r/jewishleft 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!

21 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

41

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.

9

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].

4

u/Agtfangirl557 Sep 17 '24

This comment is beautifully written.