America isn’t ready for a Jewish president because American Jews aren’t ready to destabilize their Whiteness
Bernie Sanders: [Laughter] Well, obviously for us it’s the end of our effort to become President of the United States.
Though his movement will live on, the Sanders campaign has wound down to what looks like his final moments on the national electoral stage. As the analysis of his loss to Joe Biden comes in, there’s been little public thesis that being a Jew was an issue for his candidacy. To the contrary, analysts claim the opposite- that aside from outright bigots, Americans are beyond electoral anti-Semitism. With any of the other diverse candidates such an argument would be considered almost universally naive, if not explicit bias.
As the 2020 candidates jockeyed for various concepts of “lanes” and ultimately thinned to Biden and Sanders, the notion quickly emerged that the primary had boiled down to two septuagenarian white men. It was right to underline the departure of the other diverse candidates and right to mark that as more significant for America than the distinctions between Biden and Sanders’ whiteness. In the current framework of colorism- discrimination based on skin tone -they are equivalent. But to place Biden and Sanders as the same in the context of bias is a false equivalency that points to our confusion around what it means to be a Jew in America, what it means to be white, and how to talk, even about inclusion, in an inclusive way.
At issue is not Sanders’ skin tone (very white) or his white privilege, but erasure of his Jewishness and anti-Jewish bias from the conversation. Colorism is not the basis for all hate, now or historically. Is Sanders not a minority candidate who would make history as the first President who doesn’t pray to Jesus? Are Jews at 0.2% of the world population not a minority? As Americans are we so pro-Christian in our bias that this doesn’t cross our mind? As Jews are we too fearful of the repercussions to speak up when we’re being invisibilized? Did a significant piece of America not know or choose not to acknowledge that Sanders is a Jew?
As will unfold in layers, this piece is in part about holding the impossibility of addressing prevalent and global anti-Jewish bias adequately in America without people who are Jewish and white doing the emotional and community to work to address the history of Jewish whiteness in America. We must look at the Jewish community’s participation and benefit from the myth of the white race over the past 150 years, even as many of us come from families who faced and were murdered by European white supremacists, and experience anti-Jewish bias in our lived experience.
This piece is also not about hashing out whether Jews who look white from twenty feet are or aren’t white. They’re white. And not only do they appear white, from the end of the 19th Century and throughout the 20th, American Jews actively and shamefully claimed and defended their whiteness through slave ownership, support of Jim Crow, creating their own minstrel shows, and reinforcing the myth of the white race as Jews perceived it to serve them.
But whiteness in America is a layered force not only defined by the vector of colorism. Reducing Sanders to “white” and not being able to talk about his Jewish identity in a more meaningful way is evidence of our collective, subtle anti-Jewishness and of Jewish invisibility. It also points to how binary our thinking on these issues has become compared to where we have been able to navigate the conversation towards with gender and sexuality- more layered, spectral, and defined by a respect for personal history and meaning. We can do better, and we must.
To go deeper, we need to hold in our minds, unequivocally: there is no biological basis for the existence of race, it is a social construct. There is no white race. There is no black race. Jews are not a race. Asian and Latinx people are not a race. Genetic studies that claim otherwise are misusing the data and are examples of scientific racism. When the word “race” is used in this writing, it is used to talk about the social phenomena of racialization- a phenomena invented to build and actualize white supremacy, is dependent on the myth of the white race to continue.
The Biden/Sanders false equivalency was portrayed smoothly with erasure by the progressive, national, and international media. Some examples: the progressive Common Dreams published a story called “Not Just ‘Two Old White Men” within which there was no mention of Sanders being a Jew. Aimee Allison who co-founded the import political organization advocating for women of color She The People was quoted in Politico as saying “What privilege is, is that white men get to be the default, they get to be the regular, they get to be the fallback position. And then everybody else ... is the other, is the exception, is the risk.” This may be true, but is electing a Jew really the fallback position? Would we feel that about a Buddhist, a Muslim, a white-passing POC? In Vogue, the same, no mention that Sanders is Jewish. BBC, no mention Sanders is Jewish. There are endless examples of “woke” writing about the election that fail to mention, nevermind explore in a supportive framework, his Jewishness and anti-Jewish bias.
There have been pieces explicitly claiming that Sanders’ Jewishness is a non-issue and it’s just that Americans won’t vote for a socialist, which though he has identified that way in thepast, his current platform and identification does not suggest. The author of this particular article acknowledges that while violent anti-Semitism has been on a rise in the USA and globally, they point to a highly suspect Gallup poll on bias which would have us believe that 96% of Republicans would vote for a Black presidential candidate and that essentially everyone in America would be happy to elect a Jew. You can’t probe all forms of bias by asking people if they have that bias- it’s only the die-hard self-identified supremacists and xenophobes who’ll say outright that they hate or make decisions based on it. As a society we’ve been having this conversation: bias is subtle and systemic- it’s not something you can measure only through the most terrifying and violent symptoms.
