[ibarw] From Minority to Majority: the not-so-common Immigration story.

[eumelia]

Whenever I talk about race and/or racism I do it from a default point of privilege. I've never, nor will I ever in my country, be discriminated against due to the colour of my skin, my surname, or where I was born and raised.

I was born and raised in what is probably considered one the "better" towns. We are not the most affluent town in the district, but status wise that hardly matters. We are upwardly mobile. Both my parents have University degrees and the expectation is/was that all their children get a degree in what interested them and self-actualise themselves.

Hence me studying a Literary Theory and Women & Gender Studies double major for my BA.

My point is that when it comes to race, in Israel, I've pretty much got it made.

Which makes being the daughter of immigrants very interesting indeed.

Last year, my main entry for ibarw was about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the asymmetry of that conflict and the imbued racism of the Occupation - "What is this symmetry you speak of?".

Thinking about what to write this year and working closely with my dad in his Pharmacy for the past year or so, I came to the conclusion that my family's experience as immigrants falls into a very unique story. On the one hand, they've had to deal with the regular run-of-the-mill issues have to deal with; the language barrier, the culture shock, the separation from family and finding a community of other people with a background similar to their own.
One big difference though.
They left a country in which they were an ethnic and religious minority and came to a country in which they are an ethnic and religious majority(1).

My mother "jokes" that one of the reasons she wanted to move to Israel from South Africa was that she wouldn't have to "work so hard" to be Jewish.

Before people jump up and start saying that Antisemitism isn't the same as Racism and why am I writing about this for Intl. Blog Against Racism Week. Let me first state, that some Jews have white privilege, some Jews are people of colour. In the context of Israel, I am what would be considered the WASP, and even that is pushing it because people here insist on ethnicising (yeah I made up a word) practically everyone.
Obviously some ethnicities are better than others.
Regardless, Antisemitism exists in various forms and is espoused in various ways. Sometimes it intersects with Racism, sometimes it doesn't.

With that established, let's talk about the experience of a child who considers herself Israeli though and through who grew up with a name that was just that weird.

I remember as a child cringing when my parents spoke Hebrew to the friends I brought home, I remember cringing when my friends tried to speak English in order to accommodate my parents.
I remember hating my name, because it denoted me as non-"Israeli". I didn't even have the benefit of a Russian name, which while being an non-Hebrew name, there was no need to explain time and time again - where the family was from and why they had the name they had.

"Where are you from?"
"My home town"
"Where were you born?"
"In the hospital there"
"What? Really?!"
"Yeah, really"
"Then why do you have such a strange name?"

Suffice to say growing up, my name helped me weed out the idiots out of my life. It made for a slightly stand-offish existence and a pretty negative opinion on people in general.

Any way throughout my life my experience as a Jewish person was that of being default. I didn't understand where my parents persecution paranoia came from. For a long-long time I did not understand how the story of the Exodus, the Exile, the 1492 Expulsion from Spain, the Pogroms of Eastern Europe had anything to do with me.
I thought I understood the Holocaust, seeing as after WWII the state was founded.

The history of my people is that of persecution, seclusion and exclusion.

I understand that. But not really. I've never been different because I'm Jewish. I've never felt Foreign in my own country. I know quite a few people who do.
My perspective as an ethnically white Sabra (an Jewish person born in Israel) enabled me to be oblivious to most forms of discrimination and it took me a long time to break down and unpack that privilege.

What really helped was to actually listen to my parents, the way they spoke and the way they interacted with non-English speakers.
My mother is an English teacher, she has to speak to kids (some of whom can barely read and write Hebrew) and make them understand her in a way that I've never had to try.
My father is a pharmacist and the interaction between him and his clientèle can at times be non-verbal - they hand him a script, he fills it out, they pay, the end. At times it can lead to so much frustration on both parts I sometimes wonder how my dad retains loyal customers who are not the Addicts treated at the clinic situated above his pharmacy.

Being Jewish outside of Israel, wherever that is, is being different.
I've never had to take a special day off for any of the Jewish holidays. I've never had to think about keeping Kosher seeing as the default for goods in the supermarket is Kosher, the non-Kosher shops are the ones marked as different in these parts.

My parents tell me to this day, that anything non-Jewish is Antisemitic. To me that sounds like paranoia. And I'm pretty paranoid myself regarding my identity.

