A friend of mine was recently angry and anxious about a university human resources form. The form reflected how people self-identified. In other words, how diverse was this Canadian university\u2019s workforce?<\/p>\n
The form\u2019s questions asked about race.\u00a0On that form, it said that Jewish people should mark on their forms \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n
The person who told me about this wrote on the form that this was racist and wrong. In fact, Jews come in every single colour and are from all over the world. Jews aren\u2019t defined by only the (Ashkenazim) European \u201cwhite\u201d category.\u00a0If we\u2019re identified as an ethnicity, that doesn\u2019t define our race.<\/p>\n
Also, Judaism isn\u2019t solely a religion. We\u2019re still considered Jewish even if one converts to another religion, or isn\u2019t practising or is a descendant of a Jewish person. In Canada, First Nations, Inuit and M\u00e9tis are Indigenous. Historically, Jews are also considered indigenous \u2013 to Israel.<\/p>\n
Non-Jews have racialized us as \u201cother\u201d for thousands of years. This othering isn\u2019t a new thing. It\u2019s a core component of antisemitism. In Hitler\u2019s Germany, categorizing Jews as a different race and subhuman made it easier for genocide to take place.<\/p>\n
This historic narrative around antisemitism parallels that of many other oppressed people. Yet, the antisemitic misinformation campaign is powerful. Even though there are only about 14 million Jews in the world, antisemites consider us to have an outsized influence and power that somehow overpowers and dominates others. As an example: even as hate crimes against Jews have increased, they are poorly covered by mainstream news. Yet, we are also allegedly controlling the media at the same time. Huh?<\/p>\n
These tropes aren\u2019t logical or rational. Prejudice, discrimination and hate are often fueled by emotion. Leaders then use these strong feelings to gain power, control and wealth and to scapegoat minorities like Jews.<\/p>\n
What are ways to counter this in a 21st-century context?\u00a0There are social media activists who speak out daily, raising awareness and fighting against this misinformation. Many Jewish families open their home and Shabbat tables up to enable non-Jews, one at a time, to learn about who we are. Others write books and conduct interviews on radio and TV. Yet not all of us are public figures, or want to be.<\/p>\n
Even as \u201cregular\u201d people, we can be proud owners of our Jewish identities. We can continue to learn, think and reflect on who we are, what we believe and our place in the world. We can stand together, recognizing that, as Jews, we are all responsible for one another \u2013 kol Yisrael arevim zeh le zeh<\/em>. We can attempt, through pride and knowledge, to control our own narrative.<\/p>\n I, too, was frustrated by that human resources form. Now, I\u2019m puzzled whenever I see a form that asks me what my identity is. Since a bit after the Second World War, light-skinned Jews in North America have been encouraged to tick off the \u201cwhite\u201d box on these \u201cself-identity\u201d forms. The horrors of the Holocaust were put aside by governments and non-Jews, in an effort to help European, \u201cwhite\u201d Jews integrate into society, but simply checking \u201cwhite\u201d erases us. It erases Jewish ethnicity and it erases Jews of colour. Jews from the Middle East, India, Asia, Africa and South America \u2013 Jews from anywhere we\u2019ve lived where skin colour might not have been deemed Caucasian, white or European.<\/p>\n This North American erasure is so deep that Jews of colour often describe the discrimination they face when attending synagogue \u2013 there are many instances in which a member of the Ashkenazi \u201cwhite\u201d majority questions if they are full-fledged congregants. They\u2019re asked if they are converts, or guests. Imagine the alienation Jewish people with darker skin face when asked, \u201cAre you really Jewish?\u201d or \u201cWhere are you really from?\u201d every time they walk into a service.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s Jewish population is much more diverse in terms of skin tone than what one finds in the United States or Canada but, historically, it\u2019s been hard for Mizrahi Jews to gain leadership roles in Israel, too. So many Israeli Ashkenazi Jews have bought into this whiteness identity, too.<\/p>\n In the United States, when Jews \u201cbecame\u201d white, they no longer were excluded from country clubs, university quotas, etc. There was an advantage to accepting this new categorization, even as it still created terrible, completely unethical inequities among people, including Jews, based on skin colour.<\/p>\n As a result of this \u201cbecoming white\u201d transition, some oppressed minorities and the political left now may see Jewish people as part of an oppressive white majority. In this view, white Jews have no legitimate complaints about how we are treated, because, suddenly, we\u2019re just part of the privileged majority. So, in addition to hate from the political right, there\u2019s also abuse from the left if Jewish people speak out about antisemitism.<\/p>\n Navigating this landscape is difficult. We all have bias. No one is completely free of it. We\u2019re raised with it and must each work to do better. Yet, in a time when Canadians are watching hate crimes rise against Jewish and Muslim communities, it\u2019s our obligation to do more. Confronting Canada\u2019s residential school history, the deaths of Indigenous children, and Canada\u2019s treatment of Indigenous people overall forces us to think further about what it means to uphold certain \u201chistoric\u201d narratives \u2013 narratives that don\u2019t reflect what really happened.<\/p>\n Manitoba now wants to collect data about race, ethnicity and indigeneity on its COVID vaccine consent forms. This would allow the province to learn more about vaccination rates and virus rates in various populations.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve printed out the paperwork for my second jab and I\u2019m looking forward to celebrating this chance to be fully vaccinated. Even so, I\u2019m wondering what box to tick off. Choosing \u201cOther\u201d reinforces that antisemitic tradition of negative identity politics. I\u2019d like to avoid that. I\u2019m proud to be Jewish \u2013 but it\u2019s not one of the options on the form.<\/p>\n Joanne Seiff<\/strong> has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/em>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner<\/a> or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A friend of mine was recently angry and anxious about a university human resources form. The form reflected how people self-identified. In other words, how diverse was this Canadian university\u2019s workforce? The form\u2019s questions asked about race.\u00a0On that form, it said that Jewish people should mark on their forms \u201cwhite.\u201d The person who told me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3470,20689,5914,20688,5806,20690],"class_list":["post-37113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-discrimination","tag-ethnicity","tag-identity","tag-race","tag-religion","tag-whiteness"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}