Politically Incorrect by Ofra Yeshua-Lyth

Author:Ofra Yeshua-Lyth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyscraper Publications
Published: 2016-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

The terminology of “whites” versus “blacks,” echoing racial discrimination that had been a norm in other parts of the world for generations, is still commonly used in Israel today. Colour, however, is often just a code for something else. Many of the kids in my class actually had complexions darker than mine, darker still than the skin colour of children whose parents came from Iraq or Morocco or Turkey. This by no means turned them into “blacks,” as they had parents who spoke Yiddish or Polish.

Ashkenazi Jews are a fairly mixed ethnic group when it comes to shades of hair and skin. Judaism originated in the Middle East, but throughout the generations, quite a number of fair-haired people were assimilated into the Jewish population, bequeathing their genes to their kosher offspring. The assumed mass conversion of whole Slavic clans has imported lots of blonds and redheads into Judaism.

Still, a great number of Ashkenazi Jews have preserved the genetic heritage of their Mediterranean past.

Non-Israelis find it hard to distinguish between the different ethnic brands. British journalist Brian Whitaker once summed up the question of Israeli appearance in a witty article in The Guardian about the profiling system developed “for security purposes.” One of his friends was getting annoyed with the cross examination he was subjected to at Ben-Gurion Airport.

“Have you met any Arabs,” the selector5 questioned him, following the well-established routine.

“How should I know? You all look the same to me,” the Englishman snapped.

Most of us could easily be mistaken for Italians, Greeks, or Arabs. In the 1980s, when the “Ethnic Demon” arguments were shaking Israel on a daily basis, I lived in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany. Some wives of Israeli diplomats in the embassy – almost all of them of Jewish Polish extract – were appalled to be insulted by locals who took them for Turks.

In a small German Schwabish town, I came across the pejorative term Weisse Jude, used exclusively to insult Christian Germans considered too smart (or too greedy) in their trade. For the local Germans, real Jews did not seem white. During the Holocaust, “Aryan-looking” Jews had better chances to survive, hide, and escape the death camps. Millions of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews who were murdered by the Nazis were mostly people who did not look Aryan. Our common Middle Eastern dark appearance gave them away all too easily if ever they tried to escape their persecutors. In 1960 Hollywood chose the ravishing Paul Newman, a typical sheygetz, as the chief Israeli protagonist in the filming of Leon Uris’s monumental Exodus. The golden-haired, enlightened Ari Ben Canaan character was juxtaposed against the dark complexion of his opponents: Jewish nationalist radicals and Arabs.

The elegant Viennese Dr Theodore Herzl, with his dark, curly beard and piercing, dark eyes, could easily pass for a young Iraqi rabbi or even a Hezbollah dignitary. The most influential Israeli Mizrahi leader, jailbird Rabbi Aryeh Deri, has a fairer complexion than that of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who (justly) found

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.