The Sin and Shame of Apathy: On the Whiteness of the Jewish Community

As a white Jewish writer I don’t know how to talk about Ferguson, about Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, about race in general. Seeing pitfalls everywhere, I will try to heed the wisdom of Ralph Ellison. Ellison, in his book of essays the Shadow and the Act takes the venerable Jewish critic Irving Howe to task. Howe wrote a scathing review of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison’s work, accusing them of hiding their black rage, in contrast to Richard Wright, who Howe believes, offers a better model of the black writer. Ellison then accused Howe of writing in blackface, of presuming he can speak for the Black experience and here, I try to heed the warnings of Ellison. He understood that those outside the Black community, like Howe, could fall into dangerous thinking in trying to help and so can we. I cannot speak for the black experience. We need to listen, and learn how to listen.

In listening to black writers, in trying to understand this country’s blighted history, I’ve learned that we constantly silence or ignore black voices and that above all, we need to make space for those voices to resonate. But we also need to talk, and talk out loud. In an integrated world we could create spaces for dialogue, we could build on the relationships that reach across communities, but most of the people I talk to and with, Jewish and not Jewish, live in highly segregated worlds, so we need to start with an insular conversation. We need to question our communities, generally very segregated communities that can easily give lip service to diversity and anti-racist stances, without ever exploring the racism within our lives, our pasts, the structures of communities, or the sacrifice it requires to overcome our biases, our stake in the racist system persisting. Here’s an effort to start a dialogue that risks something in accepting culpability, in offending community sensibilities, a conversation that contains the necessary potential to hurt our entrenched, entitled, privileged self-images, to clear away some of the hindrances, the rationalizations that allow us not to listen, not to feel an urgent need to change and find ourselves complacent, willfully ignorant, even culpable.

To that end, I would be remiss not to point to some Black voices that are much more important than my voice. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates, listen to him. Read James Baldwin, Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Listen to Jelani Cobb and Saeed Jones and Roxane Gay and Audre Lorde and Claudia Rankine and Alice Walker and Rita Dove. (Here’s a helpful crowd-sourced syllabus to start). There is no lack of African American voices. The trouble is that we’ve been trained not to listen. Often we just drown out the voices of the oppressed in the total noise of our daily lives. Other times we view Black voices as out there, as not speaking to us, as somehow irrelevant to our lives. Or, and perhaps worse, we’ve been trained to listen in a sterile manner, to listen and judge them, to not to feel judged by what other people are saying about us. It’s so easy in this world to separate and imagine the world we cultivate for ourselves as the most important part of the world. We can easily feel filled and fulfilled by the small world in front of us that we can simply not hear the cries of the oppressed. Yet, there is no dearth of material to understand the history of American racism and the attending need for radical change requiring self-sacrifice. It’s not an argument that needs to be made. It is a history to learn. But to learn how to listen is to dismantle our biases, the one embedded in our most cherished beliefs. In doing so I know I will make mistakes, even offensive ones, but I see no other way around that. I welcome being wrong.

I grew up scared of black people. My environment reinforced the need to fear black people, or at least to be wary, cautious. My parents, teachers, and other adults provided advice like, “hold on to your keys, they can serve as weapons in bad neighborhoods.” I remember adults talking about the horror of a flat tire in those bad (i.e. black) neighborhoods. The cold dead fear of being swarmed by hooligans you could recognize by dreadlocks and terrifying low riding pants. I grew up watching absurdly and painfully conservative shows like Walker, Texas Ranger that envisioned a world run by paternalistic white men with guns. A world in which women are saved, repeatedly, and black people were either a lone, servile sidekick or gang members that needed defeating. We thought of police only as the good guys, inherently so, there to protect us, never integrating the fact that for many, the police are their enemies. We thought of America wholly as a kingdom of kindness. In my community, we called black people “schvartzes,” the Yiddish word for black, always said with haughty derision. My small neighborhood community told and retold that funny story of the time when a neighborhood Jewish kid shouted out “oh look a chocolate person” when a black person walked by. I grew up next to the Sephardic Jewish community that continues to refer to black people as “abid”, which translates as slave. I grew up in a community that knew black people mostly as hired help and as those people to avoid.

Until high school no one taught us much about black people, their plight, or of civil rights in general. In my all white all Jewish high school, we made fun of our white, not-religious teacher who preached about the plight of African Americans, the shame of the Jewish community for leaving them behind. We made fun of her, mimicking phrases we heard, calling her a bleeding heart liberal. We told ourselves stories of earlier, heroic students, including what I hope is an apocryphal story, a prank in which a student wrote the N-word in her class on a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. This story was funny to us. Stereotypes and biases persisted as I got older. At my recent high school reunion, in a slide show, we learned that in senior year a student dressed up as Mr. T., yes, in blackface, and no one said anything then or now. But when we finally did talk about racism, we told ourselves another narrative that supposedly challenged the racism in the Jewish community, the apathy.

