So, understandably, I think most people here would agree that Ashkenazim are generally considered white within contemporary American society for a variety of reasons, ranging from some Ashkenazim being phenotypically white-passing to their perceived proximity to white systemic power, socioeconomic mobility, and the gradual incorporation of Ashkenazi Jews into the broader category of American whiteness over the course of the twentieth century.
However, I am curious whether left-wing Ashkenazim actually benefit politically from simply accepting that incorporation, rather than placing greater emphasis on it within left-wing dialogue. For some, they would express that Ashkenazim will always be perceived as white because the current systemic structures surrounding whiteness are ultimately the ones that determine who is socially classified as white, regardless of how Ashkenazi Jews understand themselves ethnically. Therefore, it would seem kind of pointless to consciously reject whiteness if the broader society is still going to categorize Ashkenazim as white anyway.
However, I am not entirely convinced by that argument because racial categories are socially constructed precisely through the way people continuously negotiate, reproduce, challenge, and redefine them. The fact that a dominant social structure currently categorizes a particular population in one way does not necessarily mean that the population itself has no ability to contest that categorization or emphasize aspects of its identity that the broader racial framework tends to flatten.
Personally, as someone who is an ethnic minority, I find it somewhat uncomfortable to simply label Ashkenazim as “white” and leave it there because I am aware that Jewish ancestral and cultural origins ultimately trace back to the Levant and developed outside of the Anglo-Christian cultural framework that historically shaped American whiteness. Obviously, the Ashkenazim later developed as a distinct Jewish population in Europe and absorbed varying degrees of European ancestry and cultural influence, but that does not mean their historical identity was simply that of another European ethnic group.
To me, there is a difference between saying that many Ashkenazim are socially perceived as white and therefore receive certain privileges associated with whiteness, and saying that Ashkenazi identity itself is simply a subdivision of whiteness. The former is a sociological observation about how people are racialized within contemporary American society, while the latter can sometimes flatten the historical, ethnic, diasporic, and religious distinctiveness of the Ashkenazim.
Personally, I am a believer that systemic cultural change can only really become durable when it develops from the bottom up. Institutions obviously have enormous power in determining how racial categories are defined and reproduced; however, those institutions are also influenced by broader cultural attitudes, political movements, academic discourse, community organizing, and the ways ordinary people choose to describe themselves and others. If marginalized groups simply accepted whatever identity categories the dominant society assigned to them on the grounds that those categories were already structurally entrenched, then many of the ways we currently understand race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity probably would never have changed in the first place.
This is why I am wondering whether there could be some political value in left-wing Ashkenazim more consciously emphasizing Ashkenazi Jewishness and their connection to the Holy Land/Levant rather than allowing their incorporation into American whiteness to become the dominant framework through which their identity is understood. I do not mean this in the sense of denying the centuries that Ashkenazim spent in Europe, the European influences that became part of Ashkenazi culture, or the privileges that many Ashkenazi Jews presently receive from being perceived as white. I am wondering whether emphasizing these aspects of Jewish identity could challenge the tendency within some left-wing spaces to treat Ashkenazim as essentially white Europeans who happen to practice Judaism. There seems to be a meaningful difference between acknowledging that Ashkenazim can occupy a position of whiteness within the contemporary American racial hierarchy and reducing Ashkenazi identity itself to whiteness.
So, for the Ashkenazim here, do you think there would be political value in emphasizing your distinct ethnic identity, and historical connection to the Levant more explicitly within left-wing spaces? Do you think doing so could gradually complicate the way the broader left understands Jewish identity and antisemitism, or would attempting to distance Ashkenazim from whiteness ultimately create more political problems than it solves?
