Black-White Paradigm and the Jews - Essay Example

A great majority of Jews felt like aliens in American life, not thought of as a distinct racial group.

The Jews' classification as a Middle Eastern racial group adversely affected their own or other people's perceptions of being white. Many Jews are of European descent and considered as white like any other white people, such as the Italians, Germans, Polish or Irish. With this type of classification, the Jews as a distinct group were not given much political significance in the early twentieth century. This attitude among the political hierarchy in America most probably allowed the Holocaust to happen because many of them thought they were not in danger of being racially targeted by the German Nazis and not enough steps were taken to safeguard all Jewish refugees.

Americans were blinded by the black-white paradigm and did not fully realize the sheer diversity of the American population. The Jews themselves were under great pressure to balance their own commitments to their group and to the larger American society (Goldstein 4). A counterargument is to declare themselves as white as any race and they had been in Europe for centuries and Jews can be found anywhere in the world, not only in the Middle East, due to the diaspora (Choueiri 283).