Are Jews White?

How a Simple Question Exposes Big Divides

I have never identified as white. And that was even back when being white was a good thing.

Skin tone was a regular topic for my Yemeni cousins and me when we were kids. In Israel, Yemenis were the swarthiest Jews around until the arrival of Ethiopian Jews in the mid-1980s. While I never cared for our textured hair, I loved our darker skin and spent plenty of time in the summer sun trying to be as dark as my cousins. I think dark skin is beautiful and I’m proud of it to this day.

So, no, I never saw myself as white. While my father is a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jew born in Belgium, I take after my mother, and I identify as a Mizrachi Jew—a Jew originating from the Middle East.

Over the years, some of my friends and colleagues have derided me for not identifying as white. My Sri Lankan-American friend Asohan would affectionately call me barely ethnic during my grad school years. My friends sometimes laugh, thinking I am playing up my victimhood for not identifying as Caucasoid. But I have had too many experiences where people have not seen me as white to think otherwise, like when my Indian doctor calls me brown or when my friend’s Yiddish speaking grandmother called me a shvartze (a racial slur for Black people in Yiddish) or when that Buffalo Sabres fan called me a sand n***er because I was cheering for the wrong team.

Awareness of Mizrachi Jews is growing, however, and I think most people accept that, yes, some Jews can be people of colour. But what about Ashkenazi Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe who make up 80% of world Jewry? Are they white?

This question was raised in a very interesting symposium I attended in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. This symposium included a provocative talk by my friends Adam Cohen, Kimberly Rios, and Keith Markman, who asked: are Jewish Americans white?

For many non-Jews, the answer is: obvs. Whoopi Goldberg, for example, believes the Holocaust was not about race, but an example of white-on-white violence. To some, Jews are inherently white and privileged and part of the white supremacist ruling class.

And if we are to judge racial identity on outer markers like skin tone, hair colour, and eye colour alone, maybe this makes sense, at least for some Ashkenazi Jews. But we don’t do this consistently.

There are many people who phenotypically look white, yet who we identify as people of colour. You can see this with Latino people. Many Latinos and Latinas have pale skin and can trace their lineage back to Spain or Portugal, so their ancestry is clearly White European, yet for historical and cultural reasons we consider them to be visible minorities here in Canada, and therefore not white. Many Persians are quite fair-skinned, some with light eyes, yet they are not considered white either. None of the people in the image below, for instance, would be classified as white in a Canadian context. One of them (on the bottom left) is my superb PhD student, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello, who is from Brazil. (As an aside, Victória is brilliant and does amazing research on AI, social media, and morality. Look her up!)

None of these people are white.

Okay, back to Jews. Are Ashkenazi Jews white? Many think yes, especially those on the political left. Ashkenazi Jews, to some, not only look white, but they are full-on white or perhaps functionally white. Again, we aren’t talking about skin tone here; we’re talking about ethnicity or race. We are perfectly fine referring to Persians, Turks, and Colombians as people of colour, even when they are functionally white, but we hesitate when it comes to Jews. Judaism refers to a religion, yes, but it also refers to a people and ethnicity.

Not all Ashkenazi Jews can pass as white, by the way. Many have darker skin, curly or frizzy hair, and, umm, those very distinctive Jewish features that have kept caricature artists employed for centuries. Mallory Mosner explores this in an excellent Substack post where she asks questions similar to mine and even includes a photo of herself to drive the point home. In one poignant paragraph, she writes:

But even as a “Caucasian” or “white” Jewish American who was raised in an era of unprecedented assimilation, I saw through the myth of colorblindness early on. I knew I was different than my German and Italian best friends; I knew I was uniquely mocked in the homogeneous suburb where I grew up for my big nose, laughed at for my “frizzy poodle hair,” and made fun of for my darker skin.

Is Mallory Mosner white?

Is it because Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, financially successful that they are considered white? Part of me thinks this might be right. But then I think a bit more and start wondering again. If it’s about wealth, then why talk about race at all? There are plenty of poor white people, yet we don’t consider these struggling folks people of colour, and plenty of rich and successful non-white people who we happily consider people of colour. Indian Americans are now the richest Americans, and no one considers them white. In fact, based on median household income, Indian Americans are nearly twice as wealthy as Israeli Americans, yet the former are brown, and the latter are mostly white.

Or maybe it’s all about oppression and privilege. Maybe groups that are privileged are white and those that are marginalized or oppressed are people of colour? This makes some sense and helps explain why Latinos are not considered white in Canada despite their often-white complexion. It also explains why many people from the Middle East are not considered white. Jews in North America are not marginalized and hold places of privilege throughout society, hence whiteness. But this only tells part of the story. Historically, Jews have faced oppression for centuries—if not millennia—across nearly every place we’ve called home. But even today, Jews are targets of sometimes violent hate crimes that far exceed our numbers. As I mentioned in a previous post, in 2023 police in Canada reported 900 hate crimes targeting Jews. This amounts to 1 Jew-hate incident for every 373 Jewish Canadians, which far exceeds any other racial, religious, or sexual-identity groups. Jews have been historically oppressed and, to my dismay, continue to experience harassment to this day.

So, I ask again: why are Jews considered white?

