#levanim yehudim

[jewish-privilege]

...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.

Right-wing anti-Semites see Jews only as insidious ethnic people whose Ashkenazi members try to assimilate, muddling the purity of the white race. ...For some right-wing Americans, the existence of Israel is not just okay, but good, both because this is where the Jews “belong”—an anti-Semitic version of certain Zionist tropes—and also because Israel’s strident nationalism represents a type of ethnic purity white nationalists would like to see in Europe and the United States. Others are just straight-up Jew-haters who would be happy for Jews to go to the gas chambers.

Besides the obvious problem this brand of anti-Semitism presents for Jews, it also inspires a backlash of Jewish victimhood that undermines any attempt to reckon in a thoughtful and rigorous way with simultaneous Jewish privilege: Jews can’t be racist, the thinking goes, because they aren’t allowed to be white. Any time an Ashkenazi Jew begins to sort through their role in American white supremacy, the flurry of anti-Semitic noise in response causes many Jews to revert to victim mentality—a mentality which makes it very hard to think clearly about the full range of social justice. As the late Rabbi David Hartman wrote in his seminal 1982 essay, “Auschwitz or Sinai,” the person who sees the Holocaust in every anti-Semitic barb begins to think that “We need not take the moral criticism of the world seriously, because the uniqueness of our suffering places us above the moral judgment of an immoral world.”

Meanwhile, on the Left, Jews are seen as a religious minority within the superstructure of European Christian colonialism that has dominated the globe since Columbus. Yes, Jews have faced oppression, this narrative acknowledges, but they are ultimately a European byproduct: They are white people with a little flair—a belief system draped over the same racial material. When King tweeted about the “White Jews” who protested against the sale of a home in Afula (inside the Green line) to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, he was following in this tradition, and in so doing erasing Jewish peoplehood. This was not Jewish racism against Arabs, in his view: It was white colonialist racism.

Jewish history, in fact, profoundly complicates the idea that all conflicts can be boiled down to modern Western European “white” Christian imperialism. But this trend on the left is increasingly strong. The term supersessionism has traditionally referred to the primacy of the New Testament for Christians, its teachings taking precedence over the Old Covenant between God and the Jews featured in the Old Testament. Recently, Bryan Cheyette, an English professor specializing in textual representations of Jewish identity, suggested that the insistence on a specifically postcolonial lens for evaluating oppression is a new kind of supersessionism: Kicked off by venerable postcolonial studies founder Edward Said, who believed Palestinians were the new Jews, it is now carried forward by progressives such as King, or Women’s March founders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, the latter of whom recently said Jews who feel unwelcome among today’s progressives “are going to have to come to terms with being uncomfortable,” because the Palestinian cause is too important—akin to South African apartheid. Implicitly, the story of the Palestinians and the story of African Americans are part of the same story of injustice, and the injustice against them has superseded Europe’s Holocaust. Cheyette instead suggested we move away from seeing these histories as exceptional: supersessionism “makes it impossible to find connections in the past and our most urgent present between different forms of dehumanization—Orientalism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia—and between shared forms of suffering (not least as refugees) alongside an often-violent agency.”

The 20th century demonstrated the tremendous capacity humans have to disregard and extinguish others’ lives, and the 21st century has yet to break that pattern. It is possible to recognize the persecution and violence, in modern memory, of Jews while recognizing the racism that exists within Jewish communities. It is also possible to recognize the deep and violent history of marginalization, oppression, and enslavement faced by African Americans and other people of color in America; and to see that both Israelis and Palestinians have been traumatized by wars, military occupation, and terrorist campaigns.  The existence of each of these traumas does not delegitimize the others. In her intellectual history of intersectionality, gender studies professor Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro argued that in making an intersectional shift, one begins to take subaltern communities as seriously as the mainstream. But doing so also means recognizing that “one is neither purely an oppressor nor purely oppressed”—a lesson both Jews and their critics have yet to internalize...

Read Joshua Ladon’s full piece at The New Republic.

(h/t @pointmerose)

[jewish-privilege]

silver-cats replied to your post “I am not interested in your decrying white supremacy if you are not...”

I dont really know if I'm stepping out of my lane here but I dont really think ashkenazim are white (as a brown dude) they have conditional white privilege for sure (depending on how visibly jewish they are) but I don't think that makes them white just means they have the potential to pass as white, agree with everything else you said though

Jews ourselves are split up on this particular issue. It usually comes down to how we’re defining whiteness, which, to be fair, is how race operates. 

