“I have lived for 26 years under the illusion that I am unconditionally white…. Recently I have started looking at my face and going, ‘Oh man, do I look too Jewish?’” Sydney Brownstone, the reporter who voiced this question in a recent Blabbermouth podcast, is not alone in wondering this. Many Ashkenazi Jews who have…
As the election recedes in the collective memory, and as Hillary Clinton gets remembered (called it!) as a you-go-girl abandoner of makeup, what’s left in the rubble is this trickle of feminism-caused-Trump takes. Or maybe not caused, exactly — what’s posited is more that Clinton’s loss invites A Reckoning, and thus an overhaul of feminism…
Decades before I wrote the book “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America,” I had an eye-opening conversation with my parents. I asked them if they were white. They looked flummoxed and said, “We’re Jewish.” “But are you white?” “Well, I guess we’re white; but we’re Jewish.” Then they…
With news emerging that white women preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, it’s tempting, if you’re a white woman horrified at what’s just happened, to start on a reckoning, or whatever one wishes to call that social-media self-flagellation that so many of us turn to when things seem horrible and we feel helpless at fixing…
I went to the movies on Saturday night to escape the dread everyone I know is feeling in the last few days of this dispiriting election season. At the theater, I watched images of a husband and wife dragged from their bed in the middle of the night — she very pregnant — and thrown…
Food, food, everywhere, but not a morsel to eat. My play on words exaggerate, but as a traveler in a strange land, my eyes often feasted upon a surfeit of food my commitment to kosher forbade I consume. In late 2015 my father died in Harare, Zimbabwe and I inherited his property which included land….
A debate over race and free speech is roiling my beloved alma mater, and in it I find unmistakable parallels to the fraught conversation about Israel that is the subject of so much Sturm und Drang — and so much communal spending — on college campuses across the country. The analogy isn’t exact. The harassment…
Am I a person of color? You’d think there would be a straightforward answer to a question like that. And for a while, I thought there was. I thought the answer was yes. When I look at my grandparents — four Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab lands — I see people who were born in…
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