#i didn't know elisha was jewish though! perhaps thats why they initially put her as asian in her acting bio/resume?

[floralovebot]

Ive seen a lot of ppl say that Musa was whitewashed by the Fate: Winx saga, but while I agree an east asian actress should have been chosen, the actress Elisha Applebaum is jewish. From what Ive read, its controversial whether jewish ppl inherently count as poc or not so im not sure if I would call it "whitewashing"

Well, I'm not sure I'm the best person to talk to about this considering I'm not Jewish?

But from what I do know, this is an extremely controversial topic (like you said) that really doesn't have any one answer. There are Jewish people who fully consider themselves to be white (and Jewish of course but like... white too), and there are Jewish people who consider themselves to be poc. I think it's important to remember that a lot of the "Jewish people aren't poc if they aren't black/asian/dark-skinned/etc" comes from antisemitism or anti-zionism. A lot of poc in the west specifically say this because of antisemitism so a lot of the arguments for it are... not great to say the least.

In regard to Elisha specifically, she's ethnically Jewish so I think you could argue that it doesn't count as whitewashing, but that's really up to Jewish people to discuss. It's obviously still wrong for her to have been cast as Musa, that's not up for discussion, but whether she considers herself white, whether Jewish people consider her white, whether non-Jewish people (goyim?) consider her white and how much of that response is linked to internal antisemitism is all very personal and case by case. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for when people sort of... race or ethnicity change a character of color to a different but still not white race so like...?

But anyway, again there is no One specific answer because there's so much discussion and outright arguing over it. A lot of Jewish people do consider themselves to be poc and often West Asian/Middle Eastern (depending on who you ask) but there are a lot of arguments among themselves as well. This discussion really should be left up to them!

It's funny you mention this because I was actually discussing this with a Jewish mutual years ago! Here are some really interesting articles (written by Jewish people (as far as I'm aware)) that I found really helpful at the time: one, two, three, and four. There were others but I can't find them now :(

(There's also the matter of people converting to Judaism which is a similar but ultimately very different conversation so I do want to clarify that I'm specifically referring to ethnically Jewish people.)