I think I have a pretty particular outlook because I’m a transethnic adoptee who was adopted by Ashkenazi Jews (who are also white and would become confused if anyone tried to argue to them that they weren’t) and was constantly told that I either wasn’t really Jewish because I wasn’t genetically ethnic, I was white, OR that I looked just like my (adopted) parents and could automatically picked me out as Jewish on sight. They were always judging me based on how they viewed “Jews” as a group, which again is how race operates. It depended not only on where I was in the U.S. but also on who was labeling and racializing me. This tag may be helpful if you’re interested.

It would not surprise me if Jews as a group are re-racialized as automatically non-white in light of what’s happening with white supremacists publicly and fearlessly marching down streets shouting antisemitism. Then again, this all happened publicly in the 1990s too with the Christian Identity movement, Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City Bombing and Jews weren’t automatically included in the broader identity of non-white or the political grouping of PoC.

To be completely frank with you? In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter to me if someone calls other Jews and me white or not (except, of course, if they're erasing Jews of color). It’s an interesting academic question in terms of social history and how race operates and changes within society. What matters more to me is that people acknowledge Jews are targetted and oppressed under white supremacy and that antisemitism is something to be fought and wasn't a discrete hatred that began and ended with the Holocaust. We can do this while still fighting all other forms of bigotry.

What I will say is that you are misusing the term Ashkenazi. There are Ashkenazim of all races: white (or white-skinned), Black, Latinx, Asian, etc. There are also white Sephardim and white Mizrahim. Because we are a diasporic group who were spread all over the globe due to expulsions and genocide, the sub-ethnicities within the pan-Jewish community don’t operate in a binary and thus don’t fit into the white versus PoC/non-white binary.

[jewish-privilege]

...One of the subplots in the film is Flip’s gradual discovery that he does indeed have skin in the game. In an early scene he is asked by a co-worker if he’s Jewish, and he says, “I dunno – am I?” He is an assimilated secular Jew, and he is invested in that assimilation without being particularly conscious about it.

Because one of the Klansmen is suspicious that he might be a Jew, Flip spews a lot of anti-Semitic invective as cover, throwing around not only words like “kike” but a horrific speech on the “beauty” of the Holocaust and the need for “those leeches” to be exterminated. It is a heart-stopping moment, perfectly acted: we see the performance for the Klansman, and deep behind it, in Driver’s eyes, the terror of his own words. We see him recognize his skin in the game at the moment in which he is most desperate to save his skin from the Klan.

Spike Lee has a complicated history with American Jewish audiences, but he and the writers of the film (two of them Jewish, by the way) have articulated the question for American Jews at this moment. There has been a considerable squabble lately about Jews and whiteness, and considerable anxiety about the rise of white supremacy in our world. This movie slices through all the nonsense to the essential question:

“Why you acting like you ain’t got skin in the game, bro?”

The point is, my fellow liberal Jews of all complexions, we do have skin in this game. The question is, are we going to recognize it and drop the fantasy that if we act white enough – if we are cultured and educated and assimilated and meet standards of white beauty – that the white supremacist will somehow pass by our houses? Because that has been our strategy for the last century. It has been a successful strategy, up to a point: Jews are now seen by whites as such desirable mates that there’s talk of an “intermarriage problem,” to give but one example.

But here’s the thing: if we are so focused on those assimilated values of whiteness and homogeneity, we will never notice how that very assimilation causes us to behave to those in our midst with different complexions, the Jews of Color who cannot (and should not have to) pass. We will never notice because we are invested in whiteness.

I can imagine a reader saying now, “But rabbi, what you are saying is that Jews aren’t white!” That compels me to ask why do we keep acting so darn white? Why are we so fragile, waving frantically at photos of long-dead Jews marching with Martin Luther King, insisting that “not all” of us participate in racism? If we don’t want to be the bad guys (which is what I hear when I hear a light skinned person insisting that they aren’t really white) then why do we keep acting like the bad guys?

Why are people of color made unwelcome in our communities, treated like outsiders? Why do we quiz them, or assume they are the janitor or a convert? Why, upon seeing them, do we feel we have to comment on their difference?

We will be white as long as we continue to deal in white privilege.

We will be white until a Jew of Color can walk into our service and simply be accepted without comment.

On that day we will become One: one People of the one God...

[Read Rabbi Ruth Adar’s full piece at Coffee Shop Rabbi]

[jewish-privilege]

...But [Ron] Stallworth couldn’t have pulled off the harebrained operation without the aid of his partner. Enter Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, in a role altered substantially for the script’s purposes), a character through whom Lee interweaves an adjacent social battle. Stallworth and Zimmerman’s daring undercover stint — the former over the phone, the latter in-person — draws a boldfaced parallel between the black and Jewish experiences, exploring the commonalities and key differences connecting two identities often remolded to fit into a hostile environment. The advertising has played up the black power ethic and the film’s aesthetic harkens back to classic blaxploitation, but the film itself gives viewers plenty to pore over regarding another cultural identity.

