There’s a lot of talk in the Pitt fandom about Robby being white and having power. And I want to believe that for a lot of people this characterization comes from ignorance rather than from overt antisemitism. So with that in mind I want to share a little bit of what it’s felt like to be a Jewish doctor in America these last few years.
First I want to set up a framework. Being Ashkenazi Jewish means often being perceived as white and also being part of a racialized minority. What do I mean by racialized minority? That this group is understood in a social context as distinctly immutably other. Remember that racial groups are very much social constructs rather than facts of genetics. If this is hard to grasp, it might help to think about other groups like Latinos or Arabs and how they are viewed in America. A person in these groups might look white but when someone finds out they are part of this group they are understood to be not white. Jews are historically viewed as a racialized other in most places in the world. This is very much true in American history even if we think of Jews here as having been accepted as white. Remember back when businesses had signs that no Black people were allowed, at the same period of time there were signs all over America at those same establishments saying no Jews allowed.
For context of my experience: I’m a Jewish woman with Ashkenazi heritage who looks pretty stereotypically Jewish but doesn’t wear anything that would identify that I’m Jewish. What this means is that if I’m in a place with a large Jewish community I’m typically read as Jewish. If I’m somewhere that people have rarely met Jews before then I’m read as white.
Here are fun things that happen when your patients read you as white:
- you get to listen to them say wildly antisemitic conspiracy theories and assume you agree and want to hear it
- you get to examine your patients and find their neonazi tattoos that they seem entirely unashamed for someone to see
- you get to debate whether to tell patients that you’re Jewish or to lie. For me because I work in an outpatient setting and know my patients for years, at some point when they ask what I’m doing for Easter or Christmas, I often do tell them I’m Jewish. And then unfortunately you get to deal with a myriad of responses ranging from “oh that’s ok dear, I don’t mind,” to a patient of mine who came into their next visit and handed me two typed pages explaining why the Jews faked the Holocaust so they could take over Palestine and how Jews love murdering babies (real experience I had).
-you get to do this same dance with coworkers. You get to have coworkers you considered friends say antisemitic things and feel betrayed.
This is not an experience of privilege. This is an experience of hiding. This is an experience of wondering how many patients who seem perfectly nice actually think vile things about you. It’s an experience of calculating if it’s safe to be open with patients or colleagues.
And over the last few years it’s also the experience of having people devalue the discrimination and pain that the Jewish community is experiencing. For non-Americans, Jews experience close to the greatest number of hate crimes in this country and by far the greatest compared to the size of our population. This is of course a global phenomenon but I know the US statistics and we’re discussing an American context so that’s what I am sharing. Despite this I watched the CEO of the healthcare organization I work for send out an email condemning every other type of racism. She sent an appropriate email after George Floyd was murdered calling out systemic racism. She sent an email calling out racism against Latinos in the wake of everything our government is trying to do. But after Bondi Beach there was an email saying that gun violence was bad and never once mentioning antisemitism. And after October 7th there was silence. Being a Jew at a progressive healthcare organization has meant going from feeling like part of a coalition of people with common purpose to understanding yourself to have become many of your coworkers favorite scapegoat for all the evil in the world.
Being Jewish in America right now, as with most of the diaspora, is to feel profoundly isolated. To calculate when it is safe to disclose being Jewish to people who read you as white (or for that matter who read you as solely Black or Asian as is the experience of two of my friends who are biracial and so are never read as Jewish).
I think when people watch the Pitt they think about how being a woman in medicine or a Black person in medicine shapes that experience, how it’s complicated to have power over patients as a physician but also to have them demean you with sexist comments or assumptions that you’re a nurse or a CNA.
But I’m not sure viewers think about what it’s like to be Jewish in medicine. How you listen to patients repeatedly say antisemitic things and assume you agree. How sometimes they do know you’re Jewish and say antisemitic things to your face. How you calculate constantly how to respond when patients start talking about Jesus and ask if you believe (which they do all the time because this is America and people are so upfront about their Christianity). It’s tiring and othering and the experience of patients and coworkers being bigoted against you contributes to burnout.
So when Robby is so much more comfortable in the room with Yana Kovalenko, yes that’s the comfort and ease of interacting with someone from the same culture, but it’s also the relief of possible the only interaction that day where you don’t wonder if your patient thinks you’re not quite human.
