Am I ‘white’? I’m not sure

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.

But are they right about Ashkenazi Jews, who constitute the majority in our community? Am I white? Since I moved to Australia where whiteness is a much-discussed topic – understandably, considering this country’s bloody colonial past – this loaded question has been bothering me.

Genetically, all Jews are a distinct group that originated from the Middle East. Ashkenazim spent the last millennia in Europe and, while there has been some mixing with local populations, their genetic makeup remains different, resembling other Jews as well as Arabic North African populations far more than their European neighbours.

So my genes are Levantine; they carry the distant memories of pomegranates and oranges, camels and the Dead Sea. But how important is this? Not all people identifying as Jewish are genetically such. More so, when we talk about whiteness we don’t really talk about biology. Whiteness has always been a multifaceted, fluid, contested social construct.

In one way, to be white is to be “normal” or normative. It is to move in the world under a cloak of invisibility – in the sense of ease, unselfconsciousness. I’m not Other, I belong. I blend in. In the Soviet Union, where I was born, I wasn’t normative or white. Jews were viewed there as “swarthy”, which I knew was bad because my classmates told me so while also calling me “disgusting” and other such terms of endearment. To be swarthy was to be foreign and inferior, and that was what I was, no matter the colour of my skin.

But then, although my nose is clearly prominent – long and curvy, a juicy nose – both in the Soviet Union and in Australia, I’ve never been a target of racial slurs from random strangers the way people of colour can be. I have had the privilege of passing in this way. Here, however, I only pass until I start speaking. Which, being a Russian-Israeli Jew, I usually do soon. Once I open my mouth, my acidic accent dissolves the inoffensive-white-woman’s cloak.

My stepson was born here to Ashkenazi parents. He has no accent. A young man with fair skin, he nevertheless has a visible marker of Jewishness – dark curls. Some months ago, as he was walking in a progressive Melbourne suburb, a passerby said to him: “Fucking Jew cunt.” So is my stepson white? Or is he not sufficiently “white” to insulate him from racial vilification?

In academic papers and poetry readings and on X, whiteness has also become a political shorthand for privilege - power, money, social currency. The Jewish community is highly educated and, mostly, relatively affluent. Many of those born here, but not all, have led what we might indeed call comfortable, or at least safe, lives.

In this sense, many local Ashkenazim can be described as “white”, I suppose. This is what that Facebook comment was about. The commenter must have assumed that I feel welcome here not only because I supposedly blend in well, but also because, as a Jew, I wasn’t a migrant escaping difficult circumstances, but a “power migrant” who came from privilege and money.

But this isn’t my story. I came here from Russia, from a childhood spent in the shadow of Jew-hatred and poverty, and from Israel – from political violence and financial hardship. I came to Australia on my own, as a young woman with no money, which left me vulnerable to exploitation (I wrote about that in one of my books).

I’ve also experienced my share of antisemitism in Australia – from the right and the left, from people of various ethnic backgrounds. In particular, I’ve experienced this within my professional – creative, progressive –  milieu (I wrote about this elsewhere in this publication). On the other hand, more recently I’ve lived a comfortable middle-class life. So, am I white or not?

“Jews are white when it suits others for them to be such,” says my curly-haired stepson. I see his point. In fact, I’ve lived his point. While I find the question of my relationship to whiteness confusing, the non-Jewish societies in which I’ve lived have always been clear on who I am. I was swarthy once, and now I am white.

When Ashkenazim are described as white or non-white by non-Jews, it has little to do with our bodies and everything to do with what the society in question needs to project onto its Jews, the ever-perfect scapegoats. As the Jewish-British historian Simon Schama says, for a millennia Jewish people have been “the other of convenience. We are the dark mirror in which wish fulfilment of other societies takes it out on people who are said to represent its opposite”.

Historically speaking, the hold of Ashkenazim on whiteness is tenuous. In past centuries, whiteness was linked to Christianity, so in European and European settler societies, including Australia, Jews – the infidels, the sinners – were never white just as they weren’t in the secular Soviet Union, where they were guilty of the “crimes” of both cosmopolitanism and its opposite, Zionism. And in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe, we all know what Jews were...

But in recent decades, as whiteness has become tainted, shadowy, associated with oppression and greed in the collective imagination, we are finally admitted into its dubious pantheon. Although never among the extreme right, where whiteness retains its high value.

