Photoessay #2839 - Intersection/Are Jews white people?

I met with my small writing group last night and they encouraged me to continue writing with my intersection series regarding ideas mentioned in Jonathan Sarna's "American Judaism."

I am also reading Penny Rosenwasser's "Hope into Practice; Jewish Women choosing Justice despite our Fears" for the class that I hope to get into tomorrow (Jewish Women in America) at UW.  I am enjoying this book despite its long and complicated title.  Darn, I see the author was just here to speak.  Last month.  Before I knew about it.

One thing that keeps me from writing these pieces is precisely her topic.  You should keep quiet about being Jewish.  Shhhh, don't say anything.  I can hear my mother saying "You are just like everybody else" and the related "You don't have to tell anybody"  I believed it.  I also believed that I could choose how I wanted to be.  I could be Jewish or not be Jewish, it was up to me.

But check out my senior picture taken in 1969.  Does this look like a white kid?  I don't look like the other kids in my high school yearbook.

On her website, the author starts out her video by saying that when people said to her "Penny, you don't look Jewish!" she thought she was supposed to answer "Thank you."

Many years ago, I was at an adult education class at the religious school my children attended.  The rabbi was going through a crash course "The history of the Jews in 45 minutes."  Think only of the mainstream ashkenazi population, we pondered, our ancestors came from Europe but how did they get to Europe?  If we really were from the middle east, how did that all work?  We were European?  Or were we?  I always thought that our families came from Europe, from Germany?  From Poland?  The Europeans, they're white.  We sat there in silence for a few minutes; I know I was confused.  Somebody said, "look around, do we look white?"  I looked around, a bit furtively.  No, really we didn't.

That's when I got it.  I wasn't white.  All this time, I thought I was white, but that wasn't true.  My Europeans were not the same as my suburban neighbor's European.  A person of color.

I've written about this before.

My Young Professor last spring talked about that it's only been the last generation or so that Jews were considered white.  Before, they were something else.  Oh.

My own parents, especially my mother, purposefully moving away from her native eastern city full of extended family.  They moved to California, to the white suburbs,  to escape from the marginalization of the ethnic minority.

And it worked, kinda.