Instead we might poll what percentage of the 85% of Americans who believe in heaven would vote for a President who is going to hell. There are many reasons Bernie couldn’t carry the South, but we are ignoring loud and familiar voices in the room: the historically expansive and ongoing anti-Semitism within Christianity, pro-Christian bias in the electorate (the linked study is for this year), and the fact that the Bible Belt States are the least religiously diverse and tolerant collection of States in the country. Several of these states have never sent a Jew to Congress- why would we expect them to elect a Jewish President? Three of these states don’t have hate crime legislation to this day. Is it a surprise to hear that Vermont, where Bernie managed to have such an idiosyncratic political rise, is the least religious State in the Country or that his base is much less religious than other candidates? Often we’ve been informed that Vermont is the whitest, but it’s also only 1% Jewish.
Why is it that the minority status of other candidates is so openly discussed as an issue complicating their success, a reason for progressive support even- but with a Jew, we don’t? There is space enough to discuss how the identity of every candidate impacts the way we see them, how that identity has shaped their politics, how they are characterized in the media, and responded to by society. The answer is the simple one and the same as with other forms of bias: anti-Jewish bias is universal, systemically reinforced by non-Jews and Jews alike, is tricky to put your finger on in its current formulation, and it is a form of bias that we aren’t yet comfortable or versed talking about. Until we can, it will be subject to erasure.
We had the opportunity to have a public conversation around basic questions facing any Jew or any non-Christian in a national election and chose silence instead: is there a ceiling on their candidacy because they aren’t Christian? Is there a different strategy that must be taken to address this bias head-on, as Sanders did not. Are the criticisms of Sanders’ character and electability often dog whistles we’ve heard used to invalidate other minority candidates like angry, unpresidential, not complimentary enough- they are.
Bernie says he is white. He’s known for his highly consistent and impassioned railing against systems of institutional oppression and has chosen to represent his own position in this mix as a man, as working class, and as white- same as Joe Biden. The equivalency we are presented with at the end of his presidential run is one he set up without qualification. When asked, Bernie will mention his Jewishness and in some contexts write passionately about it. But in a national setting, he ensures that the complexity of his Jewish identity does not diminish his public acknowledgment that his life experience and political life are colored by his white and male privilege. To do otherwise, would be disingenuous to the current framework for race in America, even flawed and at its essence a fantasy designed for oppression and control.
His career has been one of fighting to be an effective, forceful ally and amplification for voices who do not have access to the power he has been able to generate for himself. There was likely no other way for him to be the kind of politician he has been, pursuing his agenda, and also claim his Jewishness more thoroughly and more publicly. And so he has been criticized harshly by the Jewish electorate. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, but the Black left’s critique of President Obama not representing his Blackness or addressing the Black community as they had hoped, often conveyed on Tavis Smiley and Cornell West’s show at the time (which in turn generated it’s own backlash)- is related to the dynamics we see with Sanders and layers of the Jewish community. But even with his white skin, to generate sizable political capital as a minority, never mind enough to be president, is a tightrope dance. And it’s incredibly easy to be pushed off.
There is no question that white privilege has been part of the Sanders story, the story of most (light skinned) Jews in the USA, and at various points in history a central piece of the story for Jews in other countries (e.g. several instances of colonialism in Africa where Jews were considered white). Like other light-skinned groups, those who can visually pass as white in America are often treated as white and keep quiet to ensure this treatment continues. Jews became white in America, taking refuge from places they were not. Regardless of other facets of identity, colorism is a parallel process to other biases around whiteness and from this perspective anyone who looks white enough simply is. Colorism is how white privilege is groomed, but it’s important to emphasize that colorism is not built from “white” down, but from the darkest skin up. Within the Black community there is a 2x incarceration rate based on skin tone and so there isn’t a Pantone color for where white privilege begins, it fades in slowly and levels out, modulated by other dimensions of identity.
But accepting a colorist judgement as the totalizing force for one’s sense of self and history is not a productive off-ramp from a society poisoned by colorism. Nor is colorism an adequate explanation for all facets of American whiteness or white privilege. Every Person of Color knows this to their core- you can’t let society tell you who you are, what your potential is, or what you represent based on your skin tone. This is also true of those with light skin, but as the results tend to be privileged ones or seen as beneficial, white-passing people often choose to stay silent.
In situations where there is a platform for expanding the conversation around these systems of oppression, we must. And so while Sanders has benefited from this form of bias and the associated privilege- and has used this privilege as an effective ally -he also hasn’t been forced into a white identity just as passing member of another race would not be forced to identify as white.
