It is offensive to Jews of colour to describe all Jews as white

The argument

It is offensive to Jews of colour to describe all Jews as white. This argument rests on the assumption that by stating all Jewish people are white, it is fundamentally exclusive to the millions of people of colour that identify with the Jewish religion — that is, it defines a group by a characteristic that many of its members do not have, and in doing so writes them out of it. The first support offered is historical breadth. For thousands of years, Jewish people of a variety of races and ethnicities have practiced Judaism. Large parts of Goa, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Middle East have large populations of non-white Jewish communities, so non-white Jewish life is not a recent exception to an otherwise white norm but a continuous part of how Judaism has actually been practised. Whiteness cannot be a defining feature of a group that has, throughout its history, included people who are not white. The second support is contemporary. In an increasingly diverse world, there are many families that feature interracial couples where one or more have converted to the Jewish religion. Conversion is the sharpest case for the argument, because it shows that membership is something entered by belief and practice rather than something inherited along with an appearance. The conclusion follows from what such a description does to those people. By declaring all Jewish people are white, it disenfranchises all of these individuals who thoroughly believe in their religion and lifestyle; therefore, such a statement is discriminatory towards these communities. And as Judaism is primarily defined as a religion, it therefore can count members of all races as part of its constituents. The concept of Jewishness being tied to whiteness is, on this argument, entirely exclusionary in nature, as well as untrue — which is why proponents hold that Jews are not white.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Being Jewish, while certainly a religion, is also tied fundamentally to race as supported by DNA research. This same fact is untrue in comparison to other majorly popular religions. Therefore, to compare what is inclusive in Judaism and what is inclusive in, for example, Islam or Christianity, is null as they are discussing two fundamentally different root ideas. As Jewishness is tied to race, it is thus not exclusive to illegitimate Jews of colour, it is merely fact.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The diversity described is real and is the argument's strongest material, but it establishes that not all Jews are white — a weaker claim than the position's "Jews are not white". A group whose members come from many origins is not thereby a non-white group, and the premise does not close that gap. [Rejecting P2] Offensiveness concerns the effect of a statement rather than its truth, and the argument's title and conclusion trade on the difference: a description can be exclusionary and partly accurate, or inoffensive and false. The deeper difficulty is that the question is posed as though "white" were a fixed category, when it is a social classification whose boundaries have moved — Jews in Europe and the United States have at different times been placed inside and outside it. That observation supports the sibling position that Jews are not a race more directly than it supports this one.