Julia Salazar, Assimilation and Zionism
It is with great excitement we have learned that Julia Salazar defeated her machine liberal primary opponent and is now likely to join the New York State Senate. This victory was made possible by thousands of hours of tireless work by DSA members, the wider Brooklyn community, and Julia herself. It is a victory made all the more impressive by the truly gargantuan levels of smear and slander leveled against Salazar in the preceding weeks. A whole campaign utilizing dirty tricks was launched to ensure that a socialist feminist would not be going to Albany. Claims that these articles were released by journalists simply “reporting the facts” fall flat; it was an attempt to deter Salazar and more leftists from running for office. And we will remember all the Jewish organizations who were silent in the face of these attacks.
These attacks were made all the more disgusting, and its defeat more inspiring, due to links to the Prime Minister of Israel’s administration. While it is unclear how direct these links are, it is quite possible that Salazar faced and overcame a coordinated gaslighting campaign in order to defend a sexual predator, David Keyes, a high-level Netanyahu spokesperson.
The below was largely written in the weeks prior to Salazar’s victory during the height of the attack campaign against her, and is meant as an investigation into the deeper notions of Jewish identity and its relationship to the false prophets of assimilation and Zionism that Salazar’s case helped to expose. At the wishes of the Salazar campaign it was not published before the election, as the campaign was trying to shift focus away from the personal attacks at the time. But now, with victory firmly in hand, we feel it is time to ruminate on these questions. Before that though we just want to say again, congratulations to Julia Salazar and all of her team. We believe you, and we hope for the day when you and all survivors see the justice you deserve.
[This article is an independent contribution to Jewish Socialism and is not a Jewish Solidarity Caucus statement.]
As in Western Europe, Jews in the East living under the rule of the Czar were compelled to convert to Christianity to access better jobs and standards of living, although only a few could. David Medem, one of the first Jews to graduate from the Russian Military Academy, raised his son, Vladimir, in the Christian faith to which he had converted. Vladimir, despite living a luxurious life with access to privileges shtetl Jews couldn’t dream of, would go on to become a class traitor, reconnect with Jewish culture, and emerge as one of the leaders of the Jewish Workers Bund, the most popular political movement among the oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe.
This isn’t an essay about Vladimir Medem, who never felt the need to re-convert to Judaism; it’s not even really an essay about Julia Salazar, the New York State Senate candidate who came under hostile scrutiny from Tablet Magazine, which questioned not only her political trajectory, but her Jewish identity. This essay is about the ongoing struggle within the Jewish community to envision what liberation looks like, the usage of Jewish “authenticity” as a weapon to enforce the Jewish establishment’s ideology, and the ire those of us face who dare question capitalism and Zionism. When white Jews who are anti-Zionists are branded as “self hating,” it still implies some inclusion in the Jewish community; but when Jewish women of color whose backgrounds differ slightly from the norm come out as leftists, they are cut out entirely. Armin Rosen’s and others’ attacks on Salazar exemplify regressive trends within the Jewish community.
It would be easy for us to ask if Rosen is at all versed on the diversity of Jews who have committed themselves to socialism throughout history, from Jews in the U.S. to those in Iraq. We could even ask if Rosen knew what last week’s Torah portion was. But this would be a waste of time, and attempts to define Jewishness easily lead to situations like the State of Israel enshrining into law what makes someone Jewish. Tablet Magazine’s attack represents another iteration of this endless debate, this time in the service of upholding anti-socialist politics.
But to the more difficult task: an open conversation among Jews about our relationship to whiteness and Zionism. There is often much talk in the Jewish community about the dangers of assimilation, of losing connection to Jewish identity and background; often these conversations dovetail with perceived lack of support for Israel, as well as heteronormative fears about marrying gentiles. What’s often missing from those conversations is a deeper political analysis of assimilation beyond just no longer speaking Yiddish or celebrating Christmas every once in a while. We would put forward another form of assimilation: many Jews today in the US, and the West generally, have molded their identity to be compatible with empire and capital. Anything that deviates from this becomes self-hatred, and so a left wing movement will automatically be seen as an antisemitic threat, anti-Zionist Jews are seen to hate themselves, and women of color with what we deem tenuous claims to Jewishness are not even real Jews. In fact, Tablet has a recent piece attempting to argue these very same conflations, that anti-Americanism is often wrapped up with antisemitism. That attacks on Salazar are happening at the same time as attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from the UK’s Jewish establishment, or Andrew Cuomo falsely claiming that Cynthia Nixon supports BDS, is no mere coincidence; they come from the same place of paranoia and defending Jewish complacency under the status quo.
