[Wallace T.]

The Federal government did not regard Jews, southern Europeans, or Middle Easterners and North Africans as nonwhite. People from these backgrounds were counted as white in census reports and served in whites only units in the armed services. The Southern states never segregated any of these groups. An Italian, a Jew, or a Lebanese could attend whites only public schools and not be forced to ride in the back of the bus. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the German American Bund may have regarded anyone not descended from the British Isles, France, the Germanic countries, or Scandinavia as nonwhite but that was private not governmental judgment. Similarly, country clubs and upper income communities routinely discriminated against Jews, and sometimes Catholics, even “Nordic” Catholics; however, before the civil rights era, such discrimination in private accommodations was permissible.

There is a lot of mythology about the past treatment of people who were not white Protestants, all to encourage the grievance industry and the division of the population.

[sphinx]

Thanks for the clarification. But all good clarifications lead to more questions.

The categorization of Jews is a classic case of careless conflation of biological race with culture, language, religion, and country/region of origin.

This was compounded by the insistence of Jews in the diaspora that they were a people set apart. And then there are the complications of Askenazi and Sephardic Jews.

This had a long head start in antiquity into the early modern period. Then came the Age of Imperialism, when most of the world was disposed at the whim of Europeans. This probably reached its apogee with the often smug late Victorians with their “the WOGS begin at Calais” joke. That wasn’t entirely serios, but there was substantial prejudice against some European groups. Culture and race were carelessly mingled.

When I was young, it was common to describe the U.S. population as 85 percent white, 12 percent black, and three percent “other.” Others included Jews, Native Americans, Hispanics, people from the Levant, East and South Asians, etc.

We bumped along, not always well. We were making progress. Then came Hitler and the anti-Semitic madness. We ended that and were making dramatic progress, at least in the U.S. Then the left went into the identity politics cesspool, and the left has fetishized race to a terminally malignant degree.

Without clearly defining its terms. The woke left really needs its own Nuremburg Laws. But they won’t go there because the real program is the seizure of power, with race used as an ad hoc smokescreen for looting.