(Jewish Group) The Dilemma of Jewish Privilege

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Anti-Semitism both on the left and right is getting in the way of Jews coming to terms with their own racism.

I am visibly Jewish. I wear a yarmulke; I have a beard. My tzitzit—ritual fringes—occasionally sneak out from under my shirt. I speak Hebrew-inflected English with my wife and children, all of whom have non-English names. I am an easy mark for anti-Semites. As a descendant of those who fled the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 1890s, I am also visibly Caucasian. With a cap, I look like many bearded white hipster dads in the San Francisco Bay area.

All of this is to say that I appear both white and “other” at the same time. I carry with me privilege constructed by the peculiarities of American history, the great possibilities provided for my people in 20th-century America, while also carrying the millennium-old consciousness of marginalization. I could easily hide my Jewishness, but choose not to, as a result visibly presenting my Jewishness while also enjoying the benefits of white privilege. When someone I do not know points out my identity, even simply by calling out, “Shalom,” I immediately tighten up. Will this be another encounter in which I am publicly harassed or screamed at? Last year, a car slowed down and a passenger yelled, “Fuck you, Jew!” Even when the person simply wants to extend an open hand, public attention toward my minority identity brings risk and baggage.

It’s this baggage that often complicates American Jews’ attempts to reflect on their relative privilege. In the current environment, many Ashkenazi Jews—i.e. those tracing their heritage through the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe—struggle to acknowledge their whiteness and role in broader systems of racism because anti-Semitism from the Left and Right distracts them, clouding their judgment, creating little space for them to exercise the vulnerability necessary for reflection.

Two recent examples illuminate the ways Jews are being squeezed by anti-Semitism from both sides of the political spectrum, complicating efforts at introspection. When Emily Bazelon wrote in The New York Times Magazine in June about the ways whites are finally noticing their whiteness and associated privilege, she was inundated with responses from right-wing Twitter trolls insisting that she was not white, but Jewish. The very same day, leftist activist Shaun King tweeted an article from the Israeli daily, Haaretz, about a Jewish group in Israel protesting an Arab family that had moved into a Jewish neighborhood. Rather than pointing out Jewish racism, he called the protesters “white supremacists” who only wanted “white Jews” in their neighborhood, ignoring the racial diversity within the accompanying picture as well as the Mizrahi (North African and the Middle Eastern Jewish) names of the Jewish organizers. In both of these cases, critics defined Jews for their own purposes.

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Despite the shitty and grossly incorrect title, the article is interesting, though quite schizophrenic in a few places. I also found a few logical fallacies attempted to be passed off as "fact", but, overall, I felt this was something y'all might like to read. Thoughts?

[MosheFeingold]

1. Well, I read it

Not sure I understood his point. Seemed a bit all over the place, which may itself be the point.

Jews, as a nation (which I use in the sense of the Torah), come in all races.

The specific description in the Torah was a "mixed multitude" that came out of Egypt, which included everyone from Moshe's children by his Ethiopian wife (and thus black) and the ancestors of King David (who had red hair and blue eyes).

Israel, made from the Diaspora, is a pretty fair recreation of this mix, I suspect.

Of course, the USA Jewish population does, too. From Sammy Davis, Jr (or Drake for young folk) to Paul Newman. My shul has a number of mixed Asian Jewish people (original country of father unknown to me) and lots of Hispanics.

I do know we are entering into a very dangerous time for the Jewish people. Every generation, it comes.