People love blond Jews

At the recommendation of basically everyone I just read Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. And of course it’s good: learnèd but with good storytelling, and great insights. Some of which I had come up with in parallel (see: my ancient blog posts): about the Holocaust getting treated as a natural disaster, or about antisemitism not getting taken seriously because the bar for something counting is the Holocaust, and few incidents measure up. (Even Hitler: not as bad as Hitler.) She has four children and was awake enough to write this book; I have two and it’s a miracle I was able to read it. I defer, in awe.

But then there’s the opening anecdote. As a high school student, Horn stunned some girls from Mississippi, who did not know a Jew could have light hair and blue eyes. She showed them! By… having that coloring. The way the author presents it, it’s as if these kids had been stunned to learn Horn didn’t have, well, horns. Yes, the Mississippeans attribute their belief about Jews’ coloring to “Hitler,” which is disturbing, but you know what? If the problem with Hitler was a belief that Jews have brown hair and eyes then Jewdar is Hitlerian antisemitism, which, I believe, for all Jewdar’s flaws, it is not.

I suppose I’m interested less in Horn’s specific anecdote than in what it represents: If light coloring is a way of sticking it to casual antisemites, then simply having dark hair and dark eyes confirms a negative stereotype about Jews. No, not all Jews have dark coloring. (Nor is it exactly unusual among non-Jews. See: most of the planet. More on that in a moment.) But so what if we did?

What I’m talking about is separate from the question of Jews of color, that is, of people whose non-white features do not mark them as Jewish, and indeed whose Jewishness is at times doubted within the Jewish community for that reason. While Jews of color deal with both racism and antisemitism, they don’t quite deal with racial antisemitism, since their very situation—shared with Swedish-looking Jews—is that they get mistaken for non-Jews.

No, I mean the thing where Jews look identifiably Jewish. Where our presence doesn’t defy expectations about what a Jew might look like. I use “our” because I have for 38 years been going around giving Jews a bad name, what with my dark, frizz-prone hair, dark eyes, sickly-pale skin (white privilege, crossed with doctors never knowing if it’s a symptom or just how I look). This is not to say I’ve never gotten a, “But you don’t look Jewish!” because the world is full of people with varied notions of what Jews look like. However, for the most part, I confirm expectations. I am not Alicia Silverstone or Lauren Bacall, Marianne Faithful or ScarJo.

If some Mississippi teenagers met teenaged me, they’d have been like, yep, checks out. (I did once disappoint a similarly Jew-ignorant college classmate, who was stunned to learn that contrary to her expectations, Jews did not study all the time. In my defense it was the first week of freshman year of college.)

There is of course colorism in (and at) other groups. What there is not is a belief that, say, because Meghan Markle is Black, other Black people are doing a disservice to their community, confirming its worst stereotypes, by going around with darker skin than she has. Blackness is expected to be visible. But to refer to Jewishness as an even quasi-visible trait is understood as simultaneously racist against Jews of color and as somehow racist against Jews generally, as though it is somehow affirming to Hitler to go around being Jewish and not, if you’re white/white-presenting, be blond. As though it’s derogatory to suggest a group has a disproportionate number of brunettes, when meanwhile no one thinks this about any other ethnic group.

As for the supposed tragedy of Jewish brunetteishness, I don’t know. Like I said, most of the world has dark hair and eyes, so if this is true of most Jews as well, truly who cares. The brunette-versus-blonde definition of Jewishness comes out of specific contexts: Nazi Germany, WASPy country clubs. Dark-haired, dark-eyed non-Jewish white people are not exactly hard to come by (I’m married to one!), but maybe Jews look Jewish, as in look identifiable as such within day-to-day contexts. Is that so terrible? Not a problem for Fran Fine, nor for yours truly.

If I met the Mississippi girls I would simply tell them that the jerk store called.