Looking Jewish, false flags and the impossible logic of antisemitism

“But you don’t experience antisemitism do you? You don’t even look Jewish,” a close friend says to me. 

“What does Jewish look like?” I ask, “Horns?”  

He laughs. “No, you know”.  

I do, and he doesn’t, but I play along.  

I say, “like Seinfeld?” He says, “Yeah”.  

It’s true I don’t look like Seinfeld, but that didn’t stop my synagogue from being set on fire recently. Nor did it stop my workplace being firebombed, and graffitied to depict my Jewish boss with horns.  

You might be wondering, what do I look like? Well, people often think I look Indian or Middle Eastern, and airport security often thinks I look random.  

And I guess I do.  

When I tell someone I’m Jewish, it usually confuses them. They’ll often say something like, “But you’re brown?” or “Get out of my cab.”

It makes me realise how little people know about us. They don’t even know what we look like – that many of us are Arab, Ethiopian, North African, Indian, and whatever else people are. 

In fact, Jerry Seinfeld is Syrian. About one in three Jews have Middle-Eastern or North African heritage. 

At the turn of the 20th century, approximately 40 percent of Bagdad’s population was Jewish. Today, there are only 35 Jews left in all of Iraq. To put that in perspective, that’s five fewer Jews than people injured at Bondi Beach last Chanukah.