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5G's avatar

As a Jewish person, this phenomenon of Jews insisting on fleeing from the category of "white" and being seen as "non-white" infuriates me, as not only does it rewrite the history of Jews in western countries, but denies the very material racial status that ethnicities that were deemed non-white were put under.

Let's take this question a step back: what is a "white" person, or what is the category of "white" intended to refer to? In the context of western societies, it was a cohort of peoples descended for the parts of the world where caucasians originated from, taking from the work of Blumenbach. Jews were never excluded from this category in the US. The naturalization law of 1790 in the United States did not exclude Jews. They could be part of unions that were restricted to Whites. Jews could marry any WASP and not be accused of having broken anti-miscegenation laws, as prominent Jews even in the south such as Judah Benjamin and David Levy Yulee did. These Jewish Americans were, like almost all others, White Americans. Just like the Lebanese actor Danny Thomas was a White American, despite not being of a European ethnic group.

Likewise, under apartheid in South Africa, Jews were classed not as Asian, not as Coloured, not as Black, but as White.

Compare this to the experiences of other races in America or in South Africa.

While this racial status of including Jews in the cohort of "whites" might have been conditional, and one such example was the White Australia policy of 1901 which restricted Jews' status, and of course the racial worldview of Nazi Germany that led to the destruction of European Jewry, all this speaks to the fact that "white" is nothing other than a cohort of ethnicities, centered around western Europeans while including other peoples, for the purpose of ascribing rights to some peoples and restrict them from others within a society. There is no inherent "white" person; there are peoples of differing geographic and ancestral lineages of varying relative distances from one another.

However, it must be stated that ethnic persecution by Whites does not in of itself mean that it is due to the victim being "non-white". Jews have suffered persecution long before the western race categories.

What one is implicitly admitting when they assert that Jews are "non-white" is that the Nazis were the correct ones in their racial classification scheme. That they have the final say. I find this reprehensible.

Lastly, it's important to stress that, at least ideally, Jews do not recognize the racial categories under which other nations classify peoples, and are called to see all Jews as one nation, whether we spent generations in Germany, Iraq, India, or Ethiopia.

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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

This argument is just another silly outgrowth of America's increasingly deranged racial obsession, but it does cast some light on how the times change. In the prior century, immigrant groups and members wanted desperately to be seen as "White" i.e. just your average mainstream American more or less; but now that all things "White" have become smeared with suspicion, people are desperate to pass as darker, to shake the family tree until an ancestor of color falls out, or to find some caveat to help you and your people escape the dreaded scarlet W.

Jews, despite their enormous wealth, status and influence, are going to fight like hell to maintain Victim status. In modern America being an officially recognized Protected Victim class is just too valuable a credential to surrender.

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