British Asian immigrants internalized the Jew as the ultimate white yet non-white victim

Evidence

The child’s confusion becomes manifest when its mother teaches it to answer “Little Billy’s” bullying by denouncing him as “common.” Class is defined by etiquette. The Teddy boy’s response: “But we ain’t as common as a slut who marries a darkie.” The extended family into which she has married is different but is still a full step above the most liminal figures in English society. “Mother always denied that they were ‘like that.’ She refused to allow the word ‘immigrant’ to be used about Father, since in her eyes it applied only to illiterate tiny men with downcast eyes and mismatched clothes” (45). Her choked response to being taunted: “Mother’s lips were moving but her throat must have been dry; no words came, until she managed to say, ‘We’re not Jews’” (45). Big Billy, the bully’s father answered: “You no Yid, Yvonne. You us. But worse. Goin’ with the Paki’” (45). Who is the “Yid” in Kureishi’s vocabulary of constructs? The “Yid” is even more pathetic than the victims of apartheid “where people with white skins were cruel to the black and brown people who were considered inferior and were forbidden to go where the whites went” (45). The “Yids” define difference as the ultimate victims who appear to be “white” but are really not. The Jew is the foreigner who has been defined as the ultimate victim. Azhar had heard his father say “that there had been ‘gassing’ not long ago. Neighbor had slaughtered neighbor, and such evil hadn’t died. Father would poke his finger at his wife, son and baby daughter, and state, ‘We’re in the front line’” (45). They have the potential of becoming “Yids.” The Shoah defines a difference that is not merely victimhood, but an odd sort of orientalism. What the liminal characters share in the Diaspora is their “oriental” fate, that of victims. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 736

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to use-of-slur dynamics and boundary-drawing in the reader’s ongoing work on otherness—parallels to constructions of whiteness-as-default versus liminal groups.
• SEED: Possible essay: how immigrant communities vertically deploy older antisemitic hierarchies to distance themselves from victim status.