I believe I’ve already written in this blog about my students’ interest in my “race,” about their sometimes identifying me as “Spanish but not Mexican” and somewhat widely as “Middle Eastern;” even, however surprisingly to me, as Iraqi.
I don’t recall if I mentioned that a young boy from the elementary or grade school, and who is white but ethnically ambiguous, was in the Homecoming parade, and that for several days I had students telling me that they saw my son in the parade. Upon my denying that I had any son they insisted that I’ve “been down here before!” (Though I couldn’t have been older than twelve when this boy was born.)
Last week we discussed literary allusion, and the particular allusion in the story we were reading was to Adam and Eve. When I went through the familiar story, a student exclaimed, “I thought you was Jewish.”
My non-response response was that, actually, somebody’s being Jewish or not wouldn’t matter, because this story and so many other Biblical ones are very important to secular literature, and besides, the Adam and Eve story is in the Old Testament of Christian Bibles, which means it’s also included in Jewish Bibles.
A different student’s non-response response, almost whispered to herself: “You do look Jewish.”
(I remain surpised that though they might have never heard the name Christopher Columbus, they might believe most Americans are black, they might not know that Hitler was German, “looking Jewish” nevertheless means something for some of them.)