Many Jews themselves identify as white. Keith Markman, a co-author on the talk that incited this post, identifies as white. And phenotypically that makes senses: Keith has pale skin, light hair, and…actually, I have never gotten kissing distance to Keith, so I have no idea if he is light eyed. In any case, Keith can pass as white and because he has the privileges his paleness confers, he calls himself white.

Adam Cohen, in contrast, does not identify as white even though he burns in the sun as readily as Keith. Many Ashkenazi Jews are just like him (and Mallory Mosner): they refuse to be referred to as white.

Adam’s reasons are intriguing. Biologically, Ashkenazi Jews are distinct. They carry a distinct set of genes that predisposes them to hundreds of diseases and disorders that do not impact other groups to the same degree. I’ll never forget lining up in grade 10 at my Jewish high school in Montreal to be tested for whether we were carriers of the Tay-Sachs gene, which could imperil our future offspring. Mizrachi Jews are not carriers, so I was fine, but a few of my classmates received bad news that day. Other disorders that disproportionately affect Ashkenazi Jews are Gaucher disease and… the chronic neurosis that their mother’s opinion will always carry more weight than their own.

Example of an anti-Semitic sign in Ste-Agathe, Quebec during the 1930s. (Photo courtesy of the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives)

Adam’s second reason is cultural. For most of history, Jews were not treated as white. The Nazis used the prevailing race-science of the day to make the case that Jews were not of good white stock and burned them in ovens as a result. My alma mater, McGill University, had a quota on the number of Jews it admitted from 1920 to the late 1960s, preventing the student pool from being polluted by sneaky non-white interlopers. Certainly, Italians also faced discrimination when they immigrated to North America, but as far as I know there were no signs forbidding their participation in various forms of civic life. That aggression did not stand. One group that was singled out by such signs was the Irish, but that discrimination ended so long ago that some scholars incorrectly thought that such signs were vanishingly rare. Nonetheless, white supremacists did not chant “Irish will not replace us” when they marched on Charlottesville in 2017. Nor did a gunmen go into an Irish Catholic church in Pittsburgh to shoot and kill 11 congregants. The people who seem to be the guardians of whiteness don’t seem to think Jews are white at all.

Is any of this important? I mean, who cares if Jews are or are not white? This is all just silly. We’re just people. And I agree. This issue of who is and who is not white is culturally constructed and doesn’t make much sense outside of the Anglosphere. When I asked my student Victória if she identifies as white, she gave me a big LOOOOL response, saying she has no idea and that it’s a classification system made up by silly (white!) people that made little sense to her. North Americans see her as white, but as soon as they learn she’s from Brazil, not so much.

I think this is all dumb. The world is not two-dimensional! But then I learned that whether Jews are seen as white or not can predict how others evaluate us. In an important talk at that same symposium, Jeff Sherman and Siuoneh Didarloo presented data showing that being perceived as white hurts Jews in the circles they tend to inhabit. While those on the authoritarian right tend to like Jews more if they are seen as white, the far left likes them less if they are seen as white. Given that Jews are overwhelmingly liberal, voting Democrat in the US by huge margins (even in the last presidential election), being viewed as white or not matters. The social justice left has exhibited animus toward Jews they perceive as white, especially if they are incidentally reminded of Israel first.

So, are Jews white? I don’t know, and I wish I didn’t need to care. Jews are people—I’m a person. If only we considered race and identity to be incidental parts of our personhood, I think most of us would be in a better place. Right now, of course, race and identity shape the lives of people in many ways, big and small. But, one day I hope race will be considered insignificant in the way we value others. To paraphrase the great Bob Marley, I hope one day that that asking about whiteness will be of no more significance than the color of one’s eyes.

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As kids, my Yemeni cousins and I would talk about our darker complexions, but we didn’t think it mattered much beyond how we looked. It certainly didn’t shape the choices we made or how we valued other people. But we were aware of our eda (עדה), which in Hebrew refers to our ethnicity or community. So, while skin tone was not so relevant, we were keenly aware of whether the kids on the block were Yemeni, Ashkenazi, Moroccan, or Persian. I later learned that these edas were not merely descriptive but also arranged in a hierarchy, which was not necessarily about race, but about something else.

So, maybe asking if Jews are white is the wrong question. Maybe we should not be thinking about race as much when discussing oppression and privilege and instead conceptualize this discussion as being about caste. In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the hierarchies that divide us aren’t really about race but about caste: a deeply entrenched system of stratification that determines who’s valued and who’s not. Full disclosure: I have not read the book but was deeply moved by the film; I highly recommend it. Wilkerson’s ideas resonate with me here because Jews—no matter how light our skin or how much money we have—don’t fit neatly into the racial categories we’re so obsessed with. Instead, Jews occupy a caste that’s both secure and precarious, both privileged and oppressed, depending on who’s looking and when.

Maybe shifting our focus from race to caste is the real answer. Maybe then, I’d abide a little easier.

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I’ve already received some touching submissions for The Regret Project. Thank you to everyone who’s shared so far. This project is a space to reflect on regrets, missteps, and moments you wish you could take back. Some of these submissions will appear in the next installment of Regret Now, so stay tuned. If you haven’t sent yours yet, there’s still time to share (anonymously) here. Let’s turn those moments of regret into something meaningful…or at least less lonely.