BlacKkKlansman begins and ends with displays of ideological violence freely conflating antipathy toward black and Jewish people: Early on, Alec Baldwin makes a cameo as a bespectacled fearmonger recording a PSA about assorted Jew “conspiracies,” and at the previously mentioned Charlottesville demonstration that closes the film, Nazi swastikas and Confederate stars-and-bars flags flew as one. Lee echoes Martin Niemöller’s famed “First They Came…” poem in his assertion of collective duty among marginalized peoples, both to ourselves and each other.

This quandary has been complicated for a Jewish population in some instances capable of going fully unnoticed, but dire emergency — like, say, the organized hatred of the KKK — renders the situation far simpler. BlacKkKlansman suggests that navigating Jewish selfhood is a similarly complex obstacle course of code-switching; many American Jews are white and yet an increasingly frequent subject of bigotry.

Jewish and black peoples have both endured slavery and catastrophic massacres, and in America — whether that’s Stallworth’s era or our own — they can find solidarity around persecution on a more everyday level. Though there’s been plenty of discord in the past, some of it in close proximity to Lee himself, there should be more bonding these two cultures together than keeping them apart. Limited to Flip and many Jews like him, however, is the ability to blend in and the corresponding responsibility not to.

The Jewish identity is defined sometimes by religious practice and sometimes by blood. Not unlike myself, Zimmerman considers himself a secular Jew. He doesn’t observe the Sabbath day, he didn’t regularly attend synagogue and he never had a bar mitzvah. Living in a largely gentile community, he didn’t even go to that many [bar and bat] mitzvahs for other kids. To his coworkers or any other casual observer, his Judaism wouldn’t be apparent save for the gold chain a fellow cop refers to as a “Jew necklace,” which Zimmerman chidingly corrects to the proper Star of David. He’s ideally equipped to ingratiate himself with the local KKK, his appearance as phonily inconspicuous as the “white voice” that Stallworth uses to con the yokels over the phone.

...As he debriefs with Stallworth back at the station following a charged meetup with the KKK, Zimmerman makes an offhanded comment about how he never really felt Jewish until he had to pretend he wasn’t. Aside from any jewelry expressing that Judaism, it didn’t presently weigh on Zimmerman’s mind during his day-to-day life; it was something neutral that he could afford to take for granted. Whether or not a Jew chooses to wear that dimension of themselves on their sleeve is just that, a volitive decision that Stallworth and other people of color aren’t granted the opportunity to make.

Around fellow police, Stallworth sticks out as what the chief refers to as their district’s “Jackie Robinson,” a barrier-breaker nonetheless treated to a constant barrage of harassment and slurs. One gets the impression Zimmerman may have valued his low profile precisely because it exempts him from such treatment. Racists don’t usually look too fondly on the Jews, either.

The ability to assimilate and fly under the radar has its utilities, but any advantage it brings comes with a cost. Throughout the film, Stallworth gets to know Patrice (Laura Harrier), the leader of the nearby college’s Black Student Union, an avowed radical who frowns on her new squeeze’s involvement with a law enforcement organization steeped in a prejudicial history. She emphasizes the importance of living visibly, of being proud and vocal about personal identity in the face of a society that would prefer that everyone quiet down and fall in line. And Lee spares no pains to illustrate how much is at stake, bringing in an elder activist played by real-life civil rights fighter Harry Belafonte to reminisce about the horrors of a lynching he witnessed firsthand. There may be survival in silence, but it erases history and the future alike, ultimately threatening the group in question’s basic existence...

Read Charles Bramesco’s full piece at Mic.

[jewish-privilege]

regarding Jewishness and race: I'm an American Jew, and, to be honest, although prior to the election I had always ID-ed as white, now, I think because of the new prominence of neo-nazism, I'm far less comfortable with that label. I feel very, very othered from "white people" as a whole, and like, even though I can benefit from white privilege, white-ness is ultimately something that excludes me.

Nazism and white supremacy isn’t newly prominent, it’s just having a light shown on it. It never went away, it was just hidden from the general public.

I think that it’s beneficial to differentiate between “whiteness” and “white supremacy.” If whiteness and white supremacy are not severable? Then yes; Jewish people no matter if we are white-skinned or not are excluded from whiteness. If they are different, however, which I believe they are, then Jews can be white while not being included in white supremacy. 