And sometimes I want to shake us, Isreali Jews in general, and tell ourselves "Get the fuck over it!", "Move on!", "It's 1492, 1883, 1939 any more!".
And Jews themselves are now oppressors in a land considered a Homeland to more than one people.
And yet it's because of that History that I can call this place my home.
I have no other place to call home.
My parents and siblings who were born a continent away do not consider any where else their home.
I have family in the Diaspora that will never consider Israel their home.

It is a confuzzeling existence.

I know of no other kind immigration pattern in which a minority becomes a majority. Like the rest of Jewish identity, it is no cohesive and it is a difficult task trying to explain what it has to do with blogging against racism.

I really hope I managed to put my point across.

Footnotes
(1) Israel is a very touchy subject, as almost everyone knows. I'm going to be talking about my experiences only and while I may touch on how that relates to how I think and feel about the Occupation and the conflict. The main subject of this post is not that. If you are interested in reading my thoughts about the Occupation and Israeli politics as they relate to it, you can press the tag the occupation.

Comments

[whereisjoy.livejournal.com]

I actually think this story is less uncommon. Granted the particularity of Jewish and Israeli identity are singular, but becoming the majority is something much less so. Mennonite immigrants to the states are a great example, as are Irish and German-speaking folks. It's interesting the way that these immigrant groups were able to earn their way into privilege through language acquisition and cultural assimilation, because at the end of the day they were white. And there's just no denying the way that they were mistreated and discriminated - especially for Mennonites who were basically driven out of their homes. I find it fascinating the way that this real experience of discrimination makes it difficult for people to understand who they can now be a part of the dominating group.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of it that way.
The Jewish experience is very different though and that kind Minority to Majority is something that I think only happened in the US context as well.
I know from talking to friends in Ireland and the UK that their different white ethnicity doesn't do them any favours if their names are very regional and their accents can't be masked.
I'm not comparing it with PoC experience of course, but I think the Minority to Majority thing is something that pretty much happened to white folk who moved to the US and not in any other configuration as far as I'm aware.

Am I utterly off the mark?

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

White Rhodesians (and now Zimbabweans) like my dad moving to Australia is another version - he was numerically a racial minority, but a very privileged one. I know the situation of Jews in Africa is a complex one, but they were still a relatively privileged group there, compared to the black Africans. And yet my dad goes on and on and on about how white people should be running Africa, and black people just can't handle it. I wonder if that element is there in some supporters of Israeli rule over the Palestinians too - they think that the "other" was conquered and is therefore inferior, despite the fact that it happened to them, first.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I know that ideologically and figuratively Jews became "White" once they were out of Europe, especially in Africa and pre-Israel Palestine.
There's still a discourse of Israel being a Western barrier against the Eastern savages.

So you have a very good point. But Jewish identity is very much complex and having class privilege like in Australia and other places and white privilege (for Jews who are/pass as white) isn't the same as being the ruling ethnicity and Majority population.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Israel as a point of civilisation in the savage Middle East is a common part of discourse here! Even back as far as the 1930s, the plans to resettle Jews fleeing Europe in the Kimberley region (far north west) was proposed as a bulwark against Aboriginal and Asian people.

I meant to more directly compare "white Africans moving to Australia" to "Jews moving to Israel" in terms of privilege, but I can see I got myself confused there.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about Mennonite immigration to the U.S., but certainly the bulk of the Irish immigrants didn't become the ethnic or religious majority when the moved to the States. They weren't considered "white" for decades after the big immigration waves, hence the prevalence of "No Dogs No Blacks No Irish" and "No Irish Need Apply" signs (not to mention that Kennedy's election was considered a historic event).

With Ashenazi Jewish immigrants to Israel, it's not a process of "earning" your way into privilege. You step off the plane with a complicated mix of "white" privilege and the disadvantages of being an immigrant.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

With Ashenazi Jewish immigrants to Israel, it's not a process of "earning" your way into privilege. You step off the plane with a complicated mix of "white" privilege and the disadvantages of being an immigrant.
Pretty much.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Your parents came from the States?

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

No... South Africa.

[stateofwonder.livejournal.com]

This post is super-interesting to me and not something I ever really thought of before. However... I guess I'm the only one who doesn't really see how it relates to blogging against racism? I like that you brought up early on Jewish does not equal white, but that seems to be the last mention of race (aside from acknowledging your and your family's white privilege and how it intersects with the immigrant experience).

