Originally published 27/8/20
Some "progressive" people of color in the United States lump Jews together with all the other "White" Americans as beneficiaries of White privilege. American Jews tend to be offended by this classification, mostly on the grounds that historically, Jews have been treated all over the world just like people of color are treated in the US, or worse.
IMHO those people of color are correct. European Jews are people of color. Jews in Moslem lands, to the extent that there still are any Jews there, are people of color. American Jews are white.
The original class structure in the United States at its foundation was:
Protestants from Western and Northern Europe
Catholics from Western and Northern Europe (except Irish)
Other European Christians
Jews
People of Color (initially Negroes, after 1846 also Latinx)
Native Americans
Between the Civil War and World War I the boundary between the top two categories disappeared, leaving:
Christians from Western and Northern Europe (except Irish Catholics)
Other European Christians
Jews
People of Color
Native Americans
Between World War I and World War II the next boundary disappeared, leaving:
European Christians
Jews
People of Color
Native Americans
During the Cold War, the next boundary disappeared and the Jews became White:
Europeans
People of Color
Native American
except that after 1965 when the 1924 quotas were removed, South Asians and East Asians started to immigrate in large enough numbers to constitute a separate category, so I suspect that the true structure is:
Europeans
Asians
People of Color (Latinx are still here because they got included in the US by conquest rather than by immigration)
Native Americans
What brings this up now is that today I started reading this book review. This is the first paragraph:
Bess Kalb’s grandmother Bobby was born on a dining room table in Brooklyn; her mother, Rose, a working-class Russian immigrant, “didn’t want to ruin the bed linens.” Nine decades later, not long after Bobby’s death, Kalb is wandering through her grandmother’s apartment in Westchester, N.Y., looking for “tchotchkes” to claim as mementos. But the items she chooses — among them a Limoges egg, a Brooks Brothers shirt, lipsticks by Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent — serve also as a measure of how far her grandmother came in her lifetime: from a “tenement in Brooklyn” to the upscale suburbs; from the bottom of the social ladder to its uppermost rungs. (emphasis added)
QED
Added 11/6/21 to illustrate that Jews were people of color until the Cold War.
Maschwitz had arrived earlier that month, and right away was introduced to the social complexities of life in Manhattan when his prospective landlord refused to lease him an apartment, explaining that he ran a ‘restricted house’. Maschwitz assured him he had no plans to sell liquor on the premises. The landlord replied that ‘restricted’ meant he would not allow either African-Americans or Jews to live there. Although Maschwitz’s father was Jewish, his mother was not; so the apartment was his.
