JR Prize 2020 runner-up Leah Pennisi-Glaser responds to Charlotte Zemmel's entry about identity
“What’s a census?” my little brother asked.
“Well it’s a survey…” I began.
“Is it geography related?” he interrupted, his eyes narrowing. “Because lockdown is boring enough.”
I’m a geography student at Edinburgh University, so I get very excited over census, but 2021 could cause excitement for all British Jewry. For the first time ever, the national survey might include a Jewish option under the ethnicity question. If this does happen – and in Scotland it looks certain to – all my Chanukahs will come at once.
Why shouldn't atheist Jews like me have the opportunity to record themselves as Jewish without having to select it under the religion section? A census should reveal truths about a nation and the way its people live and feel. It is about more than resource allocation. A census can help tell the story of the people we are.
Click here to read Charlotte Zemmel’s original essay.
I enjoyed Charlotte Zemmel’s article, longlisted for JR’s Young Journalist Prize 2020, in which she describes her inner conflict at ticking the 'white other' box when filling in the 'race/ethnicity' box on forms. She's right to argue that “the routes to self-identification that have emerged throughout human history have left Jews unaccounted for”. But this is not because categorising Jews as white neglects our lived experience. It is because describing Jews as a white minority literally whitewashes the fact that many of us are brown.
This is most evident in Israel, where half of all Israeli Jews are people of colour – their grandparents coming from all corners of the Earth. Marriages between Israelis and Ashkenazim are now very common, their children the flesh-and-blood realisation of Ben Gurions’s utopian vision that Israel become a great Jewish melting pot. Over the pond, more than one in 10 American Jews are people of colour and in Britain, mixed-race people are the fastest growing demographic (we can safely assume this includes mixed-raced Jews).
Gay Pride 2012, Gan Meir Park, Tel Aviv © David Azagury
Ours is an acculturated community, whose social behaviour reflects that of wider society. My experience certainly bears this out. In my London secondary school you could count the number of Jewish pupils on two hands. Hardly eyebrow raising, but perhaps you'll be surprised to learn that of those Jewish students, I was the only white one.
Yet the stereotype that we are a white people stubbornly persists. Even the premise of hit Israeli TV series Fauda – now the most watched show in the Arab world – is that Jews and Muslims look the same. Well it’s time to challenge the view of what Jews look like, to dispel the myth that there is one type of Jew, and next year’s census is a good place to start.
By Leah Pennisi-Glaser
Click here to read Leah’s JR Prize essay, which was runner-up in the 2020 competition.