I Am Jewish and a Person of Color

By Cassandra Clifford

“You can’t be Jewish. You’re not white.” 

I grew up in Staten Island, New York, and as such, I already had a relatively skewed vision of religion in American society: it wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned the United States was predominantly Protestant, since a majority of my classmates and neighbors growing up were Catholic, and I had many classmates and even members of my own family who were Muslim, Hindu, Orthodox, and atheist. There were so many different people of so many different backgrounds that I had met in my fourteen years that I never really saw a correlation between race, ethnicity and religion. 

So when I was fourteen years old and another Jewish person told me this at school, I was pretty shocked. At that point, I had attended Hebrew school, I went to synagogue for most holidays, I knew how to write in Hebrew, and my family said the prayers and lit candles every weekend--If that didn’t make me Jewish, what did? I wasn’t really offended or hurt at the time, but when I told one of my favorite teachers a number of years later, he looked disappointed and assured me, “It wasn’t right for him to say that to you.” From that point on, I began to understand that my Jewishness and my identity as a person of color were both important parts of my identity, but they seemed to those on the outside as mutually exclusive.

Growing up in New York, which boasts the largest community of Jewish people outside of Israel, I was surrounded by a city which recognized my Jewish roots and had even embraced part of them: a bagel (or a bialy) with a schmear of cream cheese and lox is a New York City bagel shop’s bread and butter (along with the famous Baconeggncheese); I didn’t have to explain what Hanukkah or Passover or even Rosh Hashanah were to my non-Jewish classmates; the words “schlep” and “schmooze” and “schtick” have Yiddish origins, but nobody would miss a beat if my grandmother slipped them into a conversation. 

However, one thing that became more and more apparent to me as I started studying Jewish migration in college was that the story often repeated in American media was one of white and Ashkenazi Jewish people. For those who are unfamiliar with the distinction between different Jewish ethnic divisions, Ashkenazi Jewish people are those who are from central and Eastern Europe (my family comes from the Pale of Settlement, modern-day Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, and parts of Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, and Russia). While it’s true that Ashkenazi Jewish people constitute a majority of Jewish people around the world and many (but not all!) Ashkenazi Jews are white, equating Jewishness with whiteness and white privilege dismisses those Jews who are not white and ignores a whole history of discrimination against Jewish people, irrespective of their ethnicity.

Anti-Semitism did not start and end with Fascism and Nazism--other leaders, like Edward I of England, Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, Catherine the Great of Russia, enacted harsh and sometimes eerily similar policies on their countries’ Jewish populations centuries before Hitler. Today, when neo-Nazis are calling for white supremacy, their definition of white resolutely excludes Jewish people. In my own research on Jewish women’s education in the U.S., I found that many private colleges--including my own school, Barnard College, which today is home to one of the largest Jewish student populations of a non-religiously affiliated university in the U.S.--imposed quotas on the number of Jewish students they would accept and added barriers which would make it more difficult for Ashkenazi Jewish students to be granted admission. I speak, of course, from a largely Western historical perspective because it is my area of study, but you could find other examples throughout the world. 

All this being said, I would push back on some of my peers in the community who say the question “Are Jews white?” is a question that shouldn’t even be asked, as if admitting that the whiteness of some Jews automatically erases anti-Semitism throughout history. The answer is yes and no. Yes, there are Jews who are white, who may benefit from white privilege but still experience, directly or indirectly, anti-Semitism--but there exist, also, Jews who are not white, who experience inequality and discrimination not only because of their religion but also because of their skin color. By pretending that this question is one which shouldn’t even be touched with a ten-foot pole, we ignore the reality that the Jewish people are really a large group of people with incredible diversity among themselves and buy into the equation of Jewishness and whiteness.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down international travel, I had the opportunity to go to London. While I was there, I visited the Jewish Museum of London, which is currently featuring ‘JEW. Photographs by John Offenbach.’ In this exhibit, 33 portraits of Jewish people from 12 countries are displayed, along with their stories and their relationship with Judaism. The exhibit showcased Sepharic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Israeli Jews, Kaifeng Jews, people of all colors, sexualities, genders, and professions. I don’t think I had ever felt more seen as a Jew of color than I did while viewing that exhibit. For the first time, I saw people who looked like me who were also Jewish. 

I am Jewish, but I am also a person of color. I’ve experienced and seen prejudice through both those identities, but the thing which cuts and hurts most deeply is the feeling that I can’t be seen for all my identities simultaneously. I love seeing a Jewish or Latina protagonists in movies and on television, but I’m still waiting for when I see one who is Jewish and Latina, who embraces both aspects of her identity simultaneously and equally and who is recognized as both.