Jews Aren’t a Race — And It Shouldn’t Matter Anyway

People often try to force Jews into modern Western racial categories, usually slotting them as “white.” The whole premise is ridiculous — not only because race is a crude and unhelpful lens for understanding an ancient diasporic people, but because even if Jews were a single race, it would be irrelevant to the moral calculus. The idea that a group’s rights, legitimacy, or vulnerability should depend on where they fall in an American racial taxonomy is itself a moral failure.

But beyond that, the very claim is factually wrong. The only reason some Westerners imagine Jews as “white” is because their exposure has largely been to Ashkenazi Jews — the Jews of Europe. Ashkenazim are only one branch of a global people whose history spans continents, empires, and millennia. Worldwide, Jews come in a dazzling range of ancestries and appearances shaped by 2,500 years of exile, migration, persecution, and community-building.

There are Persian Jews who look fully Persian. Ethiopian Jews who are Black Africans. Yemenite Jews who look Arabian Peninsula. Indian Jews who look South Asian. Bukharan Jews who look Central Asian. Cochin and Bene Israel Jews whose features track India’s coastal populations. North African and Levantine Jews whose appearance matches the broader MENA region. Chinese Jews historically absorbed into the Han population. And that’s just a partial list.

This is what happens when a people are scattered across civilizations for thousands of years: they adapt, intermarry within local communities, and retain a shared identity across time and geography. Jews have never been a “race” in the modern sense; they are a people, with shared ancestry, memory, culture, and religious lineage, expressed differently in each place they lived.

The irony is that in cities like Los Angeles — which has the largest Persian Jewish population outside Israel — the absurdity becomes obvious. Tens of thousands of Persian Jews look exactly like their Persian Muslim, Christian, and Zoroastrian neighbors. They do not resemble the “white Ashkenazi” stereotype that Hollywood accidentally taught America to generalize to all Jews.

So the real problem isn’t just that the racial categorization is wrong — it’s that the categorization itself should not matter. A people’s history, suffering, rights, or standing are not functions of where they sit on a racial gradient constructed for America’s internal politics. To insist otherwise is to smuggle a grotesque moral logic into what should be a simple truth: Jews are a people, globally diverse, and their humanity and security do not depend on whether they conform to someone’s domestic racial schema.