(Image: Drake. Source: Jewish Views)

The following excerpt comes from Jonathan Branfman’s Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, & White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024). The book explores how various Jewish celebrities present the Jewish identity onscreen and how their personas may address antisemitism or reinforce issues like misogyny.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction, “Getting Racy.”

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Beware the comments on YouTube, for they often distill viewers’ crudest biases. For instance, misinformed comments about Jews of color lurk below many clips of the biracial Jewish rap superstar Drake—comments like “OMFG, I found the first Black Jew!” More polite but equally sharp surprise sweeps my college classes on media, race, gender, and Jewish culture whenever I mention Drake’s Black Jewish identity. Yet these same classes are just as startled to hear that the blue-eyed, sandy-haired, brawny film star Zac Efron is also Jewish: I routinely hear twin gasps that “Drake is Jewish?!” and “Zac Efron is Jewish?!” Upon reflection, students consistently trace their surprise to a perception that Drake looks too Black, Efron too white, and both too muscular and handsome to “look Jewish.” But even while voicing preconceptions about Jewish skin, hair, faces, and muscles, many students state that they do not consider Jewishness a bodily trait, but a religious identity. Indeed, for many students, it is as novel to notice their own racial perceptions about Jewish bodies as to find those perceptions shattered by Drake and Efron. And these surprised reactions only grow as we begin tracing how such stereotypes descend from at least eight centuries of religious, artistic, and racial stigmas on Jewish bodies. By examining millennial Jewish stars, many students thus newly recognize their own conflicting definitions of Jewishness, their own preset images of Jewish bodies, and the antisemitic history that shapes both.

My students’ classroom epiphanies reflect pervasive racial contradictions around Jewishness in twenty-first-century America. On one hand, many Americans assume that all Jews look white, erasing Jews of color like Drake. Yet if Drake’s Blackness “looks un-Jewish” to many people, so does Efron’s whiteness, both men’s muscularity, and both men’s handsomeness. These contradictions emerge partly because US media circulate racial antisemitism: historically traceable stigmas that depict Jews as bodily different from and inferior to white gentiles (non-Jews). Even for Americans who do not consciously deem Jews a “race,” these stigmas fuel racial stereotypes about Jewish bodies and prompt questions about how to racially define Jews. Such questions grabbed headlines in 2019, after reports that Donald Trump might legally reclassify Jewishness from a religion to a “race or nationality.” This controversy only dramatized racial contradictions that many Jews navigate daily. For instance, I grew up Jewish in the 1990s hearing peers ask, “Are Jews a religion or a race?” without knowing why the answer seemed hazy. Jewish racial discrepancies also went unexplained at home: although my family checked “white” on school forms, we tracked monthly reports about white supremacists who committed racial violence against Jews because they deemed us “nonwhite.”

While far-right violence can target Jews of all colors, this violence especially illustrates how Euro-American Jews navigate contradictory relationships to white supremacy and white supremacists. White supremacy describes how racism systematically awards greater rights, opportunities, and safety to people labeled white, including many Jews. The Jewish comedic rapper Lil Dicky details these advantages in his 2013 rap “White Dude,” observing that “I ain’t gotta worry where the cops at,” since “they ain’t suspicious of Jews,” so “it’s a damn good day to be a white dude.” Yet even as white supremacy advantages Euro-American Jews over people of color (including Jews of color), self-declared white supremacists revile all Jews as nonwhite “race enemies.” The former KKK grand wizard David Duke captured this hostility in 2016 when tweeting, “JEWS ARE NOT WHITE!” White supremacists like Duke specifically accuse Jews of puppeteering the Black, feminist, and gay civil rights movements, plus Muslim and Latinx immigration, to eradicate white Christian Americans. This conspiracy theory, called “white genocide” or “the great replacement,” is what motivated the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally to chant “Jews will not replace us!” In 2018, this myth motivated a white gentile gunman to massacre eleven congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. Before attacking, the gunman ranted online against a Jewish American refugee-resettlement nonprofit, which he claimed was “bring[ing] invaders in that kill our people.” In response to this imagined threat, the gunman stormed Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!” This Pittsburgh attack, like the Charlottesville rally before it, illustrates that antisemitism remains central to white supremacists’ ecosystem of hate, intimately bound to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism.

