Mondoweiss
White Jews: deal with your privilege and call out Jewish support for white
supremacy
Lesley Williams on August 21, 2017 38 Comments
Lesley Williams speaks at rally at the Stephen A. Douglas Tomb, in
Chicago, Illinois, August 19, 2017. Douglas was an author of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed U.S. territories to vote if they
would enter the Union as states with slavery.
I stand here today as a Jew by Choice and the child and grandchild of the
Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans fled racist terror
in the South only to encounter redlining, discrimination and police violence
in the North and Midwest.
Like all of you, I have mourned and raged over the overt racism and
anti-Semitism seen in Charlottesville. I have watched in horror as avowed
racists defiantly parade in Klan robes and swastikas. I have listened to the
anguish of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as they are forced to
confront the historical trauma of the Nazi-era.
As both a Jew and an African American, I recoil from the white supremacy and
anti-Semitism on display this week. I have been gratified to hear Jewish
leaders and organizations call for the destruction of racism, speaking
eloquently about the shared history of oppression Jews and African Americans
have faced.
Yet, I confess to a certain discomfort in the many appeals to recognize the
twin evils of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism in Charlottesville. I've
thought about this a lot over the past week, and here's what I've realized:
for Jews, Nazi symbols evoke a terrifying, traumatic past. For African
Americans, they evoke a terrifying, traumatic, unending present. White Jews
may be shocked at this undeniable evidence of U.S. racism; African Americans
merely see more of the same. Black people did not need to be reminded by
hoods and swastikas that we live in a dangerously racist country.
White Jews are not under the same level of threat as people of color. In
short, white Jews need to accept that they are white and that whatever
harassments or humiliation they may experience from antisemites, they
nevertheless dwell under the all-encompassing shelter of white privilege.
Police do not murder them in custody, their votes are not systematically
undermined; they do not overwhelmingly live in poverty or adjacent to
poverty. The two documented lynchings of American Jews, though horrific,
pale in comparison to the nearly four thousand lynchings of black men, women
and children in U.S. history. The lifestyle and life expectancy of the
average white Jewish-American is not materially different from that of the
white non-Jewish majority; there is no institutional antisemitism.
Furthermore, white America is generally more accepting of discussing and
acknowledging the history of anti-Semitism than they are the currency of
anti-black racism.
James Baldwin in Istanbul, 1960. (Photo: Sedat Pakay)
As James Baldwin wrote in a classic 1967 essay:
One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his
suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering.
For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered. 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.
For white Jewish Americans, the U.S. has always been the Promised Land. Yet
African Americans know it is Pharaoh's Egypt.
Not only do white Jews of good conscience need to acknowledge that they are
not the primary victims of white supremacy, they need to look at how their
own institutions have not only failed to challenge, but in some cases are
openly complicit in its preservation.
For example, the Anti-Defamation League, which presents itself as a champion
of civil rights and "tolerance," once spied against the NAACP and the
African National Congress (ANC), and was responsible for the execution of an
ANC activist in apartheid South Africa. As Jewish Voice for Peace points out
in our Deadly Exchange campaign, the ADL, and other Jewish organizations
like the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs and Chicago's own Jewish United Fund all organize police,
ICE and Homeland Security training exchanges in which American and Israeli
police officers share tactics of oppression, teaching each other the
aggressive, militarized police strategies which have led to the deaths of
African Americans like Philando Castile, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald;
and Palestinians such as Mohammed Khalaf, Amar Ahmed Khalil, and Siham Rateb
Rashid Nimer.
Meanwhile, according to their own tax filings, many cities' Jewish
federations, including Chicago's Jewish United Fund, contribute generously
to groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as leading
anti-Muslim extremists, groups like the Middle East Forum and the
Investigative Project on Terrorism, which laid the intellectual groundwork
for Trump's Muslim ban. It's no coincidence that these groups are all
tremendously supportive of Israel's brutal policies toward Palestinians.
All of this is done in the name of Jewish security, either in the U.S. or in
Israel. So I ask my white Jewish friends and family: is the perceived safety
of people who look like you worth the continued oppression, incarceration
and murder of people who look like me?
Last summer when African Americans challenged white America to support the
Platform for Black Lives, nearly every Jewish organization in the country
condemned its indictment of the genocidal oppression experienced by
Palestinians in Israel. None was more critical, dismissive and patronizing
than Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the ADL, who urged African
Americans to "keep our eyes on the prize", and to remember that it is Jews,
not African Americans who "know from genocide".
I hope that the obscenity of Charlottesville will lead all Americans to
examine their complicity in tolerating institutional oppression. But in
particular, Jewish Voice for Peace calls on our own Jewish community to
condemn and disavow our organizational support of racism and Islamophobia,
both past and present. We must embrace a vision for safety that does not
come at the expense of communities of color. Only then can we truly claim to
stand together in genuine, rather than merely symbolic solidarity.
This post is a transcript of a speech Lesley Williams gave at a Resist
Reimagine and Rebuild protest in Chicago, Illinois on Saturday, August 19,
2017. A copy of the transcript was first by Lesley Williams on her blog, and
on Rabbi Brant Rosen's blog.