The joys of being persecuted

In a piece on separating myth from reality in the history of anti-Irish bigotry, Megan McArdle writes:

As I read about these notices, I wondered: Why was I so glad to read that my ancestors had, in fact, faced nasty discrimination? It's a reaction that needs scrutiny.

This is something I was thinking about recently in light of all those stories on Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who posed as black and became an NAACP leader. It reminded me of the case of "Binjamin Wilkomirski," a man who published a memoir in the 1990s detailing his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor before it was discovered that the events he described never took place, he wasn't even Jewish, and he had a totally different name.

What fascinates me as a Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors is why people would want to engage in this kind of deception. Cases like these are as bizarre as they are uncommon, and surely mental illness is involved. But I also think they stem in part from the same tendency McArdle is alluding to, of taking pride in being the member of a historically persecuted group. Modern society has romanticized persecution to the point that everyone wants part of it, as when a billionaire last year claimed the wealthy in America today were being treated like the Jews during Kristallnacht. The statement was both silly and offensive, and it's hard to imagine anyone who actually lived in the 1930s making such a comment. Back then, being the victim of anti-Semitism or racism wasn't regarded as cool.

It brings to mind a Mark Twain quip: "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read." Nobody wants to be in a concentration camp or be lynched by the Klan or beaten by cops or harassed or discriminated against--but a lot of people, whether they admit it or not, wouldn't mind having those things on their résumé.

Why ethnic labels matter

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

Crazy professors

Just about everyone who has been through college has stories about crazy professors. I'll tell you a couple of mine.

My first encounter with one came in my second year of community college, in a required course focusing on several thinkers who shaped the modern world including Darwin, Marx, Toynbee, and Einstein. The teacher was an African Sorbonne graduate who wore his watch on the pulse side of his wrist. I had an inkling of his ideological leanings when he criticized our assigned textbook as "too Eurocentric."

There are times when even I question Eurocentrism in traditional histories. As I suspected, however, this professor was merely replacing one "centrism" with another. I could feel his frustration as he looked for openings in the assigned material to tell us about his beliefs, which included the idea that much of Ancient Greek civilization was "stolen" from black Egyptians. It wasn't easy for him, since he was assigned to be teaching us about DWEMs (Dead White European Males). I was immune to his digressions because on the first day, I had gone to the library and borrowed a copy of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa, which debunks Afrocentrist claims about history. I learned more from that book than I did from the entire course.

He was only a moderate Afrocentrist. At the extremes is Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York, who holds that mankind is divided into "ice people," comprising those of European descent, and "sun people," comprising everyone else. Ice people are violent, materialistic exploiters, while sun people are kind, compassionate peacemakers. Dr. Jeffries also maintains that Jews financed the slave trade and continue to use Hollywood to promote black subservience. It's like he took the Nazis' master-race theory and flipped it around. Around the Jews, that is.

Later on, I got an American history professor who was almost as weird as the Afrocentrist guy, though in a different way. He looked like a character out of Roald Dahl: slight build, pointy nose, pencil-thin mustache. The oddest thing about his appearance was his hair. "Never trust a professor with strange hair" should be my motto. He looked like he would have been an ordinary bald man except that he had a big clump of hair resting on top, almost like a cockatoo. Bad use of monoxodil, I thought.

On the first day, he mentioned that previous students had complained he hadn't made his teaching relevant to the current times. He promised not to make that mistake with us. He kept his promise. For one thing, he had a relentless obsession with Bill Clinton, whom he considered the most corrupt president since Nixon. (This was a while before the Lewinsky scandal.) Throughout his lectures, he kept throwing in comments about how "Slick Willy" and his wife were letting the country go to waste.

He didn't seem to recognize any boundary between fact and opinion. FDR, he taught us, was a great president, though not because of his liberalism. Truman was overrated, Eisenhower was underrated, and Vietnam was unwinnable. The prof's most fervent belief was that there was a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. He wasn't sure of the nature of the conspiracy, he just knew beyond any doubt that there was one. And he let us argue our favored conspiracy theory on the final exam for extra credit. Accepting the findings of the Warren Commission wasn't an option.

For several years afterward, I went mad trying to read up as much as I could on the stuff we had covered, which I felt had been tainted by the guy's political and ideological proclivities. I eventually concluded that apart from his hangups about Clinton and JFK, he was reasonably fair and accurate most of the time.

