Invisibilized: Being a White Jew in the Space

• In Event: Beyond Binary Thinking: Jews, Antisemitism, and Navigating Difference

Abstract

​​Purpose
Jews are a diverse people; 12% of American Jews and 50% of Israeli Jews are Jews of color. I am a White Ashkenazi Jew. While in no way denying my proximity to Whiteness (Brodkin, 1998), I aim to complicate facile notions of White Jews as “just White,” and the reductionist definition of Jewish identity as merely religious. Doing so can render our collective work in the antiracism and equity arena more nuanced, as Jews as a people complicate simple religious, ethnic, or racial identification (Tapper et al., 2023).

Theoretical Framework.
The study is rooted in HebCrit (Rubin, 2020; Author 1, 2025) to bring rigor to an analysis of a selection of critical incidents I have encountered over the past decade, with particular emphasis on incidents post-October 7th.

Mode of Inquiry/Data Sources
The study is modeled on Shibusawa’s (2022) examination of being Asian-American in search of solidarity with African-American colleagues. She does not question the urgent need to center anti-Blackness; rather, she questions what denying the need to also understand anti-Asian hate accomplishes, as if equity were a zero-sum game rather than an opportunity for coalition-building. Like Shibusawa, I draw on critical incidents through first person narrative accounts (Creswell, 2013) with non-Jewish colleagues (multiple faculty of color and one White LGBTQ+ DEI administrator). These incidents highlight having my identity defined by others, by an external gaze. The study utilizes documents, journal entries, and memory. I then interrogate these data for both my privilege as a White-presenting Jew, and my colleagues’ understanding of my intersectional identity.

Warrants for Arguments/Points of View
The analysis highlights two core phenomena. A reductionist definition of Jewish identity as religious, and deep attachment to the belief that Jews are White, feature centrally in the exclusion of Jews from equity discourse in educational settings.

My subjectivity (Peshkin, 1991) as a White Jew in the dialogue for educational equity (Author 2, 2010, 2024) is by definition central to the analysis. This is mitigated by member-checks by the colleagues who feature in the critical incidents; I asked each to read a draft paper and provide alternative interpretations, which were integrated into the analysis. My interpretive commentary attends to sociocultural context (a mostly non-Jewish university and broader geographic setting) and highly-charged historical context post-October 7th. Finally, the interpretation of the data is situated in broader literature on Jewish sociocultural experience; the data are refracted by prior literature (Schraub, 2019) showing confirmatory findings.

Scholarly Significance
Current Right wing efforts to fight “antisemitism on campus” are largely performative, intended to divide and conquer the Left in service of a decidedly anti-inclusive agenda (Goldtzvik, 2024). This presentation offers a way to see Jews, even functionally-White Jews, as “othered” by the White Christian hegemony currently on the offense against civil rights and democracy, and understand the importance of allyship (by Jews, from non-Jews) in the collective fight to beat back that threat.

Author

• Jennifer Goldstein, California State University - Fullerton