Why the age-old ‘Jews are white’ trope is back on center stage

During Rosh Hashanah dinner this past week, my mother — an occasional yet focused steamer — recommended I check out the Israeli show A Body That Works on Netflix. And so I did. The series focuses on the marital joy and strife that emerges during a surrogate pregnancy situation between an affluent Tel Aviv couple and a single mother from far more modest circumstances. 

Clearly shot before last October 7, I couldn’t help thinking that A Body That Works reflects all that is great about Israel — a place I’ve visited and lived in for decades. There’s Tel Aviv’s balmy seafront location. The series’ hip and hunky cast. And the focus on surrogacy — a reflection of both Israel’s impressive reproductive technologies sector and the culture’s blasé attitude toward putting them to good use. 

Post-October 7, however — amid a storm of global protests literally calling for Israel’s demise — all I could think about is, “Are these Israeli actors white?” Of course their skin tone shouldn’t matter, but once again — with the publication of author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message — the age-old #jewsarewhite trope is back on center stage. 

I’m both African-American and Ashkenazi Jewish and am certainly not white. Nor are many other members of my family and a vast number of other Jews across Israel and the globe. But I’m understandably sensitive to claims that Jews are “white” and was incensed by Coates’s obsessive conflation of race and Judaism in The Message — a book so fundamentally antisemitic that it could easily be considered a Mein Kampf for the twenty-first century. 

Yet on the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, my strongest emotion here is fatigue. My mother is white, her mother was white — most American Jews are white. And so what? As I shared with an Anglo-Israeli friend over coffee recently in Tel Aviv — herself a mix of Polish, Yemenite and Ghanaian ancestry — what is the motivation behind framing Jews as white? why does it matter? 

Jews and Judaism have existed long before the nineteenth century Euro-American constructs of race that now fuel our culture of wokey hierarchies and entitlement. Jews, by design, have no space in this grievance-based system — in fact it was purpose-designed to both exclude and penalize them. And the #jewsarewhite canard has allowed this to happen. 

Frame Jews as white and not only do they fail to qualify for minority status, they become the causes of #oppression — both real and manufactured — experienced by “real” minorities. Frame Jews as the causes of oppression, and they’re expected to atone for it — truth be damned. Demand Jews atone for the suffering of others, and this inevitably leads to recompense and retribution. And retribution against Jews, history repeatedly confirms, almost inevitably leads to violence and death. 

In the case of Israel and Palestine, “whitening” Jews as Coates has done so cravenly, positions them as the ideal foil to the darker, disenfranchised, truly oppressed Palestinians. Under the guise of race, Palestinians are colonized — Jews are colonizers — no need for further details or data points. And as the colonized, as folks like Coates and academic Judith Butler have suggested, armed resistance is not only acceptable, but defensible. Coates himself compares the Hamas massacre to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion of 1831 — adding that he’s not so sure he wouldn’t have joined in the Gazan loot and kill-fest if he had been there last October 7. 

And so this is what antisemites and anti-Zionists really mean when they say that Jews are “white.” They mean it’s OK to take up arms against them, “rebel” and revolt” — escalate and decolonize. They’re saying that because Jews are white, Hamas was on to something — it’s no big deal to kill Jews and end Israel as a consequence. And they’re saying brown and black folks across the globe should join their bandwagon lest they forsake their own liberation and intersectional emancipation. 

Make no mistake: the only motivation behind #jewsarewhite is death — Jewish death. And folks like Coates know exactly what they mean when they say it.