Sasha Roiz
Sasha Roiz – 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards NBC Universal Afterparty – Arrivals – The Beverly Hilton Hotel – Beverly Hills, CA, USA, 2012 – Photo Credit: Izumi Hasegawa / PR Photos
Date of Birth: October 21, c. 1973
Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish
Sasha Reiz is a Canadian actor.
Sasha is the son of Russian Jewish parents. The family moved Tel Aviv, Israel, then to Montréal, Québec, Canada, when Sasha was seven years old.
Sasha has stated:
I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened. My father served in the army, had two boys and thought, ”This is not for me”. We moved to Canada, which reminds me of Australia. It’s friendly, gracious, open.
Sasha speaks fluent Russian.
Source: http://collider.com
Since he’s Canadian and originally from Israel, he’s an Asian Canadian (a West Asian Canadian to be exact) and can qualify as being a “visible minority”. Although I know his family is ultimately of Russian-Jewish origin.
If he was in the United States, Americans would never consider him as being “Asian” or “Asian American” or even a “minority” because of his family background, and their definition of “Asian” excludes many regions of Asia for whatever arbitrary reason.
In the end, I guess this shows that all these labels are just socially constructed nonsense anyways.