Nobody is born thinking white any more than they are born thinking about protesting women’s (their mother’s) rights- “being white” is something we learn and choose to perpetuate. Based on their history and lived experience throughout their history as a people why should Jews, in particular, show allegiance to whiteness? Even if they believe there is a present-moment strategic benefit to whiteness and should not let “being white” tell their story for them. But to undo this will take generations of emotional labor, and that work is long overdue. To quote the editorial introduction of Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey’s journal Race Traitor:
. . . anti-racism admits the natural existence of “races” even while opposing social distinctions among them. The abolitionists maintain, on the contrary, that people were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as “white” because they were favored. Race itself is a product of social discrimination; so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail. The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.
Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.
Jews are a diverse people, racialized collectively as something we could call “off-white” in America. Most Jews in the USA are mixed Middle Eastern / Europeans known broadly as “Ashkenazi” (which just means “German” in Hebrew, another red herring in the system) — and because of this mixed-ness end up looking anywhere from fully Mediterranean to fully European. As is the case with all genetic melange, in the same family people can look quite different and have differing skin tones. Often Jews point to commercial DNA testing services for proof of false purity- but these technologies can look back only ~500 years and so over-identifies Jews through correlations in Eastern Europe and can’t identify where those people arrived there from. So most Jews who have done a DNA test are told they are 90%+ Ashkenazi Jew, which isn’t the truth, it’s just what can be measured at the moment.
To complicate things further there are Jews of all races scattered all over the world in various Diasporas. It will come as a surprise to most Americans to know that not all Jews have any European ancestry. ~70% of Palestine’s Jewish population are Mizrahi Jews (no European ancestry). There are 150,000+ Ethiopian Jews, many mixed race Jews all over the globe, and many Jews of Color in America and beyond. Jews of all shades exist and almost all, if genetics is a consideration are mixed origin. Beyond the specific cultural history of the United States, as a people, Jews can not be considered white in a blanket way. But in the non-MAGA American consciousness, Jews in a global sense are now considered white because they are Jews- and this “Ashkenormativity” as it is called in the Jewish community, points to the colorism in play within the Jewish community as well. For a sense of these dynamics, read through The Privilege Checklist published by The Jewish Multiracial Network.
None of this undoes Sanders as a white-passing individual member of American society or make it inaccurate for him to identify himself as a white in the contexts he has been navigating. But as a Jew, or as anyone passing as white- owning one’s white privilege, seeing the ways in which it has advantaged you- this is not the end of your moral obligation to participate in undoing whiteness and white supremacy- it’s psychologically step one. And for now, we are still fighting for a majority of the Country to acknowledge that such privilege and systemic white supremacy exist. But for Jews, leaving Jewish identity in America to be simply “white” is a way to opt out and take a too early offramp from the confrontation American (and indeed the global) society needs to have with whiteness. It also forces Jews to warp their own sense of self, family history, and connection to their own heritage in a continuance of enabling the power of whiteness to define society.
When Noel Ignatiev, Russian Jew and author of How the Irish Became White was interviewed in 1997 in the New York Times he was asked:
Q: You’re white. Do you hate your own hide?
A: No, but I want to abolish the privileges of the white skin. The white race is like a private club based on one huge assumption: that all those who look white are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to the race. We want to dissolve the club, to explode it.
This is the answer of a lifelong anti-racist and labor activist. Being an anti-racist ally for people of color (and for humanity), is not only compatible with standing up strongly and representing oneself as a racialized Jew, it requires it. We should give voice to non-allegiance to this club, even if it doesn’t fit neatly in the current parlance of liberal discourse. He was then asked:
Q: What can a white person do to explode the club?
A: Be reverse Oreos. Defy the rules of whiteness — flagrantly, publicly. When someone makes a racial slur in your presence, say ‘’You probably think I’m white because I look white.’’ Challenge behaviors that reproduce race distinctions.
Q: You’d do this in a bar full of rednecks?
A: That depends a lot on the situation. Challenging people on their whiteness can lead to harsh confrontations, even blows. Sometimes that can’t be helped. But since we don’t accept labeling people, I’d ask you: What’s a redneck?
Bernie has been operating in xenophobic bars for a long time- not least the one we call “Congress” -and thus his choices reflect the tensions one might feel in such a bar if one were also trying to walk a political tightrope and repair the world. And Ignatiev, for all of his collectivist optimism is now the subject of far more video portraits by white supremacists obsessed with actual, not symbolic “white genocide” and “white replacement” conspiracy mumbo jumbo and misuse his work to prove the Jewish conspiracy to make this happen.