These contradictions make racial antisemitism vital to challenge but tricky to visualize in America today. If few Americans consciously label Jews a “race,” how can they racially stereotype Jewish bodies? How can this racial antisemitism impact Jews of color like Drake, who “don’t look Jewish?” Why do Euro-American Jews experience safety from racist police violence, but not from racist alt-right violence? How can Euro-American Jews acknowledge their white privilege and fight color-based racism without downplaying antisemitism, and vice versa? Unwinding these paradoxes is essential to combat antisemitism and to fully grasp how race operates in America. It is also essential for American Jews who wish to decode their own unpredictable racial statuses and to dismantle racism inside and outside Jewish communities. Until such questions about Jewishness and race receive clarity, they will keep fueling harmful miseducation, imprecise scholarship, and misinformed activism.

To clarify how America racially envisions Jews, this book spotlights the screens where many people already gaze at Jewish bodies. Like classroom dialogues on Drake and Zac Efron, this book dissects the way millennial Jewish stars market their bodies and the way audiences consume those bodies. In turn, this analysis reveals how racial antisemitism permeates twenty-first-century American racial “common sense.” Millennial Jewish stars make such helpful exemplars for this study because they tend to spotlight Jewish identity and antisemitic stigma in unusually provocative ways, as we will see.

Spotting racial antisemitism onscreen is essential because scholars, students, activists, and Jewish communities often lack tools to analyze antisemitism at all. For instance, because US culture lacks language for Jewish racial status, even students who racially perceive Zac Efron as “too white to look Jewish” struggle to analyze racial antisemitism when discussing the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Perplexed by white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us!,” students often ask, “Aren’t Jews white? Isn’t Judaism a religion?” Beyond the classroom, oversimplifying Jewish racial status this way can derail progressive social activism. For example, in 2018 the Women’s March splintered over accusations that its leaders had trivialized antisemitism because they deemed Jews white.

(Image: Zac Efron. Source: Omar Vega/Getty Images)

When progressive activists and students oversimplify Jewish experience this way, they reflect gaps in feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship. Although these fields respectively examine gender, sexuality, and race, they overlap by emphasizing how multiple oppressions intersect—for instance, how racism and sexism jointly harm Black women differently from white women or Black men. This intersectional approach, pioneered by the feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, leads all three fields to examine many facets of identity, especially race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Jewishness and antisemitism seem natural concerns for this intersectional analysis. Nevertheless, antisemitism often goes unnamed in feminist, queer, and critical race theory: these fields often conflate Jews with white gentiles or mention Jews only as oppressive colonizers in Israel-and-Palestine. Although Jewish feminists have critiqued this silence since 1982, it remains common today. America’s feminist scholarly organization, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), illustrated this gap after the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally. When condemning that rally, NWSA detailed how “white supremacy and fascism have always been intricately connected with misogyny, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and settler-colonial logics.” This expansive list omitted how white supremacy integrates antisemitism, even though the Charlottesville marchers had chanted “Jews will not replace us!” on national television. Although later corrected, this omission exemplified how even blatant antisemitism routinely goes unnoticed in feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship.

