Riding Wonder Woman's Coattails: Racializing Judaism is like trying to will the tidewaters from coming in.

Using imaginary definitions like "People of Colour" as a defence mechanism will gain you no respect from enemies, nor the admiration of peers.

The racial identity of Wonder Woman lead actress Gal Gadot has sparked
a debate totally unrelated to enjoying comic book films.

I recently clashed with an author that has been on a warpath. This person seemed intent on defending the honour of one Gal Gadot, an actress now world famous for portraying Wonder Woman who happens to also be a Jewish Israeli. As tends to be the norm nowadays, the hyper-racial far-left press has condemned Gadot as being the idealization of the white European woman whereas Wonder Woman would supposedly be a princess of a non-white Amazonian race. They have also criticized her for being skinny and having shaved armpits. Such is the perception pattern of a society of know-it-alls that have to ruin everything. The author was so perturbed by attacks on Gadot's racial background by intersectional feminists that he sought to set the record straight by etching it in stone (or electronically) that Jews are "people of colour". Now what the hell does that mean? People of colour are simply those that are not white. What a brilliant tactic; deflect the criticism of racially obsessed losers by trying to establish a racial credibility that is built on a foundation of arbitrary accusations. 

Identity politics is a cancer that has ravaged the mindsets of people of all backgrounds for decades now. Each community has its own group of racial arsonists that seeks to build an organized fortress that consolidates the identity of their community often by taking cheap shots at a different community. The perfect target since the advent of this phenomenon has been white Christians, even though nobody bothers to split hairs over which type of white (Swedes, Scots?) or Christian (Methodist, Greek Orthodox?) is the real problem. A second favorite target is Jews, especially by those alleging an Asiatic (Khazar) or other perfidious lie in order to subvert the continuity of their lineage from the Bible. One of the more pragmatic tactics has been to discount the heritage of the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe, as has been done by anti-Jewish leaders from both the Arab and western world such as anti-communist writer John O. Beaty and the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Let me be clear that there's a distinction between having a racial identity and preaching identity politics. It is probably possible to have a strong identity with a racial community without practicing racial politics, it is just becoming more difficult day by day as Americans of all backgrounds seek to flash their skin like it's a gang colour. The Khazar Legend is often brought up by both the Jews and their haters in the context of an exotic episode in medieval history when a king opted to take upon himself the Jewish faith, and is documented in the work Sefer HaKozari by Rabbi Judah HaLevi. In fact however, the Khazar origin is no longer the most supported theory for Ashkenazi heritage. There are all sorts of theories that abound as to the genetic origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, but there will be no closure and it is fruitless exercise. In 2013 a major study conducted across continents in Nature Communication magazine stated this: "Our results, primarily from the detailed analysis of the four major haplogroup K and N1b founders, but corroborated with the remaining Ashkenazi mtDNAs, suggest that most Ashkenazi maternal lineages trace their ancestry to prehistoric Europe".

A different  study headed by Shai Carmi at Yale University found that the majority of Ashkenazi Jews originated from about 350 people and were of half-European and half-Middle-Eastern heritage. This study was also highlighted in Times of Israel, the same publication for which this social justice warrior author blogged about Jews being "people of color". 

Feelings of inadequacy

Those credible genetic studies however will not burst the balloon of the people pushing the POC nonsense. They are not here to represent a scientific truth or principled stand for values. They are just covering up their own insecurities regarding whatever privileges, real or perceived, that they think leave them vulnerable to the accusations by the likes of BLM, Antifa, and intersectional feminists. I don't know whether they are looking for acceptance by that coalition of failures, maybe they aren't; but I can say for sure that they will not receive any. Their entire case of being POCs rests not on what they are but what they are don't want to be: whites. They therefore suffer from the same identity crisis that many American children, not only Jews, have had to go through as a result of interracial or inter-ethnic marriages. As a kid growing up in a divorced household that was one half Ukrainian and the other Iraqi, both Jews, I find the whole argument stale and purposeless. My parents both had clear racial opinions, but their own identity wasn't built around race but rather religion or community, and it's probably as a consequence that I don't know my racial identity and it doesn't matter to me. The situation is much more evident with prominent half Jewish celebrities like Drake, who is half-Jewish half-black.

The enlightenment bottleneck

By creating the Reform movement
in Judaism, Rabbi Abraham Geiger
of Germany began the sysiphic quest by
Jews to conform to filter their own heritage
into something palatable to
non-Jews. 

