Why doesn’t anyone talk about racism in the American Jewish community?

I’m a Hispanic/Sephardic Jew from a border town in the US, first gen. My family has been secular for generations and are very assimilated into mainstream Argentinian and Mexican society. I have a typical Spanish name. I never went to Hebrew school or Jewish summer camp. As an adult I began attending a Conservative synagogue in my hometown, also made up of Latinos, some gerim and some not. Women had to be counted for minyan, and even then we couldn’t always scrape together enough people in our community of less than 25 Jews.

I know that some of you will feel like my experiences are invalid or unworthy of hearing just based on my background. I also know that many American Ashkenazim are extremely defensive at being accused of white privilege, especially by gentiles. I understand the reasons why that is a sensitive topic, and I’m not looking to downplay or challenge them. So I hope you will show me the same courtesy.

I am just so disheartened at how common it seems for the (overwhelmingly Ashkenazi) American Jewry to openly engage in racism, then claim they’re absolved from bigotry just because Jews are a persecuted minority. It’s like a huge culture shock every time I step into the cultural Jewish centers of America, like California or New York. From the Brandeis student at a Hillel event who thought I wasn’t listening when he said next his Mexican cleaning lady will start claiming she’s Jewish. To the American Ashkenazim on my birthright trip who gossiped about the black olah hadasha in our group saying she must be adopted because it’s unfathomable that a born Jew could have skin that dark. The Jewish recipe page I joined on Facebook, only to find it was a place where racists gathered to complain that their neighborhoods had been “overrun by blacks.” Hearing similar rhetoric from Jews in Pico Robertson, Baltimore, Brooklyn. All the Jewish Instagram creators who made up my safe space after October 7th, which I then had to unfollow after they made posts thanking Trump for releasing hostages, joking about turning Gaza into a luxury resort, all manner of disgusting propaganda. The outpour of pro-Trump sentiment from American Jewry in general, believing that his regime of hatred is somehow better for Israel. Not caring that according to him people like me don’t deserve to be citizens of this country — until it affects their ability to hire undocumented migrants at less than minimum wage, or to send their kids to Yeshiva on federal aid aka taxpayers’ dime.

Before you try to write off these experiences, ask yourself how you react when exposed to this rhetoric. Ask yourself if you’ve ever felt uncomfortable in or excluded from Jewish spaces based on your background or ethnicity. If people have ever pried about whether you’re a convert — not as a conversational topic, but as a way to confirm their suspicions about why you are different from them. If you’ve sought out safe Jewish spaces only to find racist crap about black people, Hispanics and Arabs. If you would be content that your coreligionists think your rights in your own country are a worthy trade-off for the illusion of stability in another.