Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 20, 2020

Thirty years ago, Kimberl Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women. The theory of how different forms of discrimination interact is a useful tool to recognize the way privilege and oppression overlap. It can serve to challenge notions about oppressions and hierarchies, class struggles and racial divides.

Identifying Jews as white in the context of American history is not only a perversion of the Jewish past but a denial of its peoplehood. In American politics, white implies one who is a beneficiary of the past 500 years of European exploration and exploitation. It is identified with control, dominance and exclusivity hardly accurate characteristics of Jewish history.

While in the past 50 years American Jews have enjoyed privileges associated with hierarchical whiteness, only a collective amnesia would preclude us from recalling just how recently Jews were still barred from exclusive hotels, unwelcome in select restaurants, country clubs and even neighborhoods, and restricted by elite universities that had a Jewish problem (i.e too many Jews), forcing them to limit Jewish registration by implementing quotas.

It is nearly impossible to imagine that any other group who had one out of every three of its members wiped out in a six-year span would be considered privileged. This narrative, however, is facilitated by the absorption of Jewishness into whiteness, which is both an erasure of Jewish ethnicity and misrepresentation of the dynamic Jewish identity.

Jewishness as whiteness obscures the unique and often oppressed experiences of Jews, including those of Sephardic, Arab, African or Middle Eastern descent. It also accentuates and accelerates antisemitic tropes based on Jewish power.

Although Sarsour tried walking back her word choice, the linking of white supremacism to Israel a country that is distinctively Jewish was intentional. White supremacism is an acceptable identifier even if it obfuscates the Jewish experience and demographic reality whereas Jewish supremacism sounds reactionary and bigoted.

The discourse associating Jews with power based on their perceived whiteness is particularly threatening given the centrality of the myth of Jewish hegemonic pursuit in the repertoire of historic antisemitism.

Along these same lines on the left, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party has become a safe space for antisemites.

From ancient through medieval times, the fear of a secret Jewish conspiracy to dominate both the economy and government was used to justify antisemitic violence. Later, the Nazis capitalized on old Christian themes of secret Jewish dominance to propagandize and mobilize support for their Jewish liquidation program. Today, that fear has been expanded by modern anti-Semites to the point of caricature to include the media, global markets and geopolitical stability.

Framed according to this trope, a paradox develops: Not only is the Jewish experience lost in whiteness, but Jewishness serves to epitomize whiteness vilest iteration. A white Jew is not only powerful but hyper powerful. He is not only exploitative and manipulative but the arch puppeteer, controlling world affairs.

While intersectionality can be a valuable tool, it has been ineffective in the case of white Jews. The result is a dangerous distortion of the Jewish experience its history, diversity and challenges.

Although Jewish skin comes in every shade reflecting the diversity of a people that spans the globe and is all at once an ethnicity, nation and religion some of its whitest members endured a genocidal program that prompted the world to proclaim Never Again.

Originally posted here:

The narrative of intersectionality fails Jews - The Jerusalem Post

Category: Sephardic
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