I learned of the simplistic and often just dead wrong Jewish narrative about a golden age of Jewish civil rights leaders who teamed up with the Black community. I saw that one picture of Heschel walking with Dr. King and felt good about myself.

No one told me that Jewish fighting for civil rights was not widespread in the Jewish community (limited largely to the reform community and left-leaning socialist Jews), that it was often received and perceived as patronizing, as paternalistic, and that for as many Jews who fought for black people there were more who didn’t, who did nothing, and fought against change, who still do. No one talked about or explained why we ultimately left the fight behind when life got dramatically better for the Jewish people. (For those who do retreat into this claim there are many academic books that present the considerably more complex picture of Jewish involvement in racism and civil rights. The story is long and stands outside of the scope of this essay. I found this book a good place to start.)

And yet something still shocks me about the tepid response, the wholesale apathy of the Jewish community, our stubborn intransigence to forget history or remember in a way that reinforces our self-image as a good people. We need to stop repeating this historically simplistic story of the central role of the Jewish people in the civil rights movement, and start telling ourselves the painful story of our benefiting from the status of Black people in America. Like how in Harlem, in 1933, the Black boycott of shops under the slogan, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” was largely directed to Jewish shopkeepers. Or how in Harlem Jewish landlords made heaps of money by charging too much for apartments in terrible conditions. I hate to call out the Jewish community specifically, as if we do more harm than others in white communities. We don’t. The point is though that we are not special in our difference, in somehow standing outside of racism. I talk about my Jewish community because it’s what I know, the lens with which I still see the world. (I do worry that focusing on the Jewish community might turn the focus away from the actual urgency — African Americans and their voices. But I passionately believe that we, as a Jewish community, have never grappled with the conflicts of Jewish power, our complicity in racism, our need for deep repentance so we can radically change the system.)

Because here’s a far more accurate and more challenging narrative. Jews left the cities and moved to segregated suburbs as we gained more acceptance and more access to powerful institutions and positions. The discriminatory walls we fought against dropped and we, as a people, whether in the insular worlds of the far-right or in the pretty much similarly segregated worlds of more liberal Jews, we stopped fighting the civil rights fight, for complex reasons, but we stopped. Our values have become those of wealth and prosperity, especially relative to other minorities. We made it. We really did. Our problems are no longer ones of existential threats, but the problems of apathy and luxury. It should come as no surprise that we left the civil rights fight as we gained more power, as Israel gained more power, as nationalism became the rallying cry of the Jewish people. It’s absurd to me that we don’t talk about it in this way. Even the wildest of Biblical writers couldn’t fathom the extent of Jewish power today. The military might of Israel, the political, economical, cultural clout of American Jewish groups and communities are all unparalleled in our long history. But we never ask ourselves questions about this power. Mostly because we’ve told ourselves that they sound too much like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion so instead we talk about Jewish responsibility, the responsibility of a holy nation, a sort of paternalistic arrogant stance that sees us above looking down, thinking how we can help those poor souls.

We hide behind anti-Semitism of which we can always find episodic examples, still thinking of ourselves as victims who need to worry about our own survival. To still think of ourselves as oppressed victims in need of constant vigilance and yet retain so much power, makes our concerns seem archaic, cruelly ironic. No doors remain closed to us in America. Let that settle in. Absolutely no doors remain closed to us. No institutions shut us out, no form of government either, we’ve won pretty much every damn external battle for entry in America. We like to think of this progress as a mix of kindness, the goodness of the American government, and the fruits of our work, our intelligence. Some Jews, many of which I’ve encountered in my community say, “You are right. We were once a minority, discriminated against like black people and indeed we did work together to help each other, but we progressed and if they didn’t it’s because they made choices not to and we bettered ourselves, our situation. ”

Or, we tell ourselves, it is because we are special, smarter, better and we won’t apologize for all our hard work. Which is both just historically not true and also a truly reprehensible way to talk about ourselves and other people. The irony of power turning us inward, obsessed with our own limited myopic problems, is that we’ve never needed to worry less about ourselves, and that given our power we are in a unique position to help. Not because some purported singular one of a kind moral tradition behooves us too, but because our world, our power, is covered in sin. You cannot simply be powerful without it warping your character and personality and it’s made us morally weak and apathetic, obsessed with ourselves and even more obsessed with finding ways to buttress and increase our power.