Identity politics in America have evolved in drastic ways since the flimsy “Diversity Awareness” tracks of the late 1990s, through Political Correctness, and now to “Wokeness” — but where we’ve ended up still seems more fearful and confused than the sharp critiques of whiteness we find in the work of deep thinkers and activists like James Baldwin or Ignatiev. To think about this, let’s review the current liberal/woke framework for Jewish whiteness.
The brief essay I’m Jewish, and I’m white neatly sums up the liberal/woke position which is simply: except for Jews of Color, Jews are white. The bullet points are legitimate, key concerns from any compassionate person who has done a bit of thinking on racism and white supremacy. But this is all it is- if you are too fearful of veering into doing the wrong thing that you want to avoid a stronger confrontation with these issues and confront yourself, it’ll tell you what to do. The prescription is: a Jew’s moral obligation is to maintain the garden of whiteness rather than participate in it’s abolition through disavowal. The author argues that Jews need to accept the simple truth that they are white or else they are squirming away from their responsibilities as an anti-racist ally and creating additional harm:
We experience and benefit from white privilege
Distancing ourselves from whiteness effects people of color
Distancing ourselves from whiteness effects Jews of color, specifically
Identifying as white isn’t aligning oneself with whiteness
These statements play upon our feelings of responsibility to do the right thing and not lazily choose to select ourselves out of whiteness. But it’s just not enough and it’s not a method for working to provide an offramp psychologically for people to more deeply confront the familial construction of their white identity.
The last bullet is just left there hanging — and it is not a self-evident statement. Everyone of all shades is responsible for taking part in the undoing of white supremacy in order that more of us can find unity. But the community doing the least emotional labor are people who are white or can pass as white — and this emotional labor is what’s missing from the liberal prescription. We should refuse the idea that white-passing people, especially Jews and other groups who themselves know what it feels like to be othered and discriminated against based on who they are, potential allies to the abolition of whiteness should just accept that they are white and tend the roses- this is a form of loyalty to whiteness that must be rejected.
Advocating the abolition of the white race is distinct from what is called “anti-racism.” The term “racism” has come to be applied to a variety of attitudes, some of which are mutually incompatible, and has been devalued to mean little more than a tendency to dislike some people for the color of their skin. Moreover anti-racism admits the natural existence of “races” even while opposing social distinctions among them. The abolitionists maintain, on the contrary, that people were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as white because they were favored. Race itself is a product of social discrimination, so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail.
The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.
-Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, 1996
So we should see Bernie’s versioning of Jewish identity for different contexts as strategy- the character of which I consider to be a miscalculation very much of the conflicted history and politics of his time, nothing he should be faulted for or judged harshly by. As a 77 year old progressive Jew from Brooklyn, he inherited the remnants of leftist ideals held by his parents' generation, but also their desire to fit into the higher society, particularly for their kids to fit in and avoid the explicit hate they endured- while legally “Caucasians” on the racial/racist scorecard, Jews at that time did not feel white as they do today, they became white.
New York City was, from the 1920s until the ’50s the center of an idealistic communist movement, with Jews as the majority stakeholder in it. But after their near extermination in Europe during WWII came to pass and McCarthyism persecuted “Hollywood” as a smokescreen for taking down prominent Jews more locally, Jews retreated and worked on becoming ethnically invisible, which means becoming white by abandoning your tells. Perhaps due to his radical politcs and perhaps in part due to this continued desire for invisibility, only 11% of Democratic voters preferred Sanders for the nomination this year. If you include Bloomberg at 8%, that’s still less than 20% of Jews who would choose to make history and vote for a candidate who is a Jew.
During the same time period that Jews were cultivating their invisibility, overt white supremacy in America was raging- principally against Black Americans, but also against Jews. American supremacists have been following the antisemitic playbook The Protocols of the Elders of Zion since Henry Ford translated it into English and had a half-million copies distributed in 1920. It speaks to the immense power of publication that Jews have been fleeing persecution under the creative logics of these texts for generations. And these riffs on Jewish power leaked into the consciousness of everyday people in the way stereotypes do- through cultural production like radio, tv, film, newspaper coverage etc. That American Jews convinced themselves of their own whiteness during this period of time is a remarkable achievement in collective self-delusion. But the strategy also kinda worked- and Jews moved into areas of the culture they had previously not been, even if under white pseudonyms — and slowly their invisibility was normalized and it wasn’t only Jew who believed they were white, much of the country had been seeded the idea and it took hold.
