#but maybe my issue is that i'm looking at this philosophically rather than politically. cause politically we probably would | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 5 years

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Oh they absolutely would have been.

Like, Jews were targeted in a very broad stroke, and the nazis were in no way rounding in favor of whiteness or gentile-ness or able-bodied-ness or anything else when they were deciding who was an undesireable. Standard practice was entire households being kidnapped, and Nazi eugenics often spoke of eliminating multiple generations forward and backward just to reeeeeeally scrub out any taint of the blood.

That said, it was ALSO fairly standard practice for the Nazis to take young children who happened to have idealized features from their "degenerate" families and try to raise them as good and honorable members of the aryan race, Hitler Youth, and National Citizenry. So like. Nazis were not known for being terribly consistent about their ethnic policies regardless. They basically did what suited them.

And listen. Even aside from the nazi's perspective on the issue, I want to be clear that a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. Converts are no less Jewish than anyone else, and their racial and ethnic situation can get complicated as a result. After all, is an ethnic Jew merely someone born to a Jewish family? Only someone born to a Jewish mother? What about adult children of late-life converts?

There's a woman at my synagogue who, when she finished her conversion and had her ceremony, established her Jewish line as being her grandchildren forward because her adult children already had religious affiliation but had agreed with her that their children should have a place in their spiritual and cultural heritage from her. Are they now ethnic Jews?

Who fucking knows! Religious leaders and philosophers have only been discussing that for thousands of years, how much longer could it take?

But back to the more specific question here. Not the question of who is ~really~ a Jew or of who would ~count~ to the Nazis with their twisted, no-basis-in-reality eugenic policies. The question you're really getting at here is "did converts die/get collected in the holocaust and could they again or are people co-opting an experience they have no claim to". They answers to those questions are yes, yes, and no. Converts DID die in the Holocaust. They died as Jew and for being Jews even if/when the Nazis erased their conversion or the cultural inheritance of their children. If we have another genocide of the Jews, converts will die alongside us the same as they basically always have because it doesn't matter what the Nazis think they ARE it matters what they represent, and converts, as with all Jews, represent our faith, our traditions, and our bloodline, which is a problem for anyone trying to get rid of Jews. Converts cannot "co-opt" general Jewish experiences because they genuinely are Jewish.

I can understand where your frustration might be coming from. And it may be worth looking further into exactly what people are doing that is setting it off. Like is there something specific you're seeing certain converts say that's frustrating and still would be if they were ethnic Jews? Are you having trouble understanding how "Judaism as an ethnic community" plays into conversion and racial conversations? Are you a person of color who struggles with seeing white people talk cavalierly about genocide? Like there are any number of reasons why what you're seeing might frustrate you that are reasonable concerns, unrelated to the status of a convert, and there are plenty more that may be based in stereotypes or misinformation. Either way, it's worth exploring your feelings on this further.

But I do want to zero in on a phrasing you used that I think might be part of what's happening here. "Otherwise white converts" are still white. Their race did not change when they converted even if their bloodline is now more complicated than society's understanding of whiteness allows for. We have done ourselves a great disservice by abandoning the word and concept of xenophobia in favor of exclusively talking about race. There's a reason most research and academia and philosophical thought usually discusses BOTH race and ethnicity. The two often overlap but are not the same. A white Jew (convert or no, and for all there are some people on this site who insist it's not possible, I know waaaay too many Jews who consistently refer to their own white privilege as white people because shockingly some Jews are actually white even when they're also ethnic Jews) is still a Jew, and they still share our ethnicity. That brings with it more than enough xenophobia and other bigotry to complicate any white convert's understanding of racial politics. But white Jews are still also, racially, white. Again, regardless of being an ethnic jew or a white jew.

And even that's contextual! In the 40's, you for SURE would not have seen very many people referring to Jews as racially white, and the one-drop rule of racial segregationist policy still applies to most of us to this day (that is no matter how distant we are from our culture and faith, or how much inter-marriage we've done, us and our children are still Jewish in the eyes of our oppressors). But these days, many Jews identify as white, and certainly white converts do not suddenly become POC despite a lifetime of whiteness. In both cases, their access to white privilege may be limited or even null depending on context, but that doesn't make them POC.

I suspect that what you're struggling to reckon with here is the notion of "no such thing as a white jew" that tumblr's weird game of telephone has made commonplace combined with the notion of "white people can and do convert to judaism" and that cognitive dissonance is causing you to fixate your concerns here on the seemingly more straight forward convert part rather than the more complicated question of racial and ethnic identity. But to that I say: White Jews died in the holocaust too, and they died in the states at the hands of neo-nazi and white supremacist groups just the same as non-white Jews did.

If someone decides to come for us again, why do you think they will target my family? Because I'm Jewish? Because my partner is converting? Because my sibling is MENA? Because I married a black person? Because my children will be black by virtue of the one-drop rule? That my children will be Jewish by virtue of the one-drop rule? Because we're queer? Because we're mentally ill and disabled? Because we're political dissidents? Because we're poor? Because we have questionable citizenship? Because some of us are people of color? Because those of us who are white MARRIED people of color?

Do you really believe they would just pick one of those? Maybe for our trials. But they would collect us for each and every one of those charges. For the sum total of our existences. Every aspect of us is an insult to their philosophies, a threat to their worldview, and proof of our degeneracy. They could and would collect us for any single one of those reasons but the reality is that we are all of them.

Even if no one looking at me on the street knew I was Jewish, even if my name weren't attached to my synagogue and my money weren't funding their social justice efforts, I am still a race traitor for marrying a black person and committing miscegenation. My partner is still married to a Jew even if they stop conversion right this very second and renounce Judaism.

They don't hate our identities first and then try to prove we carry them. They hate US first and then justify it with any identity we hold.

#holocaust #dark conversation #sorry yall this got....heavy #wall of words

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