Dear Reader,
 
Jesus had “wooly hair.” 

At least, that’s what Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour tweeted this past weekend.

"Jesus was Palestinian of Nazareth,” she wrote, “and is described in the Quran as being brown copper skinned with wooly hair.”

But why was Sarsour — a hijabi who focuses mainly on feminist, Muslim and Palestinian issues — tweeting about Jesus’ hair in the first place? And why did it make so many people so upset?

Part of the answer lies in Sarsour’s history with the Jewish community. She has passionate supporters who remember that she raised money for desecrated Jewish cemeteries. But Sarsour is also anathema to certain Zionists, who detest critics of Israel even more virulently when they are female, and Muslim.

And a lot of the anger was about the tweet itself — what Sarsour wrote doesn’t even really make sense. Whether you think a Palestinian state does or should exist today, it didn’t back then. Jesus was born during the Roman occupation of Judea.  

But here’s what’s important to understand: she isn’t just talking about history, or politics. 

If she was, she would have stopped at “Nazareth,” and not gone on to describe what Jesus looked like. That she started talking about “wooly hair” raises the question of whether she was making a much higher-stakes argument — one about genetics.

She wouldn’t be the first one. Her tweet can be read as a casual endorsement of the “Khazar hypothesis,” — the notion that European Jews are descended from a light-skinned Turkic people, with no genetic connection to those copper-colored Middle Easterners.  

Indeed, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu read Sarsour’s tweet that way, retorting that, actually, Jews are not the Europeans — Palestinians are!

Bibi came under fire for doing “race science.” That’s when people try to use physical characteristics, like skin tone or hair color, to explain complicated phenomena like thousands of years of history, or nationality. But it was Sarsour who lowered the bar this time.

“Race science” isn’t science. But neither Sarsour nor Bibi seem to care about that, writes Abe Silberstein in the Forward’s Opinion section: “Trifles like accuracy and integrity are luxuries in an existential clash,” like the one Sarsour and Bibi both want to lead. 

Don’t even try to pick a side, Silberstein says. Instead: Push back, by sitting out the existential clash.

Thank you for reading,

Helen Chernikoff
Senior News Editor
@thesimplechild