We can also tell this story about the Jewish community as an interesting case of whiteness, of gained whiteness. Because I think the Jewish communities somewhat wholesale silence on our part speaks to a much larger, less admirable tension for a white person. Let’s be honest. It’s nice to be white. Life is really not so bad. I like my life. We have made it to a place of unfathomable comfort and happiness for the Jewish people. I actually have a pretty good life, even with the economy and all. My parents help me. I can afford a ridiculously priced apartment in the Upper West Side and so can most of my friends. We need to stop underestimating the power of our relative prosperity and comfort to blind us, to impede us from action. What type of people are we that can take comfort in our absurd luxury while other parts of our country, our neighborhoods burn from injustice? Seeing smoke everywhere else in America, we feel thankful that the fire hasn’t yet reached us. We Jews today are in many important ways no different from the white world we once saw ourselves as fighting against.

In that vein, here’s another very Jewish way to frame the problem. Jewish people love to say “never forget.” We demand justice and reparations, retributions, not only from people, but from the whole country of Germany. We like to talk about not letting even one Nazi get away. We show pictures of the American army forcing Nazis and regular bystanders to look at pictures of the horror they enacted and let happen, and this, we tell ourselves, is only the beginning of reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust. It will take countless generations for the world to heal, if at all possible, so we need constant remembrance, discussion and education. So let’s talk about racism that way. When has America ever done anything close to the reckoning that is required for the centuries old and persisting treatment of African Americans? Why don’t we, people who acutely know the value of that reckoning, cry about this? How many times are we going to enable the same evil without drastic change?

Some, in our community and worldwide, have the audacity to opine about post-racialness, or that racism isn’t as bad or doesn’t exist like it used to. They want studies, they want us to cite statistics, and require proof. “Prove to me otherwise,” they say. That’s the default. “It doesn’t look like racism to me.” To require proof of the existence of systemic racism is to flat out just not listen. What does it mean to require scientific analysis to prove that millions of people are accusing the white world of racism, of systemic racism? Proof, in these cases, is what dictators and assholes require. Just listen. Why isn’t that enough for some people? This is not a subject that ought to require tact, or subtlety or diplomacy. To take the other side on this is to get into the territory of frightening evil — it’s that huge and the central part of the American story. It is not some quibbling footnote in the glorious history of America. It is the main story, the overarching narrative, and we ought to treat it that way.

Let’s say that something, even just a kernel of what I say rings true. Why don’t we then try an experiment. What if, for the next two weeks, or even just one day, we only discuss how pretty much most of the aspects of our American lives, the economic, cultural, political, all are built on one of the greatest sins in the last 1000 years. And we never talk about it. We allow ourselves to bring it softly and slowly, in a digestible manner. But how do you digest the evil in our society, the sort of basic framework of our world. We need to force the question, at our Sabbath tables, even if it evokes discomfort, especially because it scares us. I am convinced that the more you read American history, the more you will feel the weight and shame and burden of our American sin.

None of this disregards the anti-Semitism in the African American community, both historically and perhaps currently, but it does say that we cannot use that as an excuse to not explore our own power and racism, the way our power, our attaining whiteness, has made us complicit in the long and horrific history of racism in this country. In 1992 Henry Louis Gates Jr. famously took his community to task for the pockets of nefarious anti-Semitism. But where is the commensurate response?

In that same essay, Ellison writes a paragraph hard to fathom today. The tone is likely partly ironic, telling Howe something like “I’d prefer you just left us alone, because this type of help only makes it worse”, but it is powerful nonetheless:

If I would know who I am and preserve who I am, then I must see others distinctly whether they see me so or not. Thus I feel uncomfortable whenever I discover Jewish intellectuals writing as though they were guilty of enslaving my grandparents, or as though the Jews were responsible for the system of segregation. Not only do they have enough troubles of their own, as the saying goes, but Negroes know this only too well.

Can we honestly say to ourselves that this is still true? Do our own problems still preclude us from helping the Jewish people of American History, as some historians refer to African Americans? Ellison was right that I cannot be guilty for the sins of the past, but the problem persists to this day. We didn’t enslave grand and great grandparents of the Black community today, but we are ensconced in the power structures that continue that legacy. We benefit from it, we reinforce it, we segregate our communities, leave our biases and hate unchallenged. Even in a more generous light, who are we if we use this gained power only to help ourselves? The time is now. Read books. Listen. Watch. Listen more. Challenge your belief and biases ask yourself if possibly what other people are saying about us as part of white America is true without simply swiping it aside. Black lives matter. Let’s start acting like we actually believe this.