Anti-Semitism in Identity
White-Washing Anne Frank
Anne Frank was murdered when she was 15 years old for the crime of being Jewish. Most of her family was also wiped out. Her father survived, found her diary, and had it published and that act of love immortalised her and turned the promising little girl that was Anne Frank into the human face and the human cost of hate.
Those who would identify as Jewish or who practice the Jewish faith or have Jewish heritage come in many colours. Literally. Jewishness is not confined to whiteness and in fact you have to bend and break a lot of logic to define Jewishness as “white.” Sure, you can be both “white,” and Jewish, but it’s not really the same thing, to conflate the two is to write out a lot of people of colour, and anti-Semitism goes back millennia so while I absolutely won’t pretend that no Jewish person anywhere ever did anything colonialist or awful (see: Palestine), it is a bit precious to say a people who have been targeted with ongoing genocides for thousands of years have white privilege. You can possibly make specific cases for specific Jewish people being beneficiaries of white privilege sometimes when they “pass,” but you can’t just say all Jewish people all the time including those who were murdered for not having white privilege.