In turn, these fields often dismiss efforts to challenge antisemitism. Such efforts often get rebuked as ploys to evade white guilt, distract from “real” injustices, or rationalize Israeli violence against Palestinians. When feminist, queer, and critical race theory do recognize antisemitism, they often narrowly deem it religious stigma, neatly detached from racial status. This perspective dismisses “white Jews” purely as privileged whites who might occasionally face religious discrimination. Likewise, when these fields (rarely) mention Jews of color, they usually discount how such Jews face antisemitism, instead solely discussing how Jews of color face racism from lighter Jews. Although media studies and Jewish studies have stronger histories of analyzing Jewish racial status, both still tend to overlook Jews of color and to oversimplify how race operates for twenty-first-century Euro-American Jews. However, by analyzing millennial Jewish stardom, this book draws Jewish, feminist, queer, critical race, and media studies toward a fuller understanding of American racial ideologies in general and racial antisemitism in particular.

Oversimplifying Jewish racial status prevents many scholars (both Jewish and gentile) from recognizing that such antisemitism remains a threat. The same oversights also discourage some Euro-American Jews from addressing their white privilege. Time magazine exemplified this problem with a 2014 op-ed, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege,” by Jewish Princeton student Tal Fortgang. Fortgang asserts that because his grandparents reached America as penniless Holocaust survivors, neither they nor he benefit from any white privilege. Fortgang’s narrative overlooks how white skin helped Ashkenazi Holocaust refugees to obtain legal entry, citizenship, or employment in America, and how America rebuffs darker refugees today. Fortgang also overlooks how Euro-American Jews receive better acceptance within American Jewish communities than Jews of color. For instance, he has probably never been mistaken for “the help” at Jewish events, as the Black Jewish comedian Tiffany Haddish has: Haddish relates that “I’ve been to like over five hundred bar mitzvahs, and I’m getting tired of people telling me to go to the kitchen. No motherfucker, I’m supposed to be here!”

It is tempting but inadequate to dismiss Fortgang’s defensiveness as willful ignorance. When refusing to notice white privilege, Fortgang actually mirrors the NWSA statement that disregarded neo-Nazi antisemitism at Charlottesville: both gaps result from trying to ignore Jews of color and to label Euro-American Jews as stably racially privileged or oppressed. Further, both miss how Jews can encounter racial antisemitism simultaneously with white privilege or color-based oppression.

For instance, both Fortgang’s and the NWSA’s statements overlook how twenty-first-century Euro-American Jews experience a gap between legal and social race. On legal documents, these Jews are stably white. Yet in social interactions, they experience racial instability that legal scholar David Schraub calls conditional whiteness. I specify that such Jews are conditionally white with unpredictable conditions. Even people who deem these Jews white often assume they can spot Jews by noses or hair, assumptions rooted in racial antisemitism. Ultra-Orthodox Jews with distinct clothing may seem “less white” than secular Jews. Sephardi, Mizrahi, and/or Latinx Jews, no matter how fair-skinned, may find their white status more precarious than that of Ashkenazi North American–born Jews. And even secular Ashkenazi, non-Latinx, Euro-American Jews who get initially read as white cannot predict if this advantageous white status will falter once a name or nose reveals their Jewishness. Likewise, conditionally white Jews cannot foretell what consequence may follow losing whiteness, from mockery to murder.

Feminist, queer, and critical race studies often worry that acknowledging antisemitism and conditional whiteness may aid Jewish communities to deny their white privilege as Fortgang does, to employ evasions like “I’m not white, I’m Jewish.” However, erasing racial antisemitism actually promotes this evasion. Unlike Fortgang, many conditionally white Jews do wish to challenge white privilege. But when hearing anyone deny their Jewish stigma and danger, such Jews can jointly experience a rightful urge to acknowledge antisemitism and a wrongful urge to avoid white guilt. Together, these reactions encourage some condition- ally white Jews (like Fortgang) to reject antiracist insights altogether. Instead, accurately naming how antisemitism intersects with white privilege and color-based racism sets the stage for Jews and gentiles of all colors to ally in dismantling white supremacy.

To support this precision, this book helps readers to articulate how US media depict Jewish racial status onscreen. Although Jewish racial contradictions can seem abstract, they are really as familiar to many Americans as their favorite sitcom or star.

Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 49 of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities.”