I'm not implying these two professors were in any way representative of my overall college experience. After I transferred to U. of Maryland, I no longer met any ideological fruitcakes. A few of my professors there articulated liberal political views in front of the whole class, a practice I considered unprofessional (at least in non-political courses). But there was relatively little weirdness and flakiness. Yet the fact I encountered this sort of thing at all is significant. These are the kinds of experiences you hear and read about, and can't believe when they're actually happening to you.

P.S. For those who may not be aware, the picture at the start of this post is of the late comedian Sam Kinison playing a crazy professor in this scene from the 1986 movie Back to School.

Color is in the eye of the beholder

Last year, The New York Times ran an article on the debate over Columbus's ethnic origins. It featured a chart (which doesn't appear in the Internet version of the article) listing pros and cons to each hypothesis. When it reached the hypothesis that Columbus was Jewish, it mentioned the following as a con: "Most Jews in Southern Europe at the time were Sephardic Jews of North African descent, but preliminary analysis of Columbus's DNA suggests he was Caucasian."

This ill-informed remark stopped me short. I don't know what's more ridiculous, the assumption that Sephardic Jews in medieval Spain were of "North African descent," or the implication that this made them non-Caucasian.

I'm not trying to pick on the article, which was just trying to be balanced. And I have no stake in the question of Columbus's origins. I mention this quote only because it raises some interesting points about how the public perceives Jewish ethnicity.

First, there's the confusion over the meaning of Sephardic, a term that comes from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sefarad. In the strictest sense it refers to medieval Spanish Jews and their descendants. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, they went everywhere--as far west as Holland, as far east as India, even to the New World. But the bulk of them settled in the Middle East, and consequently, Sephardic has become a general term for Middle Eastern Jews.

Actually, the common convention is to apply the term to all non-Ashkenazic Jews, whatever their origin. That includes Dutch Jews, Italian Jews, Greek Jews, Turkish and Moroccan and Yemenite Jews. I grew up knowing only this binary way of classifying Jews, which still permeates the media. But careful writers use the term Mizrahi or "Oriental" to describe Middle Eastern Jews who don't have a family history in Spain.

How does race factor into the discussion? Mizrahi Jews even more than Sephardim tend to look relatively dark compared to the common Western image of the Jew. The convention of calling them Sephardi, coupled with the association of dark skin with Africa, is probably what led the article to think that medieval Spanish Jews were of "North African descent."

The fact is that many Jews physically resemble their non-Jewish countrymen. Russian Jews often look like ethnic Russians, and Iranian Jews often look like ethnic Iranians. This fact may seem surprising when you consider the religious and political barriers to mixing with the native population. Not only does Judaism discourage conversion and prohibit intermarriage, the countries themselves often enacted laws against those things, and in many places Jews lived separately from Gentiles for centuries.

But conversion and intermarriage did occur, occasionally on a large scale. Some scholars have maintained that modern-day Jews are more closely related to their non-Jewish neighbors than to Jews in other parts of the world. This hypothesis, which has been used to support as well as refute anti-Semitic beliefs, looks increasingly doubtful in light of genetic research over the past few decades. The research suggests a close kinship among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, despite their diversity in appearance. Only a few groups that don't fit any standard classification--the black Jews of Ethiopia, the Bene Israel of India, the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng--do seem racially distinct from the rest of world Jewry, and their origins remain a source of debate.

If Jews of different colors are fundamentally related, can they be called Caucasian? Well, it depends how you define the term. Its meaning has shifted over time, as has "white." Originally it encompassed not only Europeans but also the darker skinned inhabitants of Mediterranean lands. But in early twentieth century America, Jews, Arabs, and many European ethnicities were classed as non-white or non-Caucasian. Nowadays, Ashkenazic Jews are usually considered white or Caucasian, as are most indigenous Europeans, but the perception remains that Arabs and other Middle Eastern groups are people of color. This dichotomy has contributed to the curious notion that Ashkenazim belong to a different race than Sephardim.

But that just goes to show that the boundaries of whiteness are more political than biological. I saw a telling example in Nelson Mandela's criticism of U.S. intervention in Iraq: "Israel has weapons of mass destruction.... Why should there be one standard for [Iraq], especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white?"