Jews, no matter what race we are, are not part of white supremacy and never will be. No matter how racist a white/white-skinned Jew may be, it shows a complete lack of understanding of what white supremacy is and what white supremacists believe to be true and feeds into white supremacy itself. 

I’m okay that the United States as a whole sees me, a white-skinned Jew, as white, while also acknowledging that there pockets of the United States and populations within who will never see me as white. I grew up in Arizona and was told alternatively that I couldn’t really be Jewish because I was adopted and white or because I wasn’t “ethnic enough” (this was usually after someone had said something antisemitic and was trying to save face). That being said, I’ve still experienced racialized antisemitism. My whiteness has nothing to do with that.

Copying (and editing for length) from my post here:

My parents, my brothers and I are labeled as white and have white privilege because we are read and classified as white by in U.S. society. That’s what race is, it’s placed upon you by society. Some of it is due to assimilation of white/white-skinned Jews into normative U.S. culture in generations past. And that in and of itself is important to keep in mind when thinking about racial categories in general. It illustrates both what race is and how it operates socially within U.S. culture and society. It shows how certain ethnicities and certain people have ability to assimilate or be normalized into the normative racial culture, while others do NOT. That history of not being counted as white in the U.S., in general, does not mean that white Jews are not considered white in the U.S. NOW.

I’ve had experiences both of being told that I’m not really Jewish because I’m too white and also because I’m not “ethnic enough” due to my status as a genetically Western European/British Isles transethnic adoptee (my genetics are most probably a mishmash of Irish, Scottish, and Italian), but at the end of the day, I still match the concept of Jewishness more easily than Jews of color, because I’m white and not a PoC. ...

How do I know that it’s due to genetic ethnicity and not race? Because I am treated differently than I would be if I was a transracial adoptee. Because if I had a nickel for every time someone met me with my mom and/or dad and told me how similar we look, I would never have to work again. That would never happen if I were a transracial adoptee. Along the same line, I have experienced racialized antisemitism individually (being called Christ-killer, being pushed, having pennies thrown at me), as a member of a Jewish family (parents being called dirty Jews, people calling into a hotel where my parents were throwing a party saying that they would blow up the hotel unless those “fucking Jews” got out), and also as a member of Jewish communities (synagogues being defaced, being stared down by non-Jews during the High Holidays, having police patrolling the synagogues), even though I don’t match the concept of what a genetic ethnic Jew looks like, because I am white and match the concept of “Jewishness” more so than a Jew of color may.

[jewish-privilege]

I can't fully agree with your post. I'm a caucasian Jew and I can't for the life of me id as white, despite being white passing. I refer to myself as other, non-western/European white, or Aremenian.

That’s completely fine. I don’t expect everyone to automatically agree with me on everything. The only thing I expect is for people to see where I’m coming from (which is I add so many parentheticals and links) and to respect my perspective; the same as I try to do to others with whom I may disagree. 

Caucasian and white are not the same thing. One is referring to a land region and the other is a race. If you are Armenian, that’s one thing as Armenians are from the Caucasus, but Caucasian as a fill-in for “white” is based on scientific racism. 

To repeat myself from this post, race and ethnicity are different in so far as race is a label placed on a person or a group by society, while ethnicity is more a matter of self-identification based on such things as common genetics, common ancestry, common culture, origin myth, history, homeland, language/dialect, symbolism, mythology, ancestry, physical appearance, religion, and/or other markers of group identity. 

I think this is one of the main sticking points I have in these conversations. You can’t identify as a race, because that’s not what race is. Using an admittedly provocative example, look at Rachel Dolezal. She identified as Black, right? She can identify as Black all she wants to, but that doesn’t make her Black. That’s not what race is and that’s not how race operates. 

[jewish-privilege]

How do you feel about people calling white-passing Ashkenazim white & saying they shouldn't call themselves otherwise? I'm a mostly white-passing Ashkenazim hearing this in a US community with a large Jewish population & relatively little antisemitism. In the context of my community, it certainly makes sense. But I also know folks in communities with few Jews where antisemitism impacts their daily lives. I think the statement worried me because it was so absolute and critical in its wording.

Do you mean a white-passing Ashkenazi Jew of color? Because that’s the only way "white-passing” makes sense to me in this context in the U.S. Race and ethnicity are not interchangeable in the way you’re using them. Ashkenazim can be white, Black, Asian; I’m a white Ashkenazi Jew. My whiteness doesn’t cancel out my Jewishness, and my Jewishness doesn’t automatically make me non-white (unless my race is being labeled by a white supremacist). Though I seem to have a different opinion than most other Jews on Tumblr.

