Pierce: The Historical Significance of 'Cosmopolitan' as an Insult

[Hekate]

42. "How does a Jew consider himself white?" Say what?

I'll ask my hazel-eyed husband who sunburns easily. He's silver haired now, but as a child he had a mop of golden curls.

His dad looked so Polish he was able to melt into the Belgian Underground for the duration of WWII, travelling on missions with false papers.

His mom had the ethnic look, but was also hazel-eyed and fair-skinned, with dark hair. But she didn't blend in.

It depends. The Diaspora has been on for 2,000 years? Jews settled everywhere. They've been in Europe a long time, and there's bound to be some drift.

I grew up in Hawai'i, and was never allowed to forget I was a haole. The composition of my ethnic background was irrelevant: I was a haole. The few Jewish kids in my school were lumped into the same category. I didn't blend in to the local population, and neither did they. When I moved to California I was given a different label, again informing me that my actual background was irrelevant: Anglo. (I really never saw people who looked like me outside my immediate family until I visited Boston in my mid-30s. We look like our Irish ancestors who came in the middle of the 19th century, apparently a persistent ethnic stamp.)

In Europe, my husband and his family were never allowed to forget they were Jewish; when they moved to New York City, I think it was simply taken for granted among such a large population. Moving to California in 1964 was a bit of a shock: he was informed that he was an Anglo, too.

People judge others by so many things. I'm still glad I grew up where I did, where casual intermarriage was the norm. It shaped my worldview forever.