Jew-hate racialises Jews.

This does not mean that Jews are a race. Races don’t exist in nature. They are social constructs, created by racists. Anti-Jewish racism targets our ancestry, our bodies, our faces, our minds, our genitalia and our hair. It shames us and it says that to be Jewish is to be physically and biologically inferior.

Many people believe that it was the Nazis who began racialising Jews in the 1930s. This is not true. Dr. Geraldine Heng argues that Jews have been racialised since the Middle Ages. In fact, she goes as far as stating that “England’s Jews lived under the conditions of a racial state, the first racial state in the history of the West.”

Jews continued to be racialised all over Europe and in Spain and Portugal, Jews were murdered and oppressed even after their forced conversions. In the 19th century, the racists that created the term ‘race’ also created the term ‘antisemitism’ to legitimise Jew-hate on the basis of psuedoscience. Jew-hate racialises Jews.

Why is this important? We have to understand our experiences. We have to understand them, so we are able to process them and heal from them.

How can we heal from the racist targeting of Jewish faces and bodies, if we pretend these libels do not wound us?

By acknowledging that we are racialised does not use anti-Jewish ideas to define our identity. It simply describes the hate that we experience. We will not allow non-Jewish worlds to make us ashamed of physicality. We will name our experiences and we will guard against them.

We will not allow non-Jewish worlds to wound us any longer.