The idea that Israel is a "white" country while Iraq is a "black" country is laughable. If you define Iraqi Arabs as black, then how can you call Israel, whose Jewish population is about half Sephardi/Mizrahi, a white country? Anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you that it is sometimes impossible to tell the Jewish and Arab residents apart. That's because Jews and Arabs are ethnically closely related. But for political reasons, one group is seen as white and the other as non-white.

And when it comes to political classification, it seems Jews can never win. They came to be regarded as part of the white majority around the same time that being a minority started being fashionable. (The term minority itself is far more likely to be applied to blacks and Asians than to Jews, even though in a worldwide sense Jews fit the definition far better, and even within the United States are far fewer in number than blacks.) It is in situations like this that Jews remind me of the kid who isn't accepted by either the in-crowd or the nerds.

In defense of celebrating black identity

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In 1994, National Review editor David Klinghoffer wrote a refreshingly candid piece about Orthodox Jewish racism. Klinghoffer is a baal teshuva¹ who was shocked by the casual racism he encountered in the frum² world. I mention his article now because it hits upon some of the themes that Obama covered in his race speech. While not condoning bigotry in any form, Klinghoffer argued that some of the bigotry coming from Jews should be understood in the context of their experiences, a consideration he did not extend to American Jews who denigrate blacks.

I began to wonder what Klinghoffer, as a conservative, is saying about Obama now. It turns out that he has defended Obama, sort of, but from a perspective I find highly problematic. In a recent article, he argues, "The Bible makes it clear...that God has chosen some races to teach important lessons to the rest of the world.... [W]hatever unique contribution Africans have to give to the world, it is not racist to suggest that a black church, even a black theology, could be a vehicle for making that contribution."

I think Klinghoffer isn't exercising anywhere near as much caution as he should in using the term "race." The Torah talks about different peoples. The ancient concept of a people is not equivalent to the modern concept of a race. What we call race arose largely as a means of establishing differences where there needn't be.

Klinghoffer was addressing the charge that a "black church" should be considered racist in the same sense that most of us would consider a "white church" to be. But his answer was inadequate. The main purpose of black pride is to raise up a group that has been pushed down.

Whatever the white power movement may insist, whites do not fall into that category. Individual white groups might; there's nothing wrong with ethnically Irish or Italian or Polish people having their own organizations to express pride in their heritage. But an organization for white people is a different matter. Whiteness is an elusive concept that tends to be defined as whatever is left over after you've excluded "other" groups. In practice, it usually ends up excluding many Caucasians.

Some people try to apply the same argument to blacks. Why should we recognize black or African identity at all? Why not talk instead about ethnic Nigerians and Kenyans and Ugandans? In a perfect world, this argument might hold water. But blacks were brought to this country by force and stripped of their previous ethnic identity. No matter where they came from in Africa, they ended up as one group, today known as African American.

You might ask why Obama, who is not descended from slaves, should be considered a part of this group. It's a good question. I will answer it with an anecdote from several years ago. Tiger Woods insisted he was not black but "Cablinasian," an acronym he coined to highlight the many races in his ancestry. Gregory Kane, a black conservative who writes for The Baltimore Sun, retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

For the vast majority of people, even those of mixed ancestry, racial identity is not a matter of choice. It is something thrust upon them. Let's get real: when most Americans look at Obama, they see a black man. The notion that he chose to call himself black to advance his career is preposterous.

Whatever you may think of hip hop music or contemporary inner-city culture, African Americans as a group have made significant positive contributions to America. They are as much a legitimate cultural group as Jews, Italians, Irish, and all the rest that make up this great country. Group identity of any kind has a danger of turning into chauvinism, and often does. But that's the price we pay for having a heterogeneous society. The solution is that people should learn to respect differences, not that they should stop having differences.

