On the same sunny Sunday that thousands of my fellow citizens gathered on the National Mall for a day-long event to “rededicate” America to Christianity, thus leaving millions of non-Christians like me out in the cold, I was told by a reader of this blog that because I am Jewish, I am not white.

Color me dismissed.

One nation under God.

A white God.

A Christian God.

Jesus Christ, help us.

It was a roller coaster weekend for me, offering the best and worst of America today.  One that began with my art exhibit “Just Power” exploring and celebrating  American Democracy and Freedom, which then ended in divisiveness and exclusion.

I wore white to the art opening despite it being before Labor Day. The white pantsuit was a nod to the suffragettes, to Hillary, and to my piece in the show “American Diversity: Whitewashed.”

The sold-out reception to the show at The Hecksher Museum, where my collage and video were exhibited, was well-received. Both questioned our assumptions of who gets to be a “real” American.

I never expected that very question would come home to roost, when an off-color remark made me question my whiteness.

Checking my email on Sunday morning as I nibbled on my usual weekend breakfast of bagels and lox, the news was on in the background, carrying “The Rededicate 250”  Christian Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C. It was clear they were pushing the narrative of a Christian founding. A country founded by Anglo-Saxons for Anglo-Saxons.

Just as I heard the shrill sound of Pete Hegseth’s voice, his remarks infused with Christian language urging the attendees to “pray for the nation on bended knee,” calling on “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” up popped an email that caught my eye.

A notification of a new comment from this site. It was in response to a post I wrote about the American Diversity collage in the show. It felt like synchronicity. But I wasn’t prepared for what I read.

A hostile comment loaded with anti-semitic assumptions from the opening salvo.

“A Jew who hates whites?” the writer asked sarcastically. “Will wonders never cease?”

According to this reader, as a Jew, I’m not white.  As a Jew, I’m more off white. This centuries-old trope has been resurrected with all the hate and antisemitism unleashed under Trump.

Was I just whitewashed out of being a real American by a white supremacist?

I’m an American Jew

When I was in Hebrew school in the early 1970s, an ongoing debate worthy of a Talmudic scholar concerned how we were to identify ourselves. Am I an American Jew, or a Jewish American? There were nuances to both arguments.

One identity I never questioned or argued about was whether I was “white.”

It was clear that this reader did not think of my ancestors as white like his.

And in the nineteenth century, he wouldn’t be wrong. For generations, Jews were marginalized, and the issue of race was up for debate. It was a murky area between black and white. And it seemed Jews were more beige than white.

As the anthropologist Karen Brodkin put it in “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America” we were like many immigrant groups, members of a less-than-white race,” that had been “assigned to the not-fully white side of the racial spectrum.”

When it came to the great American definer “ skin color,”  one theory went that“the Semitic type is the link between the Negro and the Aryan.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a steady stream of warnings by scientists, policymakers, and the popular press, warning that the “mongrelization” of the Anglo-Saxon race- the real Americans- by inferior European races ( as well as inferior non-European ones) was destroying the fabric of the nation.

I grew up in an unusual period of post war America, where antisemitism lay dormant. Jews became part of the American story in that era. But my parents’ generation was right to believe that anti-Semitism never really left …that it was just a matter of time.

Now, under Trump, the antisemitism that lay dormant has come out from under the rocks.

Emboldened white supremacists are tearing at the fabric of democracy, as entitled  white Americans are frightened by the browning of America

We saw it in August 2017 when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, where they held 2 days of racist rallies. During these events, white supremacists chanted anti-Semitic slogans falsely claiming Jewish people had tricked people into believing they are white and blamed Jews for all racial problems in the U.S.

The weekend may have ended by being reminded I am praying to the wrong  God.

But I will be praying to God for the safety of this country.

Just not the right one.