You're talking about how race is not the only factor in identifying Other-ness in Israel. I really like the post and would like to hear more about this experience, but I'm not sure how it fits into IBARW.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Perhaps my point wasn't too clear and I should write a follow up. But my point of regarding Other-ness is that I've never experienced that because of my race and my family religion, which my parents did.

But Judaism is a prickly term as it encompasses a religion, different cultures, ethnicities, traditions that all fall under that Umbrella and one form of Antisemitism is the assumption that all Jews are one big monolith.
You should read Loolwa Khazoom's post about 9th of Av (which was yesterday) the day the Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled (http://tinyurl.com/lawrut).

I think it's easy to disregard Antisemitism as a phenomena because the people it affects are known to have and discursively Israel is supposed to be the cure for all of that. Jews have "problematic" racial identities, how can some Jews be privileged and others not? Why can't Jews just be like everyone else, etc. Having white privilege doesn't automatically mean you're a member of the majority if you're Jewish (especially outside of Israel).

[stateofwonder.livejournal.com]

But Judaism is a prickly term as it encompasses a religion, different cultures, ethnicities, traditions that all fall under that Umbrella and one form of Antisemitism is the assumption that all Jews are one big monolith.

For sure. And I'd love to see a follow-up post talking more about the variety of Jewish racial/ethnic identities and how that can become problematic in a context such as Israel, particularly because of its portrayal as a more or less homogenic state. I just wanted to give you a poke because I didn't see as much of a discussion of race as I might have expected in an IBARW entry, although as I said before it was very interesting and insightful.

Israel is supposed to be the cure for all of that

I would REALLY love to hear more about this aspect of Israel and its successes/failures in addressing Antisemitism globally, if you have any thoughts on the subject.

Also, I can definitely understand your parents' paranoia, especially having come from such a Christian and Muslim-focused country as South Africa. From what I can recall, I've never even come across so much as a synagogue in my travels in Eastern and Southern Africa, and the only Jews I've met have been fellow travelers from North America and Europe. Any thoughts on Jews in Africa? Were your parents' families in South Africa for some time?

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

My mother's father immigrated in the late 1920's from Vilna (which is now in Lithuanina, who knows where it was back then).
My maternal Grandmother's family came in the big immigration in the late 19th century, same as my father's family as far as I'm aware.

So they were in SA for quite some time.

Well, which part of Africa are we talking about? North African Jews are a very unique group which I do not know enough about other than what friends of mine who are of that heritage (Moroccan, Lybian, Tunisian, Egyptian) have told me. Beta Israel has been under attack from some Orthodox institutes here for quite some time...
There's a lot of information to discuss, for sure.

[stateofwonder.livejournal.com]

I don't really know anything about the history and status of any religious minority groups, let alone Jews specifically, in any area of Africa, now that I think about it. Hmmmm. North African Jews, eh? I will have to look into that.

[lishablog.livejournal.com]

"I know of no other kind immigration pattern in which a minority becomes a majority."

Really? What about the good ol' US of A?

The story is not the same, but immigration patterns have continuously created a situation where minorities become majorities. Everyone who comes here from a different country is considered a minority for the period of time that their major migration is happening. There was a lot of racism against the Irish just two generations ago. Today anyone with Irish heritage is just another white guy. Same goes for the Italians or the Greeks.

The case of immigrating Africans in the US is a very interesting case, not of a minority becoming the majority but of a majority becoming a minority and transforming in a generation into a different minority (African -> African immigrant in America -> "African American"). That may be something entirely different from the minorities becoming majorities, but they are deeply linked. Second or third generation African immigrants are considered "just another black guy" for the same reason that a second or third generation Irish American is considered "just a white guy". And both of those trajectories have something in common with the path of the children of Jewish immigrants to Israel becoming "just another sabra".

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Instantaneous Majority privilege is not something that I've heard of any where but in Israel.
You can be poor, you can not know the language, etc. but the way identity is constructed in Israel a Jewish person is considered a better prospect for citizenship than any other person, regardless of skill, background, etc.

It took a while for the Irish, Italians and Greek to become white in America and still, Jews though some are white/pass as white are not just "another white guy", while in Israel yes they are. Are they smiler phenomenon, yes, but there is something that is uniquely Jewish about being a minority Everywhere other than in Israel.

in case the OP's response below wasn't enough...

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between the process of immigration causing someone to go from being part of a minority in their former home to part of a majority in their new home and an immigrant group over time being accepted into the "majority" culture of their new home. See my comment (http://eumelia.livejournal.com/419507.html?thread=2459827#t2459827) above.