Glossary
¹returner to the faith
²religious

Jewish rainbow

When I walk into a room and say to people I meet "I'm Jewish" often I will get the response "But you're Black." I often want to say "no kidding," but the usual response I give is "Yes, my family has been practicing Judaism for at least three generations, now." The point that I aim to make is that it would make it easier to just "BE" as a Jewish person of color if "black" and "Jewish" identity were not so commonly assumed to be mutually exclusive. Historically, Jews have been multiple skin colors and it's unfortunate that the passive internalization of color consciousness that happens so easily in American society, helped us to forget the freedom from identifying around color that is a part of our Jewish history. (p. 27)

The above quote comes from Yavilah McCoy, as recorded in a fascinating book I just read, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Designed to raise awareness about Jews of color, the book presents numerous anecdotes about the experiences of nonwhite Jews, followed by stimulating discussions on the implications of this research. The book is marred for me by its anti-Zionist standpoint, which culminates in a final chapter that has very little to do with the rest of the book. The back cover sports endorsements by Tony Kushner, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, all left-wing thinkers squarely in Kantrowitz's ideological camp. I get the sense that Kantrowitz underestimates her audience, thinking that her discussions about racial diversity in the Jewish community either will appeal only to those with her positions or will inevitably move readers toward those positions. Instead, her dogmatic advocacy of ideas that most Jews find offensive will likely turn away many readers who would otherwise find much value in the information she presents.

What types of nonwhite Jews are there? The question is not as easy to answer as one might expect, because it depends on how one defines "white" and "Jewish," both highly contested categories. Most Americans today assume that the prototypical Jew (which usually means Ashkenazic Jew) is white, but that was not always the common perception in this country. The very act of designating Jews as white or nonwhite can be a political statement, because it is taken to suggest something about their status and position in society. (I have known Jews who mark themselves as "other" in forms asking for their race.)

With these precautions in mind, Kantrowitz considers several types of people: (1) African American and Asian American converts to Judaism (2) nonwhite children adopted by Jewish families (3) children of mixed marriages (4) Ethiopian Jews and other black African communities that have practiced Judaism for centuries or more (5) the most ambiguous category, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, some of them quite dark-skinned, others scarcely distinguishable from their Ashkenazic brethren.

One reason this information has value is that Jews, despite a long history of crucial involvement in the civil rights movement, also have a history of racism that persists today in some religious communities. The historical tension between Ashkenazim and Sephardim can take on racial overtones. More pertinently, many Jews have trouble accepting the very concept of a black Jew--it seems an impossibility, a contradiction in terms.

One anecdote really struck home for me, reflecting the type of compartmentalized behavior I've witnessed. McCoy, the woman I quoted before, attended a Hasidic school as a child. On one occasion when she complained to classmates who were denigrating non-Jewish blacks, they assured her they weren't talking about her. The inconsistent thinking required to sustain this kind of attitude demonstrates why Jews of color may help stem the tides of bigotry coming from both Jews and non-Jews.

Kantrowitz wishes to uproot the perception that "black" and "Jewish" are mutually exclusive categories, and to reveal the Jewish people as a racially diverse group. She feels that recognizing this reality will ease the tension between Jews and blacks. Her point is that if the two categories can overlap, people will be less inclined to view the two groups as enemies of each other.

She weakens her argument, however, by trying to downplay the well-documented fact that a disproportionate level of anti-Semitism exists among African Americans. She fails to discuss any of the official studies, such as Harris Polls taken over the last several decades. As Charles Silberman noted in his book A Certain People, black anti-Semitism is not a mirror image of Jewish racism. The latter is far more marginalized in the Jewish community than the former is in the African American community. The problem is not that most blacks agree with Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic pronouncements, but that leaders like him exhibit far greater influence than any comparably racist figure in the Jewish community.

She also wishes to blur the line between "Jew" and "Arab" by emphasizing the strong Arab element of Jews who are the product of Arabic land, culture, and language as surely as American Jews are Americans. She eagerly embraces the term "Arab Jew" to highlight this dual identity.

She correctly observes that Islamic countries in the Middle Ages generally treated Jews far better than Christian countries from the same era did. The height of this relatively peaceful coexistence occurred in the Golden Age of Spain from the eighth to twelfth centuries. But the picture is more complicated than she would like to believe. This period, when Jews enjoyed more rights and privileges than any time until the modern age, ended not because of the fifteenth-century Christian rulers who instigated the Inquisition, but because of violent Muslim invaders from two centuries earlier.

