What does “Jewish” look like? To even ask this question is to know the desired answer: there’s no such thing as looking Jewish, one is meant to say, admonishing an imagined interlocutor. What you thought you could tell someone’s Jewishness-or-not just by looking at them?
Liz Kleinrock (an antibias and antiracist educator and consultant) and Caroline Kusin Pritchard (a children’s-book author), along with illustrator Iris Gottlieb, take this on in What Jewish Looks Like, a new book aimed at ages eight to 12. It’s a modern twist on an old-timey Jews-in-whatever coffee table book.
The group of 36 symbolically numbered mini-biographies include an eclectic concept of famous names from Emma Lazarus to Sammy Davis Jr. to Jazz Jennings, and the Black-ish sitcom star Tracee Ellis Ross (who professionally adopted her musical mother Diana’s surname over the patrilineal Silberstein), but also lesser-known younger ones, like Is Perlman, a “transgender and non-binary student and artist” who is, additionally, “a multiracial Asian American Jew.” A man in the cover collage I’d taken to be a handsome-ized version of Albert Einstein turned out to be filmmaker Taika Waititi, whose father is Māori.
A refrain throughout are sentences that read, “Jewish looks like…,” where the sentence ends with something inspirational and progressive. Jewish looks like, among others, “organizing for change” and “creating mashups that make way for inclusivity.”
As the cover suggests, the book emphasizes how not-white Jews can be. A quarter of the showcased examples (nine of 36) are Black. Eight are white/‘white’ and Ashkenazi—or nine if you opt to include the example with an Ashkenazi parent and a white gentile one.
A section on antisemitism explains, “Jews have been and still are discriminated against because of antisemitism and White supremacy,” which, in the book’s context, gives the impression that anti-Jewish bigotry comes from most U.S. Jews being visible minorities, when the opposite is true.
Efforts to portray Jews as a diverse group encounter a problem: Jews in North America are not all that diverse, at least according to North American racial categories. A whopping 94 percent of American Jews identify as white, according to the Pew Research Center. And the population of self-identified Jews of colour in Canada is estimated to be half the percentage in the U.S.
So we have arrived at a more expansive definition: “diverse Jews (or Jews of colour, depending on one’s definition).” A group that includes Black, Asian, and Indigenous Jews—people who’d qualify as racialized, Jewish or not—but also… and here’s where it gets confusing.
“Jews of colour” (JOC) is applied inconsistently. But wider net-casting ups the odds of encountering a diverse Jew. Out of 391,665 Canadian Jews counted in one particular survey [PDF], 36,040 are Sephardim. And often, commentators conflate Ashkenazi-ness with whiteness—and, by extension, Ashkenazi cultural or liturgical dominance with racism. Five years ago, a podcast produced by the Association for Jewish Studies featured a bunch of experts in the arena, which included this fascinating comment from host Jeremy Shere:
“[N]ot all Jews are of European background. If you’re a Sephardic Jew and you trace your ancestry to the Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal and were expelled in 1492, or if you’re a Mizrahi Jew with roots in Arab lands, then you may very well not see yourself as white, or as having benefited nearly as much by dint of being considered part of the white majority.”
Why would Sephardic Jews be less white than Ashkenazi ones? Unclear.
Often, it can seem as if Jew-of-colour status is determined by subjective factors. Why is the glamorous fashion influencer Leandra Medine Cohen, who is of Iranian- and Turkish-Jewish background, regularly cited as exemplifying whiteness, while left-wing media personality Rafael Shimunov got described as “an immigrant Jew of Colour who arrived in the United States as a Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) child refugee with his parents from Soviet Uzbekistan, and grew up in New York City public housing”?
Hint: this is not about what either of these people look like, nor their families’ geographic origins.
***
To make sense of What Jewish Looks Like and similar efforts, context is needed. I’ve personally lived through three overlapping waves of ‘there’s no such thing as looking Jewish’, each with its own motivating factors.
First Wave: Looking for cues
When someone said ‘Jewish-looking’ wasn’t a thing, it code for insistence that some Jews looked like Christie Brinkley. Code, that is, for insisting that some Jews are conventionally attractive white people. This was on the one had true (Bar Refaeli exists, as did Lauren Bacall, as do conversion and intermarriage), but on the other, have you met Jews before? It was as if admitting that North American Jews tend to look more Italian than Swedish was tantamount to embracing Hitlerian antisemitism.
The insistence that Jews look like everyone else—like a white everyone-else—was on some level about refuting the Nazis’ racial antisemitism. It was also, more immediately, about mid-late 20th century North American Jews’ anxieties in largely white, WASPy spaces.