However, the inner conflict among these children is different from that of full Ashkenazi Jewish children. There is a major intermarriage current running through the American Jewish community where Jews marry non-Jews of all races. There is already a major dichotomy made in Jewish theology and legal systems between the Jews and the non-Jews, so the identity crisis is strong already. To buttress this issue, many children of both full Jewish and intermarried couples are exposed while growing up to a diluted, overly commercialized, and decidedly non-spiritual version of Judaism. The more progressive denominations (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist) all downplay the original dictates of the Bible; how could they not and remain "progressive"? This is also true of several streams of the Orthodox denomination. The Bible, as Jews and other readers know, is rich with capital punishment, condemnations of cross-dressing, and numerous other codes that are considered by "progressives" to be archaic.

Influenced by the European enlightenment philosophers, many of these progressive Jews have been conditioned to look at Judaism as not a spiritual religious path, but as a cultural backdrop to a socially liberal philosophy grounded in the progressive enlightenment. Based on that system of values, the liberal current in the American Jewish community always sought to conform to the prevailing social norms of its time. Someone once told me that progressive Judaism is like a ship attempting to land along a shore with no anchor. It's only consistently professed value is tikkun olam, a universalist mandate to literally "repair the world" through good works. 

Well, to cut a long story short, socially liberal philosophies have come a long way since the founding of reform Judaism by German Jews led by Rabbi Abraham Geiger in the 1800s. In the modern era social liberalism has mutated into a toxic and invasive worldview that judges all societal trends and events through the prisms of the oppressed vs. the oppressor. This has led to a pointless Mexican stand-off (if you object to that expression, blame Bugs Bunny) between Jewish liberals that are willing to kowtow to any other non-white ethnic group in the name of pluralism, against a new mutation: The Ashkenazi Jewish "person of color". These are represented respectively by Noah Berlatsky and Dani Behan. What's so  tragic about this showdown is that neither of these idiots realize that their cause will yield nothing tangible. I'm already conceding that it's pointless to address the cowering idiocy of Gollum-like apology-machines like Berlatsky, but what of those like Behan that have suddenly become racially awakened?

Racial gymnastics

Why in any case are we debating Jewish racial identity? Behan himself has this claim in his recent piece (the second I've read) in answer to this question: "A race in the literal sense? No. We are an ethnic group of Middle Eastern stock, indigenous to Israel, despite the diverse genetic contributions picked up in Diaspora. In that sense, we are as much of a race as Arabs and Hispanics, both of whom are considered people of color (irrespective of appearance). Jews must be held to the same standard as everybody else."

It does not take much to see through this ruse. Let's address the Arabs: Nominally the Arab "ethnic group" has a footprint that stretches from the western parts of Iran all the way to Morocco. As a former IDF serviceman in the Nablus area, I can recall with full certainty that the Arab "race" has no phenotype. There are Arabs that are blonde, red-headed, and black. There are also Arabs in Israel, typically Christians, centered around the Greek Orthodox priest Gabriel Naddaf that have assumed the identity of the biblical Arameans. Behan likes to play the game that POCs have to "pass for" people of the majority race. Behan cannot really scoff at these people, because they have the supporting point of claiming the heritage of a people mentioned numerous times in Scripture, whereas he relies on the ridiculous invented binary distinction between people of color. . . and ALL "white people". 

And what about Hispanics? There is no Hispanic race, as it could range from a massive melange of different combinations in Brazil, to full blooded Mayan Indians in Mexico, to mostly black Dominicans, to full-blooded Italian Argentines. What Behan talks about is a larger ethnic category. I happen to have worked for businesses where there are Hondurans and Uruguayans, or Peruvians and Mexicans, and all sorts of other combinations. Let me put it bluntly: The commonality between all of these different groups is limited only to use of the same language. Add to this the citizens of Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and Belize, and you do have similar racial mixes but no linguistic link.

Bernie Sanders is made to look like a fool by two pigeons.

What's really going on here is that there are a lot of young Jewish people that notwithstanding the great opportunities that we have and the deep ideas that our religion has provided the world, are jealous of the downtrodden. They see the victim culture that has produced a generation of excuse making failures, and instead of running the other way, they say "ME TOO". No wonder so many of them flocked to support the incoherent demagoguery of Bernie Sanders, a person whose entire career has been framed by jealousy towards people more successful or more blessed with wealth than him. It is small wonder that the only people that can get this jackass to shut up are aggrieved pinheads like the ones below that silenced him at his own rally. 

Many of the anchor-less among the Jewish community latched onto the rhetoric of Sanders, a number of them due to the simple fact that he was Jewish. That is the very definition of identity politics. So I would like to address that author, Dani Ishai Behan, straight up and direct: PEOPLE OF COLOUR IS A MADE-UP BUZZWORD, AND YOU'RE AS WHITE AS A PROJECTOR SCREEN. I'll say the same thing to you that I would say to Bernie: If you were Turkish, I'd wanna be Greek, if you were French I'd wanna be German, and if you were Yoko I'd wanna be Paul. Your racial arson will either be extinguished by the cold water of logic, or by the lack of oxygen once you consume yourself.