I can't afford to care if you think I'm right about Jewish vulnerability.

#JewishIdentity #racialjustice

The last Jew left Afghanistan this week. By all accounts, he was a get-witholding jerk. This is not about him, but about his racial vulnerability. Our global Jewish racial vulnerability. He was not, as the Taliban made clear, a Jewish Afghani. He was not even an Afghani Jew. He was a Jew. His residency in Afghanistan was conditional, revocable, and not to be confused with citizenship. He's not alone.

The last 70 years (following the purge of Jews from Europe) have seen the purge of Jews from ethnically Arab majority countries, where Jews had resided for 2000+ years, living in communities that pre-dated Islam. Funny, we don't talk much about it.

I live in the United States, where the framework of racial justice and white supremacy is all (at least on the left, my ideological home). I have been told countless times that Jews are white, and therefore we perpetuate white supremacy. If we speak to anti-Jewish hate, we are centering whiteness, and should 'check our privilege,' rather than be allowed airtime. Certainly if we speak to Black anti-Jewish hate, or even bias, we lack moral authority, and should be silenced. Black pain is greater, more important, and therefore Jews should ignore any resemblance the rhetoric of some activists (see, e.g. the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Up for Racial Justice, etc.) bears to the anti-Jewish ideology that has cost us our lives. Because after all, it's not that big a deal - comparatively. It's worth noting that Black Jewish Zionists fare no better in these exchanges than white presenting Jewish Zionists. I wonder why.

The thing is, we've heard this before. We've heard that we are members of a racial group disqualified from speaking to our own oppression. Sometimes that is argued to be on the basis of racial inferiority, inferiority of belief, participation in a conspiracy or overt action harming the in group who gets to define the terms, and sometimes on the basis of (often but not always fictional) wealth and proximity to power. In any case this is never grounded in fact, but in the archetype of the Jew as villain. If the good guys are racial super-men, than Jews are racially inferior. If the good guys are noble workers producing value, Jews are evil moneylenders exploiting them. If good guys are Black and brown communities experiencing racialized harm and oppression, than Jews are the white supremacist colonizers who threaten their existence. Never mind that many of the world's Jews are nonwhite. Never mind that actual white supremacists view Jews as the root of all evil. Never mind that to colonize a place you cannot be indigenous to it, and must hail from an existing country that is now expanding it's power base. The current anti-Jewish rhetoric goes the other way - we cannot be indigenous BECAUSE we are colonizers. I am not interested in pinpointing the moment where the snake swallows it tail, but rather in identifying the latest in a long line of blood libels where Jews are the ultimate villain, who cannot speak about our own vulnerability, because we are inherently less worthy. Whether because we killed Christ, drink the blood of Christian children on Pesach, or because we now have a state in our ancestral land, there's always a reason. And that reason will always be deeply compelling, and rooted in the archetypes and ideas of the historical moment in which it finds itself. Right now the American intellectual vogue is a strain of anti-racist thinking, that posits white supremacy as the ocean from which all oppressive rivers flow, and therefore identifies Jews with whiteness in order to erase our vulnerability. As a sincere young (Jewish?) woman explained to me through angry tears outside the town hall of Brighton, New York (the Jewish neighborhood where I live), "You are white!!" This was in response to my having shared the painful impact on me and other Jews in my community of a local Black politician's words with respect to the May 2021 escalation of conflict in Israel. This politician had summarized the complicated quest for peace and instant conflict with a picture of herself and Linda Sarsour and the hashtag #FreePalestine. She then went on to make a number of statements evincing a commitment to the framework wherein Jews are a religion rather than a people (I can't be an antisemite because I made sure we took the Christmas tree out of town hall, etc.), Jews are powerful (because we are no longer stateless and haven't yet submitted to the destruction of the Jewish state attempted in repeated wars against Israel), therefore the salient lens through which to view the painful loss of life and daily fear experienced by humans living in Israel and the Palestinian territories is solely Palestinian rights and autonomy. It's ok not to mention Jewish ones, or Jewish people, because after all they are the powerful (white? colonial?) group here. The young woman outside the town hall explicitly (and to general approval of the crowd of folks listening to our exchange) clarified that as a white person I cannot respond to a Black person, especially where issues of race and oppression are implicated. Even when the race and oppression are mine.

The mapping of Blackness/browness onto Palestinians and consequent mapping of whiteness onto Jews is not rooted in science, history, or fact. It's rooted in narrative. Specifically the narrative of good guy/bad guy, morally deserving and undeserving. This is familiar. For millenia, Jews were hated for the perception of powerlessness. We were stateless. Parasitic. A drain on society by virtue of our neediness. Now we are hated for the perception of power. Where might makes wrong, and virtue flows from oppression, our very survival is turned against us, as proof that we were always powerful, and in conspiracy with the forces of evil (these days evil being white supremacy and colonialism). I also sometimes hear 'get over it, the holocaust was a long time ago,' as though 1) that were true, and 2) the holocaust were the first/last/only incident of Jewish oppression. The ultimate recent expression of Jewish powerlessness was our near genocide in the previous century. The ultimate recent expression of our power is our survival and founding of a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland. Somehow neither one made folks like us very much.

You can't talk about Jewish powerlessness (antisemitism, genocide, etc.), without, on some level, implicating Jewish power (survival against all odds, the state of Israel). This is inconvenient, for those who would reimagine the Jews as a religion of predominantly white folks with middle or upper class lives, and thus bifurcate antisemitism from sentiment around the State of Israel. The historical irony of seeing worldwide Jewish existence in all it's peril and promise through the lens of American popular portrayals of Jewish life in the last 50 years, is lost here. Mostly because it's proponents never had it in the first place. The folks I meet like this young woman (who summarized the complex politics of Israel, Palestine, American anti-Blackness, and anti-Jewish bias in the name of anti-racism, with "You're white!") are legion. They are on Twitter, and Facebook. They show up to townhall meetings in Brighton NY to call Jews racists and white supremacists, instructing us that we should not have our own State because of our whiteness and power. They are frequently well meaning and sincere. They do not realize they have absorbed the current anti-Jewish narrative based on their own social exposures, biases, and lack of knowledge about one of the world's most ancient surviving minorities, a people who, after all, are only 0.2% of the world's population. I'd probably have a lot in common with them if they would sit down to coffee with me, instead of telling me that allowing me to speak is furthering white supremacy.

Ultimately, I can't afford to care. I have to live and die as a Jew. Parent and fight for the Jewish future as a Jew. I have to drive downtown past the swastikas graffitied on the overpass as a Jew. I read the news as a Jew, and wonder if my family in Israel are safe, or if the Iron Dome will continue to save their lives. As a Jew, I have to acknowledge the pain and fear of the Palestinian people who wonder if and when safety and autonomy will be theirs, and ask how I can harm or help in that struggle. I won't summarize that existence with "I am white!" I refuse to hold my Jewish tongue because of what others will think or say, and regardless of their racial and/or ethnic identity.

If the Jews remained silent every time someone told us we were wrong, evil, morally inferior, or ineligible to speak, we would no longer be here. My people have fought and died for the right to raise our voices. The right to exist in a world that wished for, and came within a gasp of, perpetrating our extinction multiple times. I would be faithless to their legacy if I stayed quiet.