Second Wave: Manufacturing a meme
The term appears to have been first published exactly 10 years ago in The Forward’s article “Learning to Undo ‘Ashkenormativity,” which was followed by more columns trying to make the word happen—later in a piece that was initially published in Yiddish. Everyone was unlearning their biases, so why not Jews?
The battle against Ashkenormativity—a term which is not without its critics, including from the left—was a product of the 2010s or in U.S.-normativity terms, the Obama administration. It consisted of Jews taking part in the general racial/antiracist awakening of those years: the Black Lives Matter movement, the promises to do better. With the first wave having successfully defined Jews as a group of white people, here is where we see Jews atone for their white privilege, and self-righteous social mediators calling out any Ashkenazi sorts who dare refer to their pasty selves as non-white.
But it also consisted in efforts to highlight existence at the margins. Emily Tamkin’s 2022 book Bad Jews encapsulated the pre-Oct. 7 progressive Jewish emphasis on inclusivity towards queer Jews, racialized Jews, Jews by choice. It is any and all communal efforts to showcase, sometimes to the point of exaggeration, the number of Jews of colour.
Third Wave: 10/7/23 and beyond
It’s effectively the same wave as the second one—only it’s been rebranded for a different era. The conversation about how there’s no one way to look Jewish continues to gesture not at blondness (as in the first wave) but at brownness or Blackness. But overnight (I think we all know which night) the political valence of the remark, ‘Actually, lots of Jews are people of colour’ switched from left- to right-coded.
Consider the following passage, from a recent Jewish Chronicle article about Black Jews—a passage that also, incidentally, conflates Ashkenazi and white: “Since Oct. 7 there has been increased interest in the diversity of the Jewish community in response to accusations of Israel being a colonial entity. While Israel’s Jewish community is more than 50 percent non-Ashkenazi, many in the diaspora view Jews as being white.”
A diverse group of Israelis have mocked the notion that Jews are a bunch of white colonizers by… showing what they actually look like. A column in the Jerusalem Post invited readers to observe Mizrahi Heritage Month by supporting Israel: “Many of us don’t present as white and our American immigration story is different from many of our Ashkenazi friends, so how are we categorized by anti-Israel protesters?” Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal editor-in-chief David Suissa urged promoting Israel’s racial diversity to bolster its image. So, this wave is the same as the last wave—but it’s now being expressed in a completely different context.
***
What Jewish Looks Like was published in September 2024, which makes it a curious artifact relative to these waves. Internally, it’s a definitive second wave document. One could infer as much from the timeline of the publishing cycle (as in, it would have almost certainly come into being prior to Oct. 7, 2023), but it’s abundantly clear from the work itself. Its wording, imagery, and ethos are in keeping with the values and preferences of a Democrat-voting, “In this house we believe”-sign-having, Reform or otherwise progressive American Jew.
The title also recalls the various other works and writings from the current millennium, which amount to the same message with similar phrasings, even if they were aimed at a much older crowd than this book.
Israel doesn’t much come up in What Jewish Looks Like, but where it does, it’s in left-ish but inoffensive terms. (References to “present-day Israel and Palestine,” along with matter-of-fact discussions of Tel Aviv existing and being in a country named Israel.) It’s a product of 2020-21 progressivism, not the 2023-24 variety.
That said, I could easily see the third wave of diversity defenders embracing the book. Today, presumably contrary to its intentions, What Jewish Looks Like comes across as a corrective to the idea that Israel’s the white people. Who are you calling a colonizer?
However, the terms of the debate have changed. The mood of the moment isn’t bothered about whether Jews are white—or whether a Turkish-Iranian Jew is really the person you want to be taking to task for white privilege.
This all crystallized for me in something Ta-Nehisi Coates observed on his trip to Israel. The Message author became widely known for his writing on anti-Black racism in the U.S. But he recently made Palestine his cause, effectively transposing the American story onto the Israeli one. One might see this as a moment to raise the fact that Israeli Jews look no more or less ‘white’ by North American standards than Palestinians, nor typically have European family backgrounds. Coates is aware of this, but remains unmoved.
You can hear an example during the podcast interview he did while promoting his new book to Ezra Klein:
“I mean, to the extent that race is a thing, I guess what he was of African ancestry. But I have maintained in almost all of my writing that race is a social construct. And so what we think about as race here did not apply there in the same way. I’m not saying it didn’t apply at all, but it is something to see, quote unquote, ‘Black’ through American eyes, quote unquote, ‘Black’ IDF soldiers lording it over literally blond and blue-eyed Palestinian children.”
In this view, it doesn’t matter what Jews look like, or where we come from. At this rate, there may not be a fourth wave to talk about.
What do you think of this subject? Let us know—and we’ll continue this conversation in November.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
For more original Jewish culture commentary from Phoebe Maltz Bovy subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
