Where Nazis used pseudoscience as a tool to annihilate Jews, antizionists today use both pseudoscience, historical revisionism, and science denial to deny Jews their right to self determination in their ancestral land, thus justifying the annihilation of the Jewish state that is home to 6.7 million Jews today. Eran Elhaik and Shlomo Sand, the author of The Invention of the Jewish People, attempted legitimizing the Khazar myth, now widely refuted and debunked. What remains constant through the decades, is the categorization of Jews, by antisemites, as what ills the world at that time. It is almost always immutable, collective, and attached to what society views as “justice”. Where once it was the lack of whiteness, today, it is whiteness itself that will render you all that is wrong with society.
The founders of eugenics were social activists and not specialists in biology or genetics. Nazi racial “experts” examined eye color, hair color, and facial dimensions to determine if individuals were racially “Aryan”, meaning superior, to apply laws differently than to the “inferior” Jew.
As a result, the Nuremberg laws came into existence, defining who is a Jew, sentencing even Christian with distant Jewish heritage, Jews who converted to Christianity, and those with paternal Jewish heritage who did not consider themselves Jewish, to be exterminated. Once again, it wasn’t our Jewish law, Halacha, that determined even the basic definition of who is a Jew, but our gentile host societies took it upon themselves to categorize us.
Proponents of eugenics championed social policies that would “improve” the human race through controlled breeding. The “science” of eugenics was flimsy when viewed from the vantage point of post-DNA genetics. Vast majority of it debunked by modern science and experts. Eugenics, as practiced by the Nazis, was NOT DNA science. The modern application of DNA science as we know it today, was only developed in the 50’s, long after nazism was defeated.
Nazis exploited the pseudoscience of eugenics as a prelude to the Holocaust. Today, gene therapy seeks to eradicate hereditary conditions like Huntington’s disease. DNA is used in multitude of ways, including ancestry tracking, forensic evidence, potential health risks, and more. When you chastise Jewish people who track their ancestry through DNA science, claiming they are utilizing Nazi race science, you display not only your ignorance as to what it means, but you levy a malevolent charge against the primary victims of Nazi eugenics, for a political and racial narrative of denial.
As Jews, we do not define ourselves by our oppressors. We do not allow gentiles to dictate who is Jewish or not, what is antisemitism and what it isn’t, what is our racial classification, ethnicity, origin, religion, spiritual beliefs, and what our liberation looks like. So when we become resistant to a relatively modern classifications of ‘whiteness’ as a political concept, it is not because we side with those who exterminated two thirds of our community, it is that we understand to our core what happens to Jews when society labels them as the “virus” to be treated. The ability to hear the call to collectively “fix us” has become a part of the Jewish DNA.
Jewish racial self identification is mutable. Where Jewish refugees who came to the west post a genocide that violently rejected them from their homes, experienced a relative sense of safety by assimilation and becoming a part of diaspora, today, many Jews want to celebrate their ancient heritage. Young Jews are reconnecting with their historical ties to our ancestral land, our culture, holidays, and communities all over the diaspora and Israel.
In a society that historically both provided them with refuge but also excluded them from traditionally white spaces, Jews have a unique lived experience in the west. While typically the older American Jewish generations self identify as white as to conform to norm, a younger generation finds the appeal in what makes them unique and gives them roots, after millenniums of being treated as guests and nomads.
Where concepts like census provides zero nuance as to your official classification, self identification, allows one to add ‘color’, if you may, to your lived experience as a Jew. Jewish people being defined by their host nations and non-Jews is a part and parcel of our history.
Jews were never allowed to define their nationhood, indigineity, religion, or liberation. To some, Jewish liberation is forbidden as we are expected to rely on the benevolence of the east and west that have shown us nothing but violence and dispossession. Even our oppression is a topic of debate and yet again, Jews don’t get to define antisemitism.
Primarily non- indigenous individuals have taken upon themselves to cement the concept of indigineity within the frameworks of power dynamics rather than cultural/historical continuity, and land-based relationship, that implies that sovereignty and its application, removes these relationship.
Marinah Shije, Indigenous Global Development professional, has laid out a profound and poignant argument against framing these modern concepts of power, deeming them anti-indigenous.
It gets more complicated with the idea of passing. While Scarlett Johansson merges into white society with ease, someone like Jerry Seinfeld might lack this ability. Your name, features, etc, are your business card in a majority white society, regardless of the check in your census box. It becomes even more so blatant when we examine the treatment of visible Jews (religious garb etc), and the exponentially rising anti-Jewish hate crimes rates in the US and Europe.
We find ourselves in atonement times. We are reviewing our history as nations, in a dichotomy of oppressor vs. the oppressed. Not long ago, belonging to the “powerful” class was the desired outcome of how society views you. Today, we wish to elevate those who were wronged. This changed view seems just on the surface, but becomes increasingly warped when society begins to fetishize victimhood, and punish any perceived post liberation. We claim to fight for minorities disenthrallment, but frown upon one of the most unlikely endeavor of emancipation and self determination of a people who barely survived a genocide a mere three years earlier.
What does that mean for Jews? Some want to acknowledge the privileges they received in a relatively short time of reduced oppression, so they identify as white. Some would prefer the acknowledgement of their othering in white societies, by spotlighting their ethnicity. Neither are wrong.
Some have come up with the concept of conditional whiteness. A lunch break, if you may. A fleeting moment in time, where you grandparents may have survived the Holocaust, pogroms, fled MENA with nothing but their clothes on their backs, your parents may have had it better, but dad still couldn’t join the country club, but you my friend, you are one lucky bastard, you get to mingle and dance. That is unless you find yourself a victim of anti Jewish hate crime. That card will be ignored should such tragedy befall you.
“But race is a social construct, and whiteness is about constructs of power”. Is race a social construct? Yes, of course. But what makes it not real as evident by the way we treat one another due to these concepts? Social construct doesn’t mean our lived experiences aren’t real. Bigotry and prejudice are alive and well until we rid ourselves of it. And anti Jewish hatred, history’s oldest hatred, has proven to be the most adaptable of them all.
The racial classifications discussions taking place now are Americentrist in nature and do not fit in other societies. The way you’re viewed in NY, is not the same as in Stockholm, or Cairo. In a sense, those who abhor the idea of American exceptionalism, have perpetuated it through the aggressive manner with which social activists have been rushing to define Jews and our ‘whiteness’. This debate not only lacks the proper sensitivity required, but the historical context that has plagued our people, and architected our demise.