In addressing this fact, Kantrowitz performs a remarkable sleight of hand. She quotes Victor Perera saying, "[u]ntil the arrival of bloody-minded Almohade Berbers in 1146, bent on implanting Islam in all of Europe, Spain's Jews generally lived at peace with Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects; and they thrived culturally and commercially as never before or since" (p. 81). She immediately comments, "This peace persisted until the Christian conquest of Iberia and the Inquisition," which is not only false, but directly contradicts what she just quoted!

The final chapter of the book is little more than an essay on forging a Jewish identity apart from Zionism. Too bad. There is considerable merit to her thesis that recognizing racial diversity among Jews will help improve relations with other people. She doesn't seem to accept, or even consider, that Jews can support Israel and still be fully committed to peaceful relations with non-Jews. I hope that intelligent readers will be able to overlook the book's flaws, because beneath the rhetoric lies some valuable material about forgotten portions of world Jewry.

The Jewish cab test

Shortly after Tiger Woods became the first black to win the Masters Tournament, he insisted that he was not black but "Cablinasian," a word he coined to describe the different groups in his ancestry: Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian. Sarcastic African-American columnist Gregory Kane retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (The Baltimore Sun, Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

I wonder if a similar test could be applied to Jews. Arguably, the Holocaust was a grotesque version of this test, as Jews who abandoned their heritage and became atheists or Christians discovered that they were just as likely to be gassed as the bearded shtetl Jew. Hitler justified this innovation to classical anti-Semitism by arguing that Jews who assimilated took Jewish ideas with them. I can't say he was totally wrong.

These examples highlight one of the most basic questions about ethnic identity: is it defined by members of the group themselves, or by outsiders? For us Jews, this dilemma is even more perplexing, because we haven't even settled the "Who is a Jew?" question amongst ourselves. Why should we expect others to fare any better?

The traditional definition of a Jew is one whose mother is Jewish, or one who converts. (Computer scientists would call that a recursive definition.) But Orthodox Jews do not accept conversions done by Conservative or Reform rabbis, and Reform Judaism has expanded the definition to include those born to a Jewish father. Depending on one's perspective, individuals in many U.S. synagogues may not be Jewish.

No matter how strongly Orthodox Jews insist that their definition is the only legitimate one, non-Jews cannot be bothered to take sides on this in-the-family dispute. They have enough trouble dealing with a group that even by their standards defies all normal classifications. I have seen confused people on message boards write "Is Judaism a race or a religion?" as if it must be one or the other. In recent times, the trend has been to think of Jews as purely a religion and not to recognize their ethnic character. I increasingly see articles that describe celebrities as having been "born to Jewish parents." Some younger stars like Natalie Portman openly identify as Jewish, but there's a sense that it would be rude to describe someone as Jewish without their permission.

To people with this outlook, a phrase like "Jewish atheist" sounds as oxymoronic as "Catholic atheist," even though many older Jews identify as one. And what about that quaint phrase "the Jewish nation" which shows up in our prayerbooks? How can Jews be a nation? Doesn't that require a country? Of course, now Jews have a country, but those who never set foot there are still Jews.

Our unconventional classification arises from our long and complex history over 4,000 years. Few groups in the world have retained a sense of shared identity for that long, and so no matter how much we attempt to adapt to current norms, there lurks in our existence an element of the ancient that relatively modern categories like "race," "ethnic group," "religion," and "nation" can never quite capture.

The ancient Israelites could possibly be called a "tribe," though that term is rarely used, reserved instead for the twelve tribes within ancient Israel. Eventually, Israel did constitute a true nation. But after the Jews were exiled, they continued to think of themselves as Jews. In this respect, they were unusual. Most religions that spread outward from a single land retained religious but not national or ethnic identity. Partly this was because religions like Catholicism and Islam had a prosyletizing mission which Judaism lacked. Thus the people of Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran are Muslims but not Arabs. Because Jewish conversions never happened on a large scale (with possible exceptions like the Khazars), the converts became part of the Jewish people, losing their previous cultural identity. I have heard rabbis compare Jews to a family, where the converts are like adopted children. It's not a perfect analogy (since adopted children do not choose their parents), but it does give a sense of how Jews can think of themselves as having blood ties even while accepting converts.

