Published: 5 June 2025
Last updated: 5 June 2025
Once, when I was still a new migrant in Australia, I wrote on Facebook about how welcome I felt here (this was before I began registering all the subtle ways in which I was othered as a Jew and an Israeli). It was a bland post really, but some random person took offence, commenting knowingly: “It’s because you’re white.”
I presume that stranger concluded this based on my profile photo. I am an Ashkenazi Jew and, as with many Ashkenazim, my skin is quite fair (although an experienced Nazi bureaucrat could probably identify an olive tint). Plus, it was clear from the post that I was a Jew, and the Australian Jewish community is usually perceived by outsiders as white.
The blindness of this perception, which excludes Jews of colour – Jews from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Sephardi Jews, and some converted Jews and Jews of mixed heritage – is glaring.
Comments1
Michael Gawenda5 June at 08:18 am
Beautifully written. Thank you Lee. I am troubled by this white question basically because most of my long life, it was not a question that I asked myself. That’s because until recently, which I mean before the rise of identity as definitional as to who we are, no one asked this question about whiteness. We were defined, in the world in which I grew up, by class. I was a working class child from a working class family.