White Girls Don't Cry...What About Jewish Girls?

The tears of White women are oppressive, if you haven’t heard. White women should not cry, for fear of oppressing people with the space our tears take up. We will be treated with greater sympathy, the logic goes, because of our Whiteness and womanhood. It actually doesn’t feel (on my end) like people care much about women crying, but I imagine they would care even less if I were a woman of color. In my experience, my female tears are used to undermine my credibility. If I cry about my experience of sexual assault, for example, I’m a hysterical woman who needn’t be taken seriously. The cultural idea of the ‘vulnerable White woman’ has certainly been used (often by White men, though I would in no way argue that White women did/do not collude in that process) as a rationale to further criminalize and harm Black men. However I’m not sure the human reality of a person crying by itself is fair game for culture policing, since you know, crying is an often involuntary stress reaction. But these things aren’t up to me. I’m genuinely not sure if White men are allowed to cry.

This yields a hierarchy of pain, wherein some pain is acceptable, even a welcomed testimony to the experience of oppression, and some pain is unacceptable. Worthy of mockery and derision. A hierarchy of whose pain matters has always existed, but is now inverted with Whiteness on bottom. So that’s better, right? The idea that we should deal with a legacy of giving social care to the feelings of only White people by making it unacceptable care about the feelings of White people seems to me at the very least, flawed. Treating someone with derision for crying while White and female doesn’t preserve or protect Black mental health (though it might offer the brief catharsis of schadenfreude at the bonfire of a strawman), and it doesn’t remediate a legacy of racialized dehumanization. Which brings me to my next wrinkle.

What about the tears of White presenting Jewish women? Do we get to cry for our people? Does it matter where we are and who is listening? Should we engage in a comparative analysis of historical pain for the members of our audience before we get out our hankies? Does anyone want to go toe to toe with the Jews in the oppression Olympics? Anyone?

100 years ago today, there were an estimated 11-13 million Yiddish speakers in the world, and 17 million Jews.

Today, there are an estimated 500,000 yiddish speakers and 14 million Jews.

When Jews write about Jewish suffering in English, there is a tendency toward universalism. To endings which absolve the reader of complicity or burden. To the Anne Frank of a thousand inspirational memes, rather than the murdered child for whom there is no comfort. To focusing on the rare gentiles who stood up for us. Witness Schindler’s List, perhaps the most watched Holocaust movie of all time. Dedicated to a non-Jew.

But Jews also wrote about their suffering in Yiddish – a language by and for Jews – and they didn’t clean it up. There are no universal platitudes about love, common humanity, and endless gratitude for the vanishingly small number of gentiles who refused to collude in our genocide. It is a history of anger, pain, and grief. I say reclaim this Yiddish history. Reclaim these Jewish voices. Until we stop playing the universalism game to sanitize our suffering for a non-Jewish audience, we will not have stepped into the fight against hate on our own terms. Give voice to Jewish pain. Cry Jewish tears. Don’t step back from Jewish particularism, or say our fight is the same as every other fight, and therefore doesn’t need its own battleground. Saying “we stand against antisemitism AND _________” dilutes the message, and other at-risk minorities have had the wisdom and claimed the power to stop doing it. So should we. I don’t speak Yiddish (well), but I can speak in a Jewish voice. Anti-Jewish hate is poisonous, endangers our lives, and we must say so or risk losing the fight. The mealy mouthed protestations that we must spend our time first and foremost (read: only) as allies fighting for others on their terms, buys into the anti-Jewish narrative that we are mysteriously powerful, and therefore any mention of our own oppression is unimportant and somehow gauche. This conventional wisdom is deeply embedded in many Jewish organizations, and I couldn’t disagree more strongly. It makes us country club members in the fashionable fight du jour, participating so everyone will think we are cool (Jewish pain is after all, uncool). We have struggled for survival for all of modern Jewish history, whether rich or poor, in country after country. Pretending otherwise won’t make us safe, and if we keep implicitly apologizing for our own survival by being embarrassed out of advocating for ourselves, that survival is by no means assured. I don’t know if I’m allowed to cry, but I do know I will - I MUST - cry out.