![]() ![]() Or inform Paddy that while, back in his day, the Irish were talked about, to quote one sickening periodic refrain, as “negroes turned inside out,” his grandson may now rest assured on the top of the racial-grievance food chain.Īnd yet, even these objections, solemn as they may be, don’t begin to capture the weight of the argument that Jews are somehow white. We got Columbus Day, for example, after 11 Italian Americans were lynched in 1892, leading President Harrison to instate a daylong celebration he thought would never become a tradition. Go tell Giuseppe, for example, that his granddaughter is now considered a member of the rarified white elite, even though he and his fellow immigrants were pelted with racial insults, discriminated against, and murdered. Next, you can try and argue that the category itself-“white”-is ridiculous. That kind of talk is earnest, but it won’t get you very far with those for whom race alone-and not, say, poverty, or lack of community, or a debilitating exposure to mind-rotting digital platforms-shapes every thread of the human experience. to your defense and say that you take the line about content of character over color of skin seriously. IF YOU WERE a completist or a pedant, you could simply insist that viewing the world and its inhabitants through the lens of race is a creepy 19th-century affectation that excited mainly the most feeble-minded of Germans and led to a good bit of savagery. You hear it in colleges, where you can pay the equivalent of the median American salary just to attend courses with titles like “Jews and Racial Privilege.” You hear it wherever our bien pensants congregate to show one another their virtues and pledge allegiance to their new radical religion. You hear it from radical Jewish advocates, who trill that Jews are “white passing” and therefore “functionally white,” which means they should take their place among the world’s most privileged, no matter what might’ve happened to their families between, say, 19. You heard endless variations on this sentiment during Israel’s recent skirmish with Hamas, as a parade of lawmakers, intellectuals, and entertainers took to social media to denounce the world’s sole Jewish state of perpetrating apartheid or of murdering black and brown bodies. ![]() But if you’d like to understand everything that’s so inherently nuts about the contemporary American conversation about race, it only takes this one three-word sentence: Jews are white. Which is not to say that systemic racism isn’t real, or that you don’t stand a much better chance of being senselessly harassed by the police if you’re black, or that centuries of discrimination haven’t take their toll, or that representation in the media doesn’t matter, or that health-care disparities aren’t frequently predicated on race and gender-or that any of the other arguments hurled at you as soon as the conversation turns to race aren’t valid. It was this: “Is that supposed to scare me?” Confused, I said the first thing that came to my mind. My rival, however, was just standing there, glaring at me as I did at him. I’d been in fights before, and I knew that when someone was jonesing to start one, he usually pushed or shoved or threw a punch or did something to let the other fellow know the game was afoot. I looked at him dumbfounded, for a few long moments, at a loss as to what was supposed to happen next. With a spring in his step, my rival got very close and stared at me menacingly. To understand fully what happened next, you should know that he was black. And so, one day, in the break room, the gentleman decided to mark his territory. This provoked the ire of a fellow worker, who felt slighted that this foreigner should prance into his turf and so brazenly attempt to mate with the females. Not really being the handy type, I cared less about the power tools on display and the customers who craved them and more about a certain young woman working the cash register. Many years ago, I moved from my native Israel to New York, and because I had no cash and no clue, I spent my days helping out at a friend’s hardware store. ![]()
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