Jews get stuck between American white identity racists (and much of the world) who ardently think Jews aren’t white and a coalition of liberal anti-racist whites and people of color who claim Jews are white on the basis of colorism, though we don’t often differentiate. It’s not that this whole system of racialization was created logically and we can sort it out in those terms. But being Jewish, like any other more visually obvious identity features that have been racialized, stereotyped and subject to bias- it’s something you do not get to choose or can easily modify, nor does it’s factual basis have any advantage in day to day operation over it’s mythology. For the purposes of subtle bias or overt hatred, Jewishness has nothing to do with whether you keep Kosher or “how Jewish” you are in a religious sense- this is invisible to most non-Jews. If you aren’t sure on the generic status of Jews, ask around at your local white power message board or do some Twitter caving and there will not be a nuanced perspective on Jewish whiteness past or present: Jews are not white. They have never been white. They will never be white. Why? Because they’re Jews. There is not skin white enough to convince these folks that Jews are white- it’s not a colorist-contingent form of hate — and this is also true for the more subtle forms of anti-Semitism.
When did anyone become white in America? There is a legal basis for this historically and can be answered superficially on that level as: The Naturalization Act of 1790 said that only those who were “free and white” could be citizens. At this time, Jews we both free and considered white. It wasn’t until 1868 (14th Amendment) that Black Americans were guaranteed citizenship. But to answer on this level would suggest that another group today could be legally “made white” and avail themselves of the privileges whiteness has to offer or that, for example, the 14th Amendment could have done so. Contemporary whiteness doesn’t operates like this.
You might think: Jews are Caucasian, isn’t that the same as white? The Census and every other government form would have you believe this is a genetic or geographic category of merit. But even “caucasian” is a racist invention, the theory of German scientist Johannes Blumenbach who, at the end of the 1700s as update to his teacher Linnaeus (forefather of all taxonomy), categorized humans as Caucasians (the superior light skinned people, he thought), Ethiopians, Mongolians, Americans (Native Americans), and Malays. These distinctions can be debunked any number of ways by more contemporary analysis of genetics or geography, but nonetheless have persisted in somewhat revised form in the legal systems and demographic taxonomies of many countries.
A succinct expression of how contemporary whiteness works can be found in Gregory Rodriguez’s 2009 LA Times piece The Dark Side of White through the words of a retired Mississippi sheriff:
“Are Lebanese white people?” we asked the 71-year-old gentleman who considered himself white. “Yes,” he said, “although they’re real dark.” How about Italian Catholics; are they white? Sure. And Jews? Yes. What about the Chinese? “Yes,” he said, “they go to the white schools.” And Mexicans? “They’re becoming more white,” he said. “More of them are getting an education.”
But a severely and overtly racist right wing government, like today’s Hungary, or Trump in a third term — will they at some point take a look at a cross section of statistics like crime rate, educational achievement, class status, vibe, and make a decree that yes, some model minority group or two has in fact, thoroughly become white? This would be an effort aimed not to empower this group but to further disempower groups left “un-white”. This happens all the time in subtle ways- as immigration policies include and exclude due to bias. Whiteness in various forms, not all colorism-based is actively policed not only by the most extreme white supremacist groups, but by state actors all over the world. The example of white supremacists developing a strange worship for Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad is just one example.
And so once again, do we want to maintain the garden of whiteness in hopes that we can grow everything into white? Is there some scenario when we will all become equally white? At the apex point of Peak Whiteness what happens? Does everyone look at each other and toast to the victory and meritoriousness of the inclusive notion of whiteness? Would we be celebrating just how amazing it is that all of these beautiful people who used to have rich and fascinating stories and heritage have now become white and shop at J Crew? Who gives the final stamp of approval? This will never happen and if it did, is this even the society we want?
And so, as Ignatiev suggested in the 90s, it is a better long term plan for society to begin the process of disavowal- to decide this is not the garden we are cultivating. This doesn’t mean embracing a post-racial or post-colorist fantasy- no- just the opposite! It means we burn down the garden and plant a new one together.
This is a strategy that “off-white” or “white-adjacent” groups, like Jews, have a strong roll to play in sorting through and advocating for alongside people of color and other marginalized groups — we need to build an offramp from this system.
There is no “white” race or geographic motherland- let’s not give credence to these myths, let’s reject them outright. It’s not that Hitler’s philosophical error was that he didn’t include Jews, Romas and LGBTQ people as Aryan, it’s that his whole cosmology was a fractal dumpster fire of a nation’s bile and misdirected malcontent.The current mythology of whiteness is a hangnail of European racism, implemented in America for social control and it has come to infect everything around it.
In Jeffrey Perry’s introduction to the Second Edition of Theodor Allens’ Invention of the White Race Vol. 2 he summarizes Allen’s research findings on how the notion of “white” was invented in America:
. . .the ruling class invented the “white race” as a social-control mechanism in response to the labor solidarity manifested in the later, civil-war stages of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges in order to define and establish the “white race”; and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.