For the last half a century or even longer, many Australian Ashkenazim have had a good run, blending seemingly smoothly into the dominant society. More than a few have acknowledged their privileges and have been involved in various social justice movements, advocating for the rights of other minorities, while feeling their own rights were sorted out. As my husband, who was born here to descendants of Eastern-European Jews, tells me: “All my life, every pathway was open to me. I felt free and safe.” But he speaks in the past tense…

I’ve recently co-edited an anthology where 36 Jewish-Australian women reflect on their lives post-October 7. Most of them are Australian-born Ashkenazim. Two dominant narratives run through the book. One reminds me of my husband’s: I thought I fully belonged here, then October 7 happened and my sense that I had a voice and was free from discrimination, vanished into the thick-with-hatred air. And another: I’ve always felt people treated me differently or minimised my Jewish identity, but I doubted those feelings because I mostly felt secure. Then, after October 7, I saw I wasn’t paranoid at all...

The incredible speed with which Australia’s most recent antisemitic outbreak occurred, following October 7, and its intensity and longevity, underscore how contingent the sense of Ashkenazi belonging in this country’s white mainstream has always been.

While the majority of Australian Ashkenazim have faced much less overt discrimination than many people of colour do, have we ever been truly white in that unselfconscious way, with our heavily guarded events and institutions, our sometimes-Anglicised names, the swastikas graffitied on our buildings, the centuries-old ancestral trauma coursing through our veins? It seems to me the unease among us had always been around, like pollution – damaging but largely unnoticed. Then the aftermath of October 7 scrabbed off our whitefaces, leaving us exposed in all our swarthy glory...

Perhaps Ashkenazim can be “somewhat white”, but only during times of social stability? Certain media outlets and university demagogues and Facebook commenters, however, maintain we are white even now, when it is physically dangerous to be visibly Jewish and our institutions are firebombed, when Jewish students are haunted at universities, our businesses and artists are boycotted and cancelled.

In Australian progressive discourse, Jews are still top dogs and therefore generally denied social empathy and protection at the time when our tiny community needs it most. We are not suffering enough. Or our suffering is merely “Jewish feelings”. According to some theories that have gained traction on social media, we are even the ones orchestrating antisemitic attacks.

In our multicultural society, to designate Jews as white is actually yet another way to marginalise us. It is to revive the old-time libels of greedy, world-controlling Jews against the most persecuted minority in European history, while downplaying antisemitism. This paradoxical narrative of Jewish white privilege, where Jews are othered and at the same time our difference is minimised, goes on strong. Why? Because the collective story shines brighter by outsourcing to us whatever Australia doesn’t want to own – oppression, greed and, now, alleged genocide…

And also, to some extent, because some of us, understandably, find the dominant story about us difficult not to internalise. After all, in some ways it is alluring. To hear that you are part of the powerful elite can be as intoxicating as guilt-inducing. You are the oppressor, the bad guy, but you also belong. And what is more seductive for us, diaspora Jews, than that? So we drink this strange, paradoxical cocktail up. This drink that costs us not only the social empathy but also the privileges other minorities have been increasingly enjoying under the diversity paradigm. I, too, live this paradox. In my literary world, even before October 7 publishers sometimes advised me not to write anything too “Israeli” or “Jewish”, because such writing won’t appeal to the mainstream, or refused to publish some of my stories for these reasons. At the same time, I often face barriers when applying for diversity programs and awards. Why? Because Jews are white.  

Am I white?

Sometimes I look in the mirror, especially in winter, and think “yes”. Then an antisemitic pamphlet arrives in my mailbox, as happened several times recently, and I think “no”. Sometimes I walk in my suburb populated mainly by white people and think “yes”, but then I go to my local café where the staff who have been selling me coffee for eight years don’t say hello to me while chatting to my neighbours and I am no longer sure. And sometimes I think, who cares? But isn’t to say “who cares” a privilege that some people of colour don’t possess? And then, yet another social media post appears in my feed, sneering at “Jewish pigs”.

Some Ashkenazim I know think of themselves as white, even today. I know others who identify as people of colour – I respect this, but at least for now I don’t feel comfortable to claim this label for myself. Yet others see themselves as “white-passing”, which is not how I experience myself, as I only pass until I begin to speak.

There are also Ashkenazim saying they are “conditionally white” – treated as white in some contexts, but not in others. Personally, I’ve never felt “normative” anywhere, and especially not since October 7, when the occasional discrimination and marginalisation I experienced because I am Jewish, and Israeli, have become all-pervasive and intense (I have written about this too).

I still haven’t found the right words to describe myself. But I do have three things I feel certain about. I belong to a small minority always marked as Other, but not always overtly, whose collective identity has been shaped by centuries of Jew-hatred. I’d never call myself white. And – it is not up to non-Jewish people to say who I am.