The hate crimes framework, conservative power, & Jewish resistance.
The Jewish left must stop using the conservative framework of “hate” to think about anti-Semitism and racism.
US Jewish communities are massively divided over how to respond to the anti-Semitism that has reared up in recent attacks. Many Jewish organizations and leaders have spoken against increased policing, against securitizing Jewish spaces and treating our neighbors as threats, and against the claim that Black and/or left communities are “dangerous” to Jews. An op-ed by Monsey’s Shimon Rolnitzky is one of the loveliest examples. Although they struggle to be heard, in this terrible and strangely hopeful moment, it’s a welcome change that they’re much less drowned-out than usual by the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, UJA-Federation, and other deep-pocketed Jewish organizations shored up by right-wing mega-donors and the Christian Right.
In fact, progressive Jewish groups are making such a dent that right-wing Jewish organizations have made an unusually clumsy, visible play to co-opt their language to get in front of it. “Safety through solidarity” is a leftist/progressive Jewish call to commit to people of color and Palestinians, particularly now for those who have been demonized in the wake of anti-Semitic attacks.
In an obvious panic, the ADL, AJC, UJA, Jewish Community Relations Council, and NY Board of Rabbis gave the name “Solidarity March” to their weekend rally for more policing, turning the meaning of solidarity away from people of color and toward themselves. The conflation is evident in a New York Times editorial, capped by this photo which (incredibly) uses progressive groups’ message to advertise the right-wing groups’ march.
This internal Jewish battle is completely historic. US Jews have been represented almost entirely by right-wing institutions since the anti-communist purges of 1950s. Leftist Jewish organizing, always vibrant, has been painted as not-actually-Jewish for 70 years. Now, Jewish groups who think about justice in terms of race, class, and colonialism are again rising as an entire cohort of mass organizations. It’s gorgeous.
But there is a piece of right-wing legacy that we have yet to shake off: hate crimes. “Hate crime” seems like a useful way to describe racial violence against people who urgently need defense — but it isn’t. In fact, right-wing Jewish organizations have built much of their power to dominate discussion of race, anti-Semitism, and Jewish safety through the single remarkable concept of hate crimes. We could call it a “rights industrial complex” or we could just say that “protecting rights” is such a powerful idea that of course right-wing forces have coopted it. (See also: “solidarity.”)
“Hate crimes” is a legal framework that identifies hatred for someone’s racial/ethnic identity as the motive for violence. Defining hate, training police and communities on how to deal with it, and educating students against it has been the making of the ADL. Since 1985 it has seen many, many millions of dollars in public contracts, and many millions more in grant funding, for projects on anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-queer hate. Through this work, the ADL has constructed close relationships with most of the school systems and police forces in the US. It’s also an authority for elected officials and media on all things hate-related — why should officials trust anyone more than the agency they’ve contracted to be the expert? Other right-wing Jewish organizations also get amazing mileage out of the hate crimes framework, as I’ll explain. And progressive, anti-racist organizations are marginalized by it.
Critics of the hate crimes framework point out that boiling racial hostilities down to “hate” hides the politics and the power contained in racial identities. More than skin color, race defines one’s political and economic position, and one’s power over others. Violence by powerful people punching down is an act of domination; in the other direction it can be an act of resistance. But the hate crimes framework says that punching up and punching down are the same, just motivated by bigotry. (By this logic, the AJC also claimed the Jewish Defense League’s anti-Arab bombings weren’t hate crimes, because they were “political.”) The hate framework also obscures racial violence that’s not illegal, like structural and environmental racism, while increasing the powers of racist systems of policing, punishment, and incarceration. Sociologist Ruth Frankenberg coined a helpful term to describe this abstract view of race and violence: “power evasive.” (It’s worth noting that things didn’t start out this way. Hate crimes laws were a contortion of efforts to response to white supremacist attacks on Black communities in the early 80s. Their aim was to protect the most basic exercise of citizenship: Black people’s ability to have homes, walk around in public, attend school and work, organize and vote.)
The hate crimes framework has put a massive thumb on the scale in favor of right-wing Jewish organizations. Some history helps explain it: by the mid-80s, US Jews had stopped being viewed as alien, climbed political and corporate ladders, and — at least in terms of power — become indistinguishable from WASPs. Accordingly the ADL’s director, Nathan Perlmutter, had concluded that anti-Semitism was no longer an issue for US Jews: the little incidents that persisted had to be challenged “on principle,” but they weren’t “pressing” because Jews had “made it.” Instead, the ADL and most other major Jewish institutions focused on Israel. With the election of Menachem Begin and the invasion of Lebanon, efforts to paint Israel as a utopian, egalitarian project lost steam; critiques of Israel violence and racism gained traction. Many Jewish organizations switched tactics, arguing instead that the US needed Israel as a strategic partner. But a moral argument, if they could manage it, held a different kind of power.
The hate crimes framework did the heavy lifting to reclaim a moral justification for this overtly right-wing, violent Israel. As the ADL continued to press anti-Semitic hate crime as an urgent matter (through legislation, in unspecific and eternally “spiking” statistics, and in its rapidly expanding anti-bias education programming) it helped reframe Israel in power-evasive terms. Even though US Jews had overcome anti-Semitism, a powerful militarized Israel was somehow necessary for their protection. Even though Israel was brutally dominating Palestinians, their resistance was framed as anti-Semitic hate and therefore immoral. At the same time, it was hate crimes work that positioned the ADL as very nearly a state agency: a partner for media, law enforcement, school systems, elected officials. The ADL was elevated as an interpreter of race, and of Israel, for the US public — to the deep detriment of movements led by people of color and progressives.
Measuring anti-Semitism through “hate” means other right-wing Jewish institutions have also been able to demand ever more protection from the state, without regard to the agency they already have or the power they exercise over others. (US strategic interests in Israel and Islamophobia didn’t hurt either.) The abstraction of hate is what allows the UJA and Jewish Community Relations Council — two sponsors of the “solidarity march” — to hire Mitchell Silber, the Islamophobic NYPD intelligence officer responsible for the horrifying Muslim surveillance program, and put him in charge of “protecting New York’s Jews.” It’s also what allows charges of anti-Semitic hate to be easily turned against progressive and leftist Jews, people of color challenging racism, and anyone who mentions Palestinian rights. This finally has a name, and a communal effort to stop it: it’s the weaponization of anti-Semitism.
Even as Jewish organizations are pushing back on weaponization, we have not yet collectively reckoned with the hate crimes framework. In this crucial moment, it’s urgent that we recognize the right-wing roots of the hate crimes frame, and the deeply conservative, anti-progressive bones on which major Jewish institutions have been built. That is a harder project than asserting that “these institutions don’t represent us.” It requires leftist Jewish groups refusing to replicate the old calls to “stand against hate” — even in ways that seem “more inclusive “— and insisting on calling power by its name. It requires, uncomfortably, critiquing a whole system of NGO work, including and far outside of Jewish communities, that limits how we think about racism and safety in the US. It’s a lot, but there’s so much momentum. As we’re undoing 70 years of the cooptation of left Jewish voices, I can’t imagine a more promising moment for getting it done.
This essay rests on groundwork laid by Kay Whitlock, Dean Spade, and other writers & organizers who have questioned how state offers of “protection from hate” (particularly to queers) amplify race-, gender-, and class-based state violence.