When the word was introduced “white”, “Christian”, “English”, and “Free” were used interchangeably for many years. This whole scenario post-Bacon’s Rebellion was a conscious scheme to construct the mythological whiteness for the purposes of systemic oppression we have of non-white people today. At some point this system and its psychic damage will need to be cut out from each of us and replaced with something more loving and more true. There is nobody for whom this is more true than people who have drifted into white supremacy as teenagers online, or kids indoctrinated by their parents. My first experience of overt anti-Semitism was in 2nd or 3rd grade when “Kylie” approached me and said “You should have been burned with all of the books” which of course left me dumbfounded because I had no idea what she was talking about. I’m sure she didn’t either.
James Baldwin’s On Being White . . .and Other Lies is a brief essay, but master codex for understanding how these processes went to work on various groups as they struggled to ensure they would not be treated as Black and the complexity of loss involved. He is writing of all groups who became white in America (Irish, Italian, Greek, etc) but of Jews he says:
It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants — that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate.
If you are a Jew it doesn’t take much digging to find your own stories of cultural abandonment- what we gave away -and we all should. In many cases you will find they are stories whose loss has not been acknowledged nor mourned. Here’s one of mine: one of my grandfathers was named Carl Marx Silver by his father, Louis Silver who had been in the Bund, a Marxist anti-czarist resistance movement in Russia. He was sent to and escaped from Siberian prisons twice. But it wasn’t until his son Carl’s death that I knew or anyone mentioned what the “M” was for. He became a doctor (as Carl M.), joined the country club, had three kids, didn’t go to synagogue except on high holidays, got a small house on a lake in New Hampshire and abandoned all radical politics. Elsewhere in the family there’s a handful of generations where they were the principal rabbinical dynasty in Transylvania. Fast forward a couple generations and nobody believes in a Jewish formulation of God, life, or death, nevermind studied the Talmud to adjudicate regional disputes. After seeing six million of your ethnic group murdered in the middle of the 20th Century, many Jews left a lot behind while taking cover, trying to pass as white Americans. Can you blame them?
Bernie represents the entirely normalized situation for the 90% of Jews who are not Orthodox or Jews of Color: blend in and hope nobody notices the slippages in your white identity. Talk about your Jewishness only in the safety of other Jews. Seeing oneself as white is the the norm. To get there, our families changed our names, got a nose jobs, straightened their hair, eradicated Yiddish, and keep quiet. To become white is to successfully blend in to the fabric of white society and evade overt identification- it seems in only one or two generations what was lost can become almost impossible to retrieve.
In the Village Voice’s 1993 The White Issue Rabbi Michael Lerner Michael Lerner articulates something that brings a new dimension into our exploration:
“In the context of American politics, to be “white” means to be a beneficiary of the past 500 years of European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world — and hence to “owe” something to those who have been exploited. So when Jews are treated as white in the United States, the assessment is not a crude physical one but a judgment of Jewish culture and civilization, history and destiny.
But Jews can only be deemed “white” if there is massive amnesia on the part of non-Jews about the monumental history of anti-Semitism (which continues to play an important role in European politics today even after Europeans did their best to murder us all off), combined with the willful accommodation of Jews who have unconsciously internalized the anti-Semitic demands of the larger culture.”
To expand our sense of this, let’s take the case of Indigenous people in America. They were here before there was a concept of white — and they were subject to genocide, repression, imprisonment, and other atrocities by people we now call white (English Christians). There are people within this group who pass as white within the framework of colorism, like Jews. So we could say they are “Indigenous and white” in the way that Jews who pass identify as “Jewish and white” — but there is something violent about this assertion that we should acknowledge. To call a Indigenous person white, even as a secondary descriptor, is to force them to identify themselves with their oppressor. I’m not comfortable with this as an ethical formulation and points to the failure of enforcing colorism as a logic in all circumstances for all people.
“How can you deny, the argument goes, that here, in this country, Jews have assimilated so well into the mainstream that they have won all the benefits of whiteness, and hence must assume its historic responsibilities as well? . . . Quite apart from the fact that this argument leaves out the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have not “made it” the way their Manhattan brothers and sisters may have, it is wrong because it misunderstands the specific nature of Jewish oppression.
As feminists and gay theorists have shown, oppression operates in ways that cannot be reduced to material well-being (or lack thereof). And Jewish oppression has its own specific forms. Jews have repeatedly been offered a devil’s deal by European societies: You can move out of the position of the “most oppressed” if you become the public face of oppression to the rest of the society, the middle men (and, increasingly, women) who will represent the elites of wealth and power to the powerless.”
