Race In The Jewish Community: A Mischling's Perspective

As a person of mixed-race black and maternal Jewish heritage, I am a mischling and I feel highly motivated to stand equally against racism and anti-Semitism. When I go out and about in the Jewish community people naturally see my colour first, and depending on whether I'm wearing my hair as an afro or in the way Anne Frank wore her hair, some people in the Jewish community don't automatically assume that I'm Jewish. Although some say I look Israeli, I've learned that there's a belief in small sections of the community that you can't be Jewish if you're black, a subject I wrote about in an earlier blog called "How Can I Be Jewish When I Am Black?" There is also a belief that the presence of Ethiopian Jews in Israel is incontrovertible proof that there is no racism in the Jewish community, either towards mischlinges and other Jews of colour.

The concern I express in this blog is that when I want to talk to some of my favourite Jewish friends and associates about my life, my experiences of racism and my efforts to tackle it, I find myself isolated, slightly ostracised, and sadly in two extreme cases, cut off completely. By reading between the lines I have learned that racism in the community or at large is neither admitted nor discussed openly as to do so is perceived as negative and liable to attract anti-Semitism.

My family background
For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with my blogging, my background is that my mother's father was Jamaican and her mother is Jewish and was attending a primary school in the North East of England in the years leading up to WW2 when Britain and some of its schools (including my grandmother's) were supporters of Hitler, because at that time the threat of him had yet to reach British shores. My maternal grandmother once confided in me that her headmaster was "pro-Hitler" despite being aware that her family are Jews. This stance convinced my maternal great-grandmother to want to conceal the family's Jewish faith and do as much as possible to avoid being rejected by the indigenous English community.

When my maternal Jewish great-grandfather passed prematurely from a heart attack in 1940, my maternal great-grandmother married an Englishman who became my maternal grandmother's stepfather. Later, my maternal grandmother would be ostracised by her Jewish mother for leaving her to take up residence with an Aunt in Wood Green, and for then carrying on a relationship with a black man who came from Jamaica to England via the Royal Air Force - my maternal grandfather. Ten years later my maternal grandparents gave birth to my mother, a British born mischling of mixed-race Jewish-Jamaican heritage. Then, nearly twenty years later, following an affair with my British born Jamaican father, my twin and I were born but subsequently adopted 'out' following my mother's premature death.

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