Truth! But in the context of American racialization, it still matters (to me, and to many others). Notwithstanding the question of whether Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews qualify as “white” in an American context, it’s obviously absurd that we’ve reached a place where white people and whiteness itself is so deeply vilified — and indeed, the significance and historical meaning of race itself has become so convoluted and weaponized, it demands critique and more generally asking “wtf is going on and why?” etc.
But in a framework where America is still so aggressively and sometimes almost singularly focused on identity politics, it very much matters to me that Jews are not categorized (whether or not intentionally as an act of overt or subtle antisemitism) as “white” people as though we were indistinguishable from the people who not only colonized America and instrumented the slave trade, but indeed the very people who slaughtered us recently because we aren’t white enough.
I’m not saying the American constructs of race and identity politics are good, or even that they aren’t literally insane. But I do have a right to identify with my Jewishness, even if there are many people (leftists in particular) who believe that it is backwards and/or “tribal” to do so. Identification to some degree is a natural part of being alive and having a brain that regiments and compartmentalizes based on patterns.
As long as you are not drawing lines of identification in order to cause harm to people who aren’t “like you” in a certain cultural or experiential way, then I don’t care. It’s when people start justifying killing all (insert here) based on these or any other lines that we reach the problem.
And I don’t think I would follow an argument that suggested that doing away with any form of identification would eliminate this problem, as every instance of communism has failed for a reason, and I don’t know how many times we need to read The Giver to reach the conclusion that differences are a natural part of life and it’s possible to make peace with not perfectly understanding each other without needing to control and dehumanize other people lol
