ARABELLE RAPHAEL
Being the person that I am is not easy in the United States right now. It’s not easy for my friends, my family, or millions of Black people, Jews, and LGBTQI people.
I’m an Iranian, Tunisian, French, and Jewish sex worker. I’m queer, a drug user, and a sexual abuse survivor. I immigrated from France to the United States as a child. I still hold a large amount of privilege; my skin is light, unlike that of many of my family members, and I am a high-income sex worker. With that, I’m still confronted with Islamophobia—many people assume I’m Muslim because I’m Middle Eastern—and anti-Semitism both in my personal and professional lives.
I was raised with Judaism but I’m a secular Jew. I’m a Hebrew school dropout. My feelings about religion are very complicated and, honestly, it often makes me quite uncomfortable. Every time I walk around New York and see white Hasidic Jews, I feel otherness—we are culturally different and I’m not a nice Jewish girl—as well as a connection to them.
The thing that makes me feel most Jewish is knowing how much people hate us. People hate them as people hate me. I’ve been to Nazi death camps and I remember looking at a flyer in one camp’s museum. There were excerpts from a pamphlet the Nazis passed out during the war. It was titled How to Spot a Jew, containing several highly racist caricatures presented as what to look out for. Those racist caricatures all looked like me. I don’t need to have religious garb on to be recognized as Jewish, and I still see those caricatures being used in reactionary media today.
I’ve been conflicted about saying anything about anti-Semitism under my work persona. I struggle with being politically vocal while still trying to make money and remain appealing to clients.
But when I’m faced with these prejudices at work, being silent gets complicated. I feel like I’ve lost. My racial identities come up too often at work to ignore. I once posted a photo online of myself post–menstrual sex, and someone’s response was, “Now I know why Hitler gassed the Jews.” People frequently point out my big nose. I’ve been called a “terrorist,” “camel pussy,” and “kike” on client-facing social media quite a bit.
When I was younger and new to sex work, I was afraid to set boundaries and money was scarce, so I took jobs that I wouldn’t take now that I’m in a better financial situation. I think all performers of color are faced with this experience. I’ve been in a movie called Women of the Middle East and have been cast as a belly dancer many times. I was always given the information that I would be participating in a racial fetish scene only after I had traveled, paid for testing, been booked, etc. I’ve had a director make jokes about needing machine guns as props for Middle Eastern vibes, and I’ve had to fuck a white man as he was in a turban wearing black eyeliner. Clients and fans still ask me to wear hijabs.
I’m afraid of racist attacks when doing in-person sex work. Sometimes I see clients and have fans who support Trump. They are fine consuming my sexual labor but do not care about my safety or my rights, or they look at me like they would an “exotic” bird or rug.
The Far Right thinks pornography is a Jewish conspiracy to turn white men into cuckolds. In contrast, I’ve had many deep conversations and connections with my Middle Eastern clients. I don’t see that side of my family much. I do not have the Irani community present in my life. I was even outed as a sex worker by my cousin to the Irani side of the family after I posted an anti-Zionist article on Facebook. Middle Eastern clients are one of the very few ties to the culture I have besides my family.
My work doesn’t escape the realities of identity, racism, and anti-Semitism—that is not a privilege I have.
I’ve seen many articles on the rise of anti-Semitic harassment popping up in the news. As a stereotypically Jewish-looking sex worker, this is nothing new to me. I’ve spoken a lot about how sex workers get to see human beings without their social masks on. Sex workers of color have known for quite some time just how prejudiced and racist people are. Many clients feel no need to pretend around us. Many people, including Jews, were surprised when the Tree of Life synagogue shooting happened in Pittsburgh in October 2018, but many of us knew it was only a matter of time. It doesn’t make it less painful.
The Israeli government’s response to the shootings wasn’t a surprise either, and it proved that they don’t actually care about Jews—surprise, their priority is colonialism! In 2018 Israeli leftist leader Avi Gabbay said the attack should inspire “the Jews of the United States to immigrate more and more to Israel, because this is their home.” Then it was widely reported that Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi refused to use the word “synagogue” to describe the Tree of Life, because it is not Orthodox but Conservative, part of one of the more progressive branches of Judaism rejected by the Israeli state’s definitions of Jewishness. It turned out that this was a distortion of what the rabbi had actually said, but the divisions this misreporting revealed run deep—Israeli Orthodoxy has often disavowed Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jewish practice, alienating millions of Jews. Naftali Bennett, the Diaspora Affairs Minister at the time, visited the United States only to offend American Jews by implying that anti-Semitism is overblown here and we have nothing to fear. He also staunchly defended Trump, the person responsible for inciting these white nationalist attacks in the first place. Israel chose its political ties over American Jews. It is more interested in furthering white supremacy.
Israel did not show up for Jews, but you know who did? Two Muslim organizations, Celebrate Mercy and MPower Change, raised more than $130,000 for the victims of the attack and their families. This has been my only sliver of hope—hope that Jews, Muslims, people of color, and gay and trans people create ties. Hope that marginalized communities will fight back, that we will acknowledge that our communities intersect and that we have no choice but to fight for each other’s rights.
That being said, I hope such unity will include sex workers. The sad fact is that sex workers also need to fight for legitimacy within their intersectional communities even as we all are forced to fight white nationalism. It’s quite a lot of work to do simultaneously, but the only thing we can do in order to continue to survive is to try.
A version of this piece was originally published on Tits and Sass on November 5, 2018.