The anti-socialism of the establishment aligns with nationalism. For the Jewish bourgeoisie in the diaspora, Zionism fills the gap of a nationalist politics from which they had been disenfranchised. Their class position has finally aligned, after decades of not being allowed in the halls of power, with an ethnic nationalist one, which has been enabled and legitimized by US imperialism. They can be proud Jews in the diaspora without ever thinking of moving to Israel — as long as they form their Jewish ethnic identity entirely around that far away, tiny state. It is a form of assimilation in everything but name: Zionists are willing pawns of empire and capital, and they call this “self determination.” Our fight against Zionism must be a national-class one.
The American Jewish establishment, defined by its thousands of non-profits and synagogues that tacitly if not openly support Zionism, and with mouthpieces like Tablet, is concerned with the “reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order,” as Althusser would say. It’s worth noting that Tablet specifically is connected to conservative institutions and people, such as the Tikvah Fund and Bill Kristol. You can read about that here, here and here. But it’s not just Tablet who’s guilty of submitting to the established order. In attempt to appear balanced, The Jewish Daily Forward has also been running articles that both defend and attack Salazar. This “balance” serves not to offer any real understanding of history or politics; it’s an attempt to appear rational and to divide the left, and in particular to force Jews into a false choice between loyalty to socialism or loyalty to our people. The Salazar fracas is only a repeat of the Forward’s meaningless attack and defense that they already employed against Bernie Sanders. They’re going to keep doing this, long after Salazar’s campaign.
The attacks against Salazar come in a context of a general undermining of the American Jewish establishment’s authority. If Salazar had maintained her right-wing Zionist politics she had in her youth, aligning herself with the interest of empire, there would have never been any questions about her identity raised by Tablet, The Forward, or anyone else; the establishment would have welcomed her with open arms. But because Salazar’s campaign comes in a context of a rising left-wing Jewish insurgency, inspired by socialism and anti-colonialism, the right sees her as a threat. Salazar’s now-defeated opponent, Martin Dilan, has taken significant sums from real estate developers, and no one in Jewish establishment periodicals is pointing this out.
Today thousands of young Jews are getting involved in activism and politics through their Jewish identity in new and innovative ways. The most visible showing of this groundswell is seen with the rapid rise of IfNotNow and other anti-Occupation and anti-Trump Jewish organizing, like Jewish Voice for Peace. While the politics of IfNotNow don’t go nearly far enough in addressing Zionism and Apartheid Israel, it has tapped into real energy in American Jewry. And it is tapping into this wellspring of Jewish identity and energy entirely outside of the mainstream establishment’s control.
The communal establishment makes a lot statements about the need to win over Jewish youth to be more involved, to reclaim those “lost” from the community. But this is a lie. They want more Jews actively engaging with their culture, faith, and identity only if and when its in terms they can control. They want only a very narrow set of pro-Israel politics allowed in our community, and those movements and individuals reaching beyond those restrictive borders are nothing short of excommunicated. The establishment sees thousands of lay and lax Jews re-engaging with their identity through anti-Occupation and Palestinian Solidarity activism as the gravest of threats to their positions of power, and they are right.
The establishment wants to be the metaphorical border police enforcing what and who is Jewish. And like the literal U.S. customs and border patrol, they too need to be abolished. Rebellious Jews are embracing fluidity in definitions, lived experiences, and identities, and the establishment doesn’t have a prayer in stopping it.
A lesson here for the left is that we don’t necessarily need to respond by doubling down on uncritical identity politics. We don’t need to convince anyone we’re Jewish — we’re fighting an uphill battle against right wing forces who have captured Jewishness and tied it to white supremacy and Zionism. We respond with actually organizing alongside gentiles, and building a massive movement for liberation. People writing for, or even reading, Tablet will say they care about “Jewish liberation”; they don’t realize that socialism is Jewish liberation.
Further reading:
Framing Julia Salazar, by Ari Paul
Latin@s, Israel and Palestine: Understanding Anti-Semitism, by Aurora Levins Morales
Judaism, Zionism, and the Nazi Genocide: Jewish Identity Formation in the West between Assimilation and Rejection, by Sai Englert
