is a colloquial way to refer to a heritage of a common Jewish ancestry. For a Western country like America to impose its own categories on a tribal identity which is intrinsically quite foreign to singular notions of "race" and "ethnicity" is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't work. Those who insist on constraining a tribal identity are erasing and delegitimizing defining characteristics because it doesn't fit in with their preconceptions about what identity can be. Indeed, as the article which prompted my self-reflection states, the Middle Eastern Pashtun people, who have pale skin, would never identify as white.

Not long ago, I was having a conversation about racial identity and privilege with a female person of color. She is proudly Mexican and identifies strongly with the Latinx community and as a person of color. In the United States, many argue that racial identity consists solely of the hue of one's skin so that, regardless of what you actually are ethnically, you are de facto viewed, lumped together and stereotyped because of your skin. My own olive skin was undeniably darker than her skin. If skin color is the sole determinant, as many claim, I wonder if this means she is not a person of color or that I am a person of color or possibly both. But, and this is important, it cannot be neither. Again, I recognize that there is racism toward those with darker skin and that this bigotry is too often sadly hard-wired into people and various parts of society, and I do not question ingrained xenophobia. I only question its implications for Ashkenazi Jews such as myself.

Finally, it should come as no surprise that Ashkenazi Jews were, and are, subjected to fierce racism and institutional discrimination. Pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Ghettoization, periodic expulsion and other historical acts of anti-Semitism are well-known. These documented instances of hatred are ingrained in Jewish history. Yet even today, anti-Semitic micro-aggressions exist and are seemingly "invisible." These include assumptions of Jewish control, power, money or connections, accusations of dual loyalty, denying Jews status as a minority, the blood libel and denial of anti-Semitism. Please don't tell me that anti-Semitism doesn't exist anymore when a member of my synagogue from back home, who wore a yarmulke daily, eventually transferred from his liberal arts college when he felt there was no space for him there. These anti-Semitic stereotypes, which continue to exist today, have for millennia characterized a peculiar but potent racism that is at once similar and distinct from traditional racism.

Are Ashkenazi Jews white, closely related to its other European counterparts like the British, Germans or Italians? Are Ashkenazi Jews people of color, closely related to other Middle Eastern groups? Maybe they are somewhere in between, subjected to institutional racism but,due to their pale skin, are not people of color. Or maybe they are something completely different.