The word I use the way you use “white-passing” in this sense is “gentile-passing” or “goy-passing.” Regardless of my opinion on this though, you can be white and pass as not-Jewish or gentile and still experience antisemitism and you can live in a city or place with a large Jewish population and experience antisemitism. Neither passing as non-Jewish or living in a large Jewish population necessarily shields you from antisemitism. 

I grew in Phoenix, Arizona, but I live in New York City, perhaps one of the “most Jewish” locations in the U.S., and gentile-pass pretty hard, but I still experience antisemitism. Neither my location nor my gentile-passing shields me from antisemitism.

[jewish-privilege]

can i ask a question? cause im a little bit confused... (this is coming from a non-jewish person) are jews white/considered white?

The best answer I can give you is: "It depends.” One good tag I have here regarding this is #yehudim levanim.

[jewish-privilege]

Okay so I'm still a bit confused, and google is no help; as you've explained, Jewish people are not white? So does this mean Jewish people are people of color? And how does this affect Jewish people who also happen to be white?

I have to state at the outset that not only did I not write the post you’re referring to, but I also disagree with it and think it’s based on a faulty understanding of race and ethnicity and how they operate worldwide and in the United States. The moderator who wrote that post has abandoned Tumblr and this blog, so in explaining I’m going to contradict a lot of what Joseph wrote because not only do I think he’s wrong, he also does not have a grasp over race, ethnicity, and socio-politics. 

People of color is a term that is not a catch-all for non-white people. It is a political, American term that was popularized to replace term “minorities” and includes only specific minorities. Jewish people as a group in and of itself is not one of those minorities. As an illustration, think about the Latinx ethnicity. I am not saying that being Latinx and being Jewish are the same, just that sometimes it’s necessary to use a comparison to clarify (for example, Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people while Latinx people don’t have a religion specifically tied to their peoplehood). Latinx-ness is an ethnicity, not a race. So what this means is a person can be Latinx and be white, Black, Asian, some mixture thereof, etc. Being white and Latinx doesn’t erase that person’s Latinx-ness; nor does it mean that that person is not subject to anti-Latinx bigotry and xenophobia or that that bigotry may operate along racial lines. The same theory holds true for Jewish people. 

Everyone in my immediate family is a white Jew. This includes my transethnic adopted self, my fellow transethnic adopted brother, my genetically-ethnic Jewish adopted brother, and my genetically-ethnic Jewish parents. We’re all Jewish and white. Being white does not mean that we aren’t Jewish or insulated from antisemitism or xenophobia, that antisemitism doesn’t operate along racial lines, or that white supremacists or some other groups see us as really white.

It also doesn’t mean that antisemitism is an example of “anti-white reverse racism.” First of all, there are Jews of every race. Second of all, people don’t hate Jews because we are white, people hate Jews because we are Jewish. White-ness, perceived or otherwise, has nothing to do with antisemitism. 

Instead of erroneously using the term “white-passing” to describe the passing that Joseph was talking about, I use the term “gentile-passing.” When white/white-skinned Jews are able to pass and blend into greater American WASP culture, we aren’t passing as being white, we’re specifically passing as white gentiles. Like the term “people of color,” “passing for white” means something specific and shouldn’t be universalized to describe all ethnic and racial experiences. 

Nuance may take longer, but when we are discussing social justice and bigotry we shouldn’t be lazy for the sake of boxing groups and people into boxes that are shaped incorrectly.

I’d recommend this following posts, which are in no particular order, for more information:

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/123796927844/i-just-read-your-post-about-jewish-people-not

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/123507569200/jewish-privilege-thegrumpyopinionist

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/154165425815/can-jews-still-assume-theyre-white

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/123908612020/i-think-a-lot-of-people-are-having-problems

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/148561084405/on-the-discussion-of-race-and-jewishness-ive

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/144102117065/questions-to-ask-yourself-before-saying-jews-are

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/142819494430/apologies-if-this-seems-like-a-stupid-question

http://jewish-privilege.tumblr.com/post/135777593931

http://agnellina.tumblr.com/post/132404387110/antisemitism-eu-agnellina-antisemitism-eu

[jewish-privilege]

idk if you're aware, but your "levanim yehudim" tag should probably be changed to "yehudim levanim," bc the way it looks right now, it feels like i'm reading "jews white" and it's just kind of jarring. that's all, keep up the great work up here!

So true story. I switched it once by accident (my fluency in Hebrew...isn’t) and tumblr keeps autocompleting to the wrongly ordered tag. Thank you for pointing it out to me! You aren’t the first, but hopefully this will be the last time it needs to be pointed out.