If I’m remembering my high school english class, Gatsby was pretty Jewish coded.

Which, in the context of 1925 and the power of the Klan, was very much not White. Sort of like today—the white supremacists who were chanting “The Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville 2017 are now running the DOJ and Homeland Security.

Jews, especially anti-zionist Jews are very much not White in 2025 America. (You don’t have to take my word for it; watch BlacKKKlansman—Spike Lee created a Jewish character and had Denzel Washington’s son tell that character he was “passing”. Lee began his career examining the tension between African Americans and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. When he ended BlacKKKlansman with footage of the Charlottesville Nazis, it made quite the impression on me).

For a more analytic take, the idea of Jews being a single group is as much a part of 19th century scientific racism as Black or White. The members of Beta Israel make this stupidly clear. Their tradition goes back to biblical times, they hail from Ethiopia, and their skin tone is the same as any other person from that region of Africa. Given that they are Jews, not all Jews are White.

The early 20th century pogroms against Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews were essentially race riots under a different name (compare 1905 Odessa with 1921 Tulsa). When we Ashkenazi escaped to the United States, we landed one rung higher because African Americans occupied our place on the absolute bottom. However, in areas without many African Americans, the Klan in the 1920s were definitely focused on keeping Jews in their place (after all, the word "ghetto" is borrowed from areas of European cities in which Jews were legally bound to live).

Even after WWII, we never became truly White like European ethnic groups. The language of (((Globalists))) and (Cosmopolitans))) never went away and we have always been linked to the fight for civil rights. Both positively (two of the martyrs of Philadelphia Mississippi were Ashkenazi Jews) and negatively (the trope of us being the evil puppet masters because African Americans were too dumb to think for themselves. 🙄).

This is not to claim that Jews in the United States are the most oppressed group. We Ashkenazi Jews definitely benefited from the colorism inherent in anti-black racism. But it does mean that you don't need to imagine Gatsby as a fair skinned African American to understand that he was passing. Just do the obvious reading and pick up on Fitzgerald coding him as an Ashkenazi Jew with a large nose, etc.

Highly recommend to anyone interested in the topic of passing that they read the Nella Larsen novella Passing, published in 1929. The 2021 Netflix film adaptation of it was an interesting watch as well. The novel 2020 The Vanishing Half also centers around passing, but takes place a bit later in time and in a different part of the country.