OFF-WHITE

Moving beyond “blind spots and biases.”

Shabi’s potent book explores the nature of Jewish identity from the personal perspective of a British woman of Iraqi Jewish heritage. Her central argument is that race is a social construct, that the association of skin color with race is a cultural convention, and that “racism itself creates race—and not the other way around.” The book pivots around what Shabi, a journalist and author, calls a “category error.” She writes, “The history of Jewish people in the West, persecuted, killed and then, finally, absorbed into white majorities, is not only a story of antisemitism. It is itself a story about the fakery of whiteness. That we can’t agree on whether or not Jews are white does not tell us that Jewish people are hard to categorise. It tells us, again and again, that racial categories are specious.” Building on this idea, the author draws on her experience as someone who sometimes presents as white and sometimes is taken for a person of color. This is less a book about antisemitism itself than a book about how charges of antisemitism have become the weaponry of both right- and left-wing politics. The author spends much time reviewing the academic critique of “settler colonialism” as it applies to Israel. We should recognize, she writes, the origins of Zionism in the long-standing antisemitism of Europe while at the same time condemning “the injustices perpetrated by the state of Israel.” Then again, she writes, “antisemitism is not surfacing because of ever-growing and justified criti­cisms of Israel. It is coming up because [of] centuries-old patterns and structures of antisemitism.” While this is not a subtle book, it may help us understand how we have learned to talk the way we do about Jewish identity in the 21st century.

A passionate reinterpretation of antisemitism.