A Question of Race: Obama and the Jews

Hat Tip: Instapundit

Times Magazine delves into the question of Barack Obama's background--and what it takes to be a "black man."

As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it's also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man. In calling Obama the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," the implication was that the black people who are regularly seen by whites — or at least those who aspire to the highest office in the land — are none of these things. But give Biden credit — at least he acknowledged Obama's identity.

The same can't be said for others. "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," Stanley Crouch recently sniffed in a New York Daily News column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me." "Black, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves," wrote Debra Dickerson on the liberal website Salon.

Apparently there are all kinds of implications in this for Obama's relationship to the African American community and to what degree he will actually be able to rely on the African American vote. The matter has gone so far as the use of the word "halfrican" to describe Obama, and the question as to whether this is a negative term.

Mickey Klaus at Slate writes:

I don't quite understand why it's offensive to call Sen. Obama a "halfrican." It's a useful word! It efficiently describes a real phenomenon. It isn't, on its face, pejorative--and even if it were, it wouldn't be pejorative for long if it were simply used descriptively to mean people with one parent from Africa. ... Update: A reader emails to point out the word is distressingly close to "half-breed." That does seem like a hard connotation to shake.

I don't see how a term using the word "half" when applied to a person's race can be anything but pejorative. The whole idea of splitting hairs over what it takes to be a member of a race is unsettling and can lead to some bizarre verbal gymnastics. When Teresa Heinz Kerry, who comes from Mozambique, described herself as an African American--it caused a huge controversy...and an unusual defense:

"African-hyphen-American belongs to blacks," Heinz Kerry's spokesman told reporters, insisting that it was proper for his boss to call herself African American as long as no hyphen was used or intended.

I'm glad they got that settled.

I mention this because it seems to connect with an article I found--entitled Zionism and Race--by Fred E. Foldvary:

Jews that lived in Ethiopia are as black as their Christian neighbors. In India, Jews who have lived there for hundreds of years look Indian. Chinese Jews looked Chinese. Jews who come from northern Africa look like Arabs. European Jews look Caucasian. There are many ways to look Jewish. Anyone from any race may convert to Judaism and become a Jew. So are Jews a race?

A dictionary will tell you that a "race" in this context is a variety of the human species characterized by various physical features such as skin color, hair color and texture, body shape and size, eye color, and so on. Anthropologists have divided human beings into several races, such as the Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, African pygmy, and American Indian. Race is a genetic classification; one is born into a race and is of a certain race or mixed race because of one's ancestors. One can covert into a religion, but one cannot change one's race.

Jews are therefore not a race. Jews are members of a religion, Judaism. There was at one time a Hebrew nation that was an ethnic group, but since ancient times the scattering of Jews throughout the world and intermarriage and conversions have made the Hebrew origin less a genetic and more a spiritual tie. There is also a culture tied to the religion and its laws regarding diet, the Sabbath, and various rituals, along with cultural practices picked up in various locations that are "Jewish" by coincidence. But there is no "Jewish race."

This seems to be a particularly odd sort of argument that Foldvary makes. The point he wants to make is that since Jews are not a race, but rather a religious identification, Zionism can therefore not be racist. At the same time though, he does seem to rely on Jews as a race when it helps his cause:

Arabs and many Jews are of the same ethnic family, the Semites. Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages. Many Arab Palestinians and Israeli Jews have common ethnic origins, some Jews in Israel having converted to Islam after the Arab conquest, and some ancient Canaanites having converted to Judaism. Jews and Arabs are ethnic cousins, if not brothers.

According to the resources used brought down by dictionary.com, designations such as Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negro are "no longer in technical use." Instead, racial designations seem to be based more on different physical characteristics and genetic markers such as blood groups. In terms of blood and DNA, there would seem to be a lot to bind Jews together as a race (see What Is It With Jews and DNA?). More than that, race is also defined in terms of "any people united by common history, language, cultural traits, etc."--a definition that goes beyond religion.

There's lots of room to argue and discuss Jews as a race, as a religion, and as both. That should be especially obvious since that is something we have been arguing over for quite a while. But during times of adversity, Jews have historically tended to come together and unite--a history that has been more tested in recent times.

Likewise, it would be a terrible waste of talent and human resources if African Americans would allow the issue of "Who is an African American" to get in the way of further empowerment and achievement.

Technorati Tag: Barack Obama and African-American and Jews and Judaism.