my jewish woke worries
To divide ourselves into 'adjective Jews' is to adopt the tactic of those who wish us harm. Zionism and Chabad point the way forward.
Imagine tapping open the Clubhouse app on your phone and being presented with the option to join a room entitled “Do White Jews Benefit from White Privilege?” Perhaps you scrolled past that one with a pit in your stomach, only to find one entitled “Finally, White Jews are getting a taste of their own Medicine.” If neither of those appealed to you, you could always join the brave dissidents who gathered under the banner “Booted out of room speaking truth about Jewish Privilege.” Presumably, a lesson in sentence construction was not on the agenda.
What is so damning about these rooms is not only the blatant anti-Semitism, the aspiring audio pogromists spoiling for a fight on the cool new app. Haters will always hate, and it is old news that intersectionality and critical race theory hold little sympathy for the millennia old story of Jewish suffering, or the less than century old experience of Jewish annihilation. In Europe, we weren’t white enough. Here, we are all too white. It is a kind of color blindness, but only when it comes to Jews.
Even more worrisome is that Jews are adopting these politics of division, adopting the logic of race that is used to pummel us in the first place. If Jews are labelled white, the exact wrong response is “well, not all of us. Only some of us.” Importing into internal Jewish conversation the growing cultural obsession with race as the whole story of identity erases the extraordinary cohesion of a people whose reach across geography and time put the lie that skin color is essence. Judaism’s grand insight is one that it shares with the best of other world religions and the American promise: a greater collective is worth fighting for.
For example, International Hillel has committed itself to “anti-racism” as a platform despite the ways in which anti-racism as a particularly ideology has often manifested as anti-Jewish. Synagogues have taken on the project of “decentering ashkenormativity” as a core component of their mission statement, a strange way to relate to the heritage of their own members, let alone one that was targeted for genocide a mere seven decades ago. Innumerable Jewish organizations have signed on to the support of Black Lives Matter, signaling support not only for the worthy principle behind it but for an organization that has had an on/off again relationship with anti-Semitism and a lucrative relationship with activism, at least for its leaders.
The new cultural revelations of omnipresent white supremacy and intricate structures of oppression that slice and dice the oppressed into competing tribes of suffering is too simple a story to tell about contemporary American society, let alone an ancient religion that has been a minority everywhere, since the beginning of recorded history. This is not to say that there are not Mizrahi and Ashkenazi and Chasidic and Black Jews, among a multitude of other flavors.
But it is to say that throughout history people in every single one of these groups would have thought of herself first and foremost as a Jew, just as others would have seen them that way. The modifiers might have been useful up until a point, but to claim that they created distinctions that made a difference would be to misread the shared history, dreams, and prayers that know no pigment. The movement must be centripetal, not centrifugal.
To adopt the language of race and privilege that is being used to attack Jews in order to divide Jews is to operate in bad faith. I worry about the rise of ‘adjective Jews,’ those who see themselves first and foremost through the lens of race or sexual orientation or country of origin or their attitude towards Israel. This is to adopt the language of balkanization that is on the ascent in a fractured country and apply it to something that is meant to unify. It is to turn us against ourselves in the name of a world to come more dystopian than utopian.
Those who posit the most static and race based categories Jewish identity claim the role of community leaders urging a community hampered by race to “do the work” of anti-racism. What are we so afraid of, or so guilty about, that we seek to self-punish so relentlessly?
Even more perniciously, it declares open season on some Jews, for no other reason than an arbitrarily declared difference. Notice the linkage in the Clubhouse rooms between ‘white privilege’ and ‘white Jews,’ the notion that ‘white Jews’ are finally ‘getting a taste of their own medicine.’ If once anti-Semites lumped all Jews together, now they succeed in tearing them apart. Let’s not give them a helping hand, especially at a time when everyone from French Jews to Hasidic Jews in New York to ‘white Jews’ online are targets of hate.
How tragic and inexcusable to walk into a trap we set for ourselves, and to invite the bad dream of what is happening in our elite private schools, flagship public schools, and elite universities into the spaces our community has built. The result won’t be something fairer or more just: if we forget how to be one people, we’ll be adrift in an unforgiving sea. The cruel logic of division jettisons the traditional Jewish value of dan lkaf zchut, judging others for the best, with the impulse to ascribe the worst, to see bias everywhere.
Fortunately, there are signs that Jews recognize that they can be first in line not to amplify these ideologies, but to resist them. The founding of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and New Zionist Congress suggests that this is a time for building of new institutions if the old ones have chosen to adopt the worst of illiberal culture. The targeting of Jewish campus life in the name of anti-Zionism shows that forces are on the rise with whom there will be no possibility of compromise.
But on the other hand we can capture in word and deed the notion that being a Jew offers the opportunity to be neither oppressor nor victim but instead what Jews have been at their best: happy warriors for a saner world. Perhaps the two most successful Jewish projects of the last half century- the establishment of Israel as a worldwide center of Jewry and the worldwide success of Chabad- have ben animated by this spirit. In their own way, they both elevate action of critique, self-reliance over external approval, and authenticity over assimilation into faddish trends.
We all need to be more Zionist and Chabadnik: to be bold rather than chiding, and to build projects built not on guilt and critique but boldness and bravery.
Have a great week,
A
The notion that racial identity is the core of America's founding distorts the country's history. That racial identity defines American politics ignores voting patterns and voter surveys. Most importantly, racializing identity conveys a terrible message to everyone about how to think about themselves as individuals and their futures. The fallout for us, as Jews, may be more severe than for others, but it does not bode well for the kind of freedom America once embraced as an ideal.
we need to stay together always. those who look for privilege everywhere will inevitably find jews... who have an image of being "successful" .. .and want to bring us down ... it's not new