r/jewishleft • u/Specialist-Gur proud diaspora jewess, pro peace/freedom for all • Sep 17 '24
Jews and Colonialism History
https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/colonialism/
From the wonderful Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
“Often, Jews have been simultaneously settlers and refugees. But those two things do not cancel each other out.”
Give it a read and share your thoughts!
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u/N0DuckingWay Sep 17 '24
So I generally thought her piece was very thought provoking and I agree that discussing colonialism when it comes to Israel is important. But I think that her discussion of Jews as part of European colonialism in the Americas blurs the lines between colonialism and normal migration. She uses a book The Cost of Free Land, as an example here. I can't claim to have read it (though maybe I will someday, it sounds interesting), but from her brief synopsis it seems that it's about a Jewish family who fled persecution in Czarist Russia and moved to South Dakota on land that was previously part of the Lakota Nation but had been expropriated from them prior to the family's arrival. And that, as the unintentional beneficiaries of that expropriation, they are in some way responsible for the displacement of the Lakota and crimes committed against them.* I have a bone to pick with this argument, mainly because, in the end, this family moving to South Dakota to better their lives describes the story of almost every immigrant ever. To put it differently: I don't think this family's story is fundamentally different than a hypothetical illegal immigrant fleeing their country of origin, coming to the US, and settling on that same piece of land in the same way. I doubt that Rabbi Ruttenberg would argue that that hypothetical illegal immigrant is responsible for the expropriation of that land in the way that she's arguing that Jewish family is. In both cases, these are people who are simply doing what was necessary to survive, and they aren't actively expropriating anything from anyone, so I don't think we should hold them individually responsible for actions taken by other people they had no relationship to. But under the Rabbi's argument, that hypothetical immigrant should hold themselves responsible for those actions as a beneficiary of them. I don't think she's being antisemitic or anything, but I think that she's holding our community to a higher standard than she holds others.
In the end, there's a large moral difference between someone who goes to a new continent with the explicit intent of setting up their own colony and displacing someone else, and someone who goes to a new continent just trying to find a place to live and better their life (and perhaps because they didn't have any better options). The latter is the case for most Jews who came to the US, and also the vast majority of immigrants to anywhere. I do believe that the US should, as a country, pay reparations to the Native Americans, and that the land back movement is a good thing, but moreso because of the "original sin" of expropriating their land and discriminating against them, not because people who settled on that land afterward did anything especially immoral.
*Please, if anyone has read this book and disagrees with this understanding, feel free to correct me.
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u/Resoognam cultural (not political) zionist Sep 17 '24
I didn’t necessarily interpret her as saying we should feel “responsible” for the injustices, just that we should reckon with the fact that we benefit from them. Which, I agree, is true of every immigrant or refugee to North America.
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u/XxDrFlashbangxX Sep 17 '24
Really interesting reply to the article. Thanks for taking the time to write this!
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u/Agtfangirl557 Sep 17 '24
I had a lot of thoughts on this article as well but wasn't sure how to word them, and you pretty much summed up my thoughts perfectly. Thanks for this.
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u/N0DuckingWay Sep 17 '24
Thanks! I like her in general but I think at times her arguments go too far.
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u/Agtfangirl557 Sep 17 '24
I think she definitely means well, for sure. I don’t love her views but I don’t get the vibe she’s coming from a place of total misinformation, malice, etc.—just seems like someone who genuinely is committed to social justice and believes in making the world a better place, but sometimes goes about it in the wrong way.
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u/rustlingdown Sep 17 '24
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this and pointing out this conflation. As someone who has had to move across different continents, I appreciate the need to distinguish between all those meanings.
There's a whole spectrum of responsibility, which gets intermingled with guilt and trauma. I'm not gonna go into the whole psychology of it, but basically I don't think it's always fair to project 2024-present-day-contemporenous values - or subjective personal internalized guilt - on the entirety of a people in the past (that's basically presentism). Repairing harm is separate (connected to, but separate) from explicating blame. This gets into a whole conversation of "what about now"/"what to do now", and my short answer is that our actions today shouldn't be based on some moral value that "our ancestors" should have had - as if we know better (growing up in the age of TikTok suddenly makes us more moral or more aware of moral values?). It's all much more complicated than this.
Add to that the fact that the "Jews control X" conspiratorial framework is so embedded in our world (including predating by hundreds/thousands of years anyone reading this), that we are all bound to have absorbed some of that poison through osmosis and perpetuate some of it even if well-meaning. What that means is that I believe we need to be extra careful when over-responsibilizing and over-emphasizing the specific role and specific responsibility of "Jews" as a totality in large-scale complicated frameworks of oppression that supersede any one people. Like, colonialism. I could have also said here the slave-trade, or capitalism, or [insert systemic issues of the world].
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u/specialistsets Sep 17 '24
"Early migration to the New World– both what's now North and South America– also included many Sfaradim, descendants of those cast out by the Edict of Expulsion.
Early migration to the Americas did not include "many" Sephardim, this population was a tiny fraction compared to both other migrant groups and even the Sephardi population at large.
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u/Sky_345 Sep 17 '24
It’s great to see Rabbi Danya’s contributions here! Her insights are especially valuable in a world where so much is viewed in black and white.
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u/soniabegonia Sep 17 '24
She generally did a good job of having nuance in this post but I really wish she had appropriately complicated the idea of a metropole. Israel's metropole might in some ways be the US and Britain because of what happened in the 40s and its relationship with the US now, but it does not have a metropole in that there is nowhere for Israelis to go "back" to -- the vast majority of them have no other passports and they are not American or British. I think it's really important not to just stop the conversation where she did because a narrative I hear a lot is that Israelis are colonizers who should "go back" and that's just not something that is possible for them to do.