Why the Jewish Race Question Matters

Over the weekend, UK Labour MP Diane Abbott made some ignorant comments about racism. She has since apologized, and is now suspended, but this is not the first time that well-known leaders and/or celebrities have publicly questioned whether Jews (or others) should be considered a race for protections against racial discrimination.This article will just focus on Jews.

Instead of just getting angry, it is time for us to set the record straight, so that people actually understand why the question fundamentally matters.

First, whether Jews are or are not a scientifically separate race may be debatable, as much of modern science regards the category of race itself as a social construct. But that is a wholly different question than whether Jews have experienced and do still face racism and racial discrimination.

Racism is the belief that innate inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. It often involves the color of a person’s skin, but not always. Racial discrimination, or discriminating based on race, takes place when people treat other people differently (usually in a bad way) because of their perception of that other person’s race, whether their perception is scientifically accurate or not.

For example, whether or not Jews are scientifically a race, it is undeniably true that the Nazis killed six million Jewish men, women, and children because they believed (as enshrined in the Nuremberg Race Laws) that Jews were racially inferior.

At the same time in the United States, immigration laws (i.e.the Johnson-Reed Act) treated Jews as a distinct racial group — and a less desirable one — thus limiting their immigration, and condemning untold numbers to death in Europe.

So Jews have clearly faced their share of racism and racial discrimination throughout history, and often lost their lives for it. Even today, the vast majority of antisemitic incidents targeting Jewish people in the United States have nothing to do with this or that religious Jewish practice, and everything to do with the target’s perceived race or national origin.

That is why, from a legal perspective, the question about Jews and race is simple: Jews are considered a distinct race for the purposes of civil rights laws.

Whether it is Title VI (See T.E. v. Pine Bush Cent. Sch. Dist., (S.D.N.Y. 2014)); Title VII (Bonadona v. Louisiana Coll., (W.D. La. 2018); Section 1982 (Singer v. Denver Sch. Dist. No. 1, (D.Colo.1997); or other civil rights statutes, (see Bachman v. St. Monica’s Congregation (7th Cir.1990)), Jews can and should be protected by the laws we already have in place. Sadly, however, oftentimes they are not protected in the first instance. Charitably, it might just be an issue of education. Practically, it seems to reflect a much deeper, and more consistent, pattern of “othering.”

“Othering” is a psychological phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined as being outside the norms of a particular category. Here is how it works, using Jews and race as an example: Within living memory, an entire one-third of all world Jewry was murdered, explicitly because of their race. You would think that should qualify Jewish people for continued protection from racial discrimination. Today, however, when anti-racism is finally in vogue, Jews are told that their struggles should not be part of that discussion, because they are not actually a race.

Othering is one of the rare unifying themes that emerges from the history of antisemitism. Sometimes, it goes as far as dehumanization: Whether they portray Jews as malevolently superhuman, as in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” or as worthlessly subhuman, as in the Nazi ideology, antisemites have always found it easier to despise and eventually kill that which they do not consider human.

But Jews have also been “othered” in more subtle ways: People used to yell at Jews, “go back to the Middle East,” but now that we have (and happy 75th anniversary to the reborn Jewish state), they call us colonizers and tell us to go back to Europe. The concept of race is an important if oft-neglected part of that conversation because people love to ignore the inconvenient fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are not of European descent, and are not white or even white passing: Israel is a large melting pot of Jews of Middle East and North African descent, who are physically indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors. But in this context, “human rights” groups are suddenly happy to say that Jews are once again a separate race — and a white one at that — because it helps feed into ridiculous notions like the concept of Israeli apartheid.

That is why Abbott’s comments, comparing antisemitism to the kind of prejudice that “many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience,” are more than just silly — they are both uninformed and dangerous. Casually ignoring the history and continued prevalence of anti-Jewish racism, while erasing the existence of non-white Jews, ends up amplifying antisemitic libels and justifying the exclusion of Jewish people from the protections that they have earned in blood. We can only hope that this becomes a change-inducing teachable moment for both Abbott and her audience.

Mark Goldfeder is Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

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