This, beyond the double-bind Jewish whiteness within the framework of colorism is another, codified in The Protocols for ease of transmission: you can not separate the idea that Jews have elevated themselves out of being a hated minority and become part of the oppressive majority (white) from the anti-Semitic trope that they’ve done so because they have out-sized power and control over society, and almost universal wealth. To Lerner’s point, a third of all Holocaust survivors living in America are impoverished. But this isn’t where the story ends.
The trope goes that the slice of power the Jewish minority has, given their small numbers in terms of population, is due to some trickery, magic, “powerful Jewish lobby” or other hard to figure out deal with the devil. From here, all good anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are born, for example the one leading to chants of “Jews will not replace us” in Virginia a few years ago, which is an expression of the theory that Jews are orchestrating massive waves of immigration to replace white people in America and Europe. At the time most Jewish people I knew were baffled by this chant’s actual meaning- had Jews figured out a way to birth at ~10x the rate of other Americans?
Of course there are Jews who lobby and there are Jewish groups who lobby, but in the 2020 election cycle so far, the Pro-Israel lobby is #40, behind accountants, publishers- just above general contractors (and far behind the influence of Christian religious groups). The non-factual myth of outsized Jewish power and influence is used to deauthenticate vitriol directed at Jews as anti-Semitism and instead a rational response to an obvious and organized cabal. This is now even more tangled up with dual allegiance tropes that assume Jews are supports of or have power in the right wing policies of the nation State of Israel (which of course they don’t). The interlocking components of antisemitic tropes make them hard to confront.
Do Jews need to more actively ensure they aren’t seen to be involved with an international banking cabal and get out of finance professions? Should we make sure to be less of “a Jew” in some abstract personality test scenario governed by non-Jews? We already made Yiddish the dead language it has become and learned to talk white. We’ve done all the body modifications we could and changed our names, accepted much of our stereotypes being portrayed in the media without calling them out. We’ve not acted up, we’ve bought into capitalism, suburbia, what more does whiteness want from us?
Should we also make sure that if you’re a Presidential candidate whose emphasis is on class (money-adjacent) to keep the Jew stuff kinda hush hush lest we trigger everyone’s blood libel and Merchant of Venice fantasies? Is Bernie unpresidential because really he just wants his pound of flesh from the billionaires?? It’s sad to say, but Jews and Jewish culture were decimated by European racism, executed most brazenly by the Nazis- but what was left over has been largely given away willingly. Other white-adjacent groups should take note and hold onto what they can. But again- this isn’t how whiteness works, there’s no party where Jews will be given their whiteness certificates, Asians will be recognized as up-and-comers, and they’ll say “better luck next decade” to Black Americans. The way out of this is around, not through.
There has yet to be thoughtful and forceful backlash by Jews against the representation of Jews in the media- nor their representation overall in broad sectors of society. In the New Republic some years ago, Joshua Cohen observed that when people impersonate Bernie Sanders, it’s not that they are doing an impression of Sanders, it’s that they are playing Jew. Disgraced pedophile Woody Allen, codified for the post-war global community a physically weak, neurotic, self-absorbed, incapable and self-destructive urbanite- more or less the Nazi stereotype made funny from a safe distance. Seinfeld provided an updated vision of the “New York Jew” — a phrase I and I’m sure many others have confronted in foreign countries as people try and understand what/who I am. Alas, I grew up in an extremely rural town of 800 surrounded by poor white Christian folks. Why have Jews been scared to stand up? Perhaps it has something to do with their fear of losing their seat at the table of whiteness in America. One exception worthy of mention, largely for how the Jewish community reacts, is the work of Sacha Baron Cohen. In the deployment of his overtly anti-Semitic character Borat he generated enormous backlash from the international Jewish community- largely from the perspective that to highlight overt anti-Semitism was to amplify it. The controversy over his under-cover performance of In My Country There is Problem whose refrain (sung enthusiastically by the crowd) is “throw the Jew down the well” exemplifies the ambivalence of Jews from many perspectives and political alignments with this type of American anti-Semitic excavation. More recently in Who is America Cohen concocted a militaristic right wing Israeli to expose racist, homophobic, and absurd pro-gun positions while also revealing the American right wing’s alignment with Israel is based on a perceived resonance around violent repression.
Jews are 0.2% of the world population. There are more than 10 religious/spiritual groups with a larger percentage of the world population. Jewish people are a tiny minority who have been successfully vilified for over a thousand years- it’s been a PR disaster impossible to overcome in a global context. Taken with many grains of salt around how hard it is to measure bias, at last a major non-profit tried to count, about 25% of the world population holds anti-Semitic views. This means there are +/- 66 admitted anti-Semites for every Jew on the planet — not a fight with compelling odds, even if their study accidentally doubled the incidence. 30:1 would still be shocking. It’s a serous concern and we should reject the critique of Jews seeing their own oppression in exceptional terms, bashing everyone else over the head with the Holocaust, this is yet another well-worn trope of anti-Semitic debasement.
