When Elon Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “Jews are white, if not peak white,” I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or invite him to a Shabbat dinner in Beersheba with my Ethiopian family just to show him what “peak white” looks like after a week under the Negev sun.
As an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew, a Black African descendant of the Ethiopian Jewish community, I’ve spent much of my life trying to explain that Jewish identity is not a skin-tone category. It is a covenant, a calling, a story that crosses continents and centuries. We are not one shade of people; we are one people of many shades. But when I first saw Musk’s post, I hesitated.
Since October 7, Israel has been in mourning. Our national heart is still sitting shiva for the murdered, the kidnapped, the shattered. This has not felt like a time for digital arguments.
Yet silence, too, can mislead. So let me answer not with outrage, but with warmth; not to accuse, but to educate; as my teacher Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z”l) taught me, “Tell the truth, but tell it with love.”
Let’s start with a confession: Elon Musk, a brilliant and, by most accounts, well-intentioned defender of innovation, democracy, and progress did not invent confusion about Jewish identity; he merely gave it Wi-Fi. When a man who builds rockets and brain chips still struggles to tell the difference between ethnicity and covenant, it says less about him and more about the picture we, the Jewish people, have painted for the world. If outsiders believe all Jews are white, perhaps we have framed our portrait too narrowly.
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