The problem is that Gentiles would not be expected to pay any attention to how Jews defined themselves. What ultimately bound Jews together mirrored what bound blacks together: namely, persecution. It is worth asking whether there would be a concept such as "black" today if racism had never existed. It is similarly worth asking if Jews would have outlasted their ancient Middle-Eastern origins if anti-Semitism had never existed. Nowadays, many secular Jews admit that their Jewish identity is often driven by a desire to stick it to the anti-Semites. As Ilya Ehrenburg said, "so long as there is a single anti-Semite in the world, I shall declare with pride that I am a Jew" (qtd. in Alan Dershowitz's book Chutzpah, p. 14). Likewise, as anti-Semitism declines, or at least fades into the background, the concept of a secular Jew becomes harder to maintain.

Of course, if you define a Jew as anyone who may be a victim of anti-Semitism, then the definition becomes as arbitrary as bigotry is senseless. Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned discrimination against a man who was black on the basis of one great-grandparent; many people with more African ancestry have passed for white. In a similar way, Barry Goldwater was subject to anti-Semitism even though he was a practicing Episcopalian with a Gentile mother; he probably would have been safe if his name had been Anderson. The cab test may be a sad reality for blacks, but for Jews it is something we must actively resist if we are to make sense of our lives.

Running away from one's shadow

For reasons I've never fully understood, Americans have an aversion to naming the dominant racial group in East Asia. When I was growing up, the accepted term was Oriental. It was no more controversial a term than Asian is today. For example, The New York Times in 1985 described Haing S. Ngor as "the first Oriental actor to win an Oscar." But around the early '90s, the term fell out of use and came to be regarded as an anachronism if not a slur, much like the word Negro had done a generation earlier. Suddenly, everyone was expected to say Asian when referring to people of Chinese, Korean, or Japanese descent.

In this new scheme, Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are not Asian, even if they live on the Asian continent, and even if their ancestors lived there for thousands of years. It's true that other continental terms have also acquired a racial sense; after all, people often use European to mean "white" and African to mean "black." But Asian is the only continental adjective that has been narrowed to such an extreme that it now refers only to a segment of the continent's traditional boundaries.

How did this happen? I'm not sure. The narrow sense of Asian goes back a long time. For example, a 1979 journal article notes that "Most literature on ethnic studies has...narrowed the term 'Asian Americans' to refer mainly to those people coming from the Far East and Southeast Asia." But this very same article unhesitatingly uses the phrase "Oriental children." It took a while before the media decided that Asian was not simply an alternative, but the only acceptable term.

The most frequent explanation offered is that Oriental is too Eurocentric. The term comes from a Latin word meaning "to rise," and it was first applied to the area now called the Middle East, because that area lay in the direction where Europeans observed the sunrise. (This meaning is still used in the phrase "Oriental Jew," though because of its association with the Arab world, it is even applied to Jews from Morocco, which ironically is farther west than almost all of Europe!) Eventually the term was transferred to the Far East, and that's when it acquired its racial connotations.

But if Eurocentric terminology is inherently offensive, why do we still say Middle East, or for that matter Western civilization? Besides, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word Asia itself may come from an Akkadian word meaning "to rise," and, if so, it came to refer to that part of the world for precisely the same reason that Oriental did.

In fact, etymology has very little to do with why we regard certain words as offensive. For example, Negro is simply the Spanish word for "black." In the mouths of English speakers, it acquired a derogatory sense over time. That's apparently also what has happened with the word Oriental.

The term Asian American gained popularity around the same time that African American did. The apparent purpose of these coinages was to replace the language of race with the language of geography, on the assumption that if people stop talking about race, they'll stop thinking that way as well. Unfortunately, this assumption reflects a naive understanding of how language works. When people say Asian today, they mean exactly what people from a generation ago meant when they said Oriental. The thinking hasn't changed one bit; only the label has. All we've accomplished is taken a previously race-neutral term (Asian), destroyed its original geographic meaning and given it a new racial meaning.

Not that I'm advocating going back to saying Oriental. The shift is here to stay, and those who object are fighting a lost cause. Hopefully as time goes by, we will no longer need to use racial terms altogether. But we haven't reached that point today. America remains a race-conscious society, and that's not going to disappear just because we change the way we talk. The notion that it will is the linguistic equivalent of running away from one's shadow. As long as race continues to play a role in society, racial thinking will follow us wherever we go, no matter how many changes we make to our speech. Only by working directly on people's attitudes can we make a real difference.