To the contrary, prominent Jewish progressive groups rightly see that there are other minorities in the USA who are far more violently and outwardly oppressed than Jews. Jewish progressives are also explicitly not aligned with Netanyahu’s racist right wing agenda in Israel, nor Trump and his Jewish collaborators- these are zealots- everyone has their share, Jews are no exception. While there are more than 70 countries with a Christian majority and 50 countries that have a Muslim majority to complicate the finger pointing, there is only one Jewish majority nation- this allows an illusory 1:1 notion of identifying a worldwide, diverse-thinking diaspora with one nation. What would happen to consciousness around Jewishness if there were two, or four scattered around the globe and one of them was an egalitarian paradise? The conflation between the nation state of Israel and Jewish people worldwide is nothing less than the same xenophobic dual-allegiance trope used to imprison Japanese Americans in WWII in the United States. The fact that the Israeli right wing pushes for this non-separation doesn’t negate this, it just further reinforces the schisms in play.
The position of left-leaning Jews like Sanders and notable groups in the global struggle for equality such as Jewish Voice for Peace take positions in concert with Baldwin’s 1972 assessment of the relative position of Jews in America:
For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.
But this progressive Jewish voice, since the Civil Rights era has simultaneously been operating as if Jews can advocate from an elevated position of self-perceived whiteness- that we have moved up and on — and are good enough to step back down and help out, generously. This hubris has been felt by people of color, rightly, as uncomfortable and superior. We should see this as directly related to American Jews inability to reconcile with their utilization of whiteness to protect themselves, to leverage their invisibility in ways other groups can not, and ultimately betray those groups with which they share an American minority experience. Michael Lerner and Cornell West’s conversations around their book Blacks and Jews unfolds this with definition.
Jews have been collaborators with whiteness, because they could pass. Jews owned slaves in the South, went to white-only schools and used white-only bathrooms under Jim Crow. They performed in blackface (notably Al Jolson, aka Asa Yoelson by birth). They became white for the same reasons other ethnic groups on the borderlines of whiteness did: to move them further away from the experience of the principally oppressed group in America, Black Americans. Acknowledgement of your white privilege as an American Jew doesn’t correct the past where Jews chose to hide under cover of whiteness like every other white person who embraced their position in the power structure. Disavowing your whiteness, while acknowledging that your colorist privilege remains, begins this process- it’s a first step towards collectively looking to plant the seeds for a new garden for how to think about the polycultural reality of the United States.
All of this complexity of bias and assimilation has tongue-tied American Jews to assert their own experience and confront their own history of enabling white supremacy. What did you lose when your family “became” white? What did you stop being able to feel, to say, to think? And if Jews haven’t done the work to feel through this complexity for themselves and their family identities, we can be sure the media and the general public has not thought of it either. In the past decade the Black and Latinx community have demanded to be represented more inclusively on screen, in curriculum, in the workplace- Jews need to stand up and add their voice to the choir, not just as an ally who sees themselves as part of a group who has “made it” which in terms of cultural awareness is patently false, but as a group who demands to be heard as a distinctive voice for who they are and where they come from.
American Jews need to confront the roots of the anti-Semitic, self-debasing trap they have fallen into on their way to passing as white in America. What a culture of white supremacy asks is to aspire to be treated as provisionally and precariously white, always with the threat of a nasty reveal alongside an agreement to identify with the oppressor.
American Jewish people must do the inner work to confront themselves and their own stories. We must work through a process to disavow the mythology of whiteness in exchange for a deeper understanding of our own families and multicultural communities. We don’t need to accept the options we’ve been handed. Until Jews do this work, the public will understand Jews as they have and with the biases they’ve inherited- with our passive consent. If we look around at other minority groups in America and the legibility they have brought to their oppression for the general public- it’s on us to to stand up.
We need Jewish candidates and public intellectuals who can articulate our stories and hold the media accountable. It will take a new generation of Jewish cultural awareness and advocacy to force the conversations we need to have around Jews and whiteness. A Jew will not be elected as a white President- to believe this is to ignore all of the obvious signs of anti-Jewish bias and outright Jew-hatred. A Jewish president will be minority president and understood that way, in solidarity and partnership with other non-white or off-white people, even amidst all the complexity and responsibility of white skin privilege, should that Jew have it.
Only once we do the work to get to this new collective understanding, and assert it with equal parts compassion and conviction, can we think about what it might mean for there not only to be a President who is Jewish, but a President that the public understands as Jewish, with their particular Jewish identity intact and respected for the complex and beautiful thing that it is.
