Jews Are Not White, Prof. Tells Rabbis

BOSTON —A political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been speaking to Jewish conventions over the past few months, told the Reform Rabbis meeting here that Jews are not white.

Speaking as a Jewish academician, Prof. Leonard J. Fein explained that “we are not white symbolically, and we [Jews] are not White literally.” He then added that we should “not permit ourselves to be lumped together with white [Celto-Saxon] America, for that is not where we belong.”

CONTINUING he [Prof. Fein] explained that “We [Jews] are too much an oppressed people, still, and too much a rejected people, even in this country [America], to accept the designation ‘white.’ And to count ourselves as white, moreover, is to deny our brotherhood with the Yemenites and the Kurdistanis in Israel, with the B’nei Yisrael from India and the Black Jews of New York.”

Employing a theme which he used in addressing other Jewish conventions, Dr. Fein asserted that Jews are not black. “We are Jews,” he went on, “and because we are Jews, and not white, and not black, we must see to it, as a community, that we do not come to act as whites, whether by choice or because others so identify us. Not only because it is forbidden us, not only because we of all people ought to know better, but because we [Jews] shall cut ourselves off from our own future if we do.”

He [Professor Fein] then went on to relate this view to the Negro. “And because we are Jews, it seems to me that we are entitled to insist that there be a special relationship between us [Jewsl and Negroes; a relationship based not upon a common enemy, not upon a common history, but instead upon a common purpose, the purpose of teaching America at long last what pluralism is all about.”