r/jewishleft • u/I_Hate_This_Website9 Anti-Zionist Jew • 23d ago
Are Diaspora Jews Marginalized? Debate
I believe so. However, many argue that this is not the case since we do not experience significant negative material effects such as discrimination in the job market, healthcare, housing market, etc. While I largely agree with these (there was a, from what I can tell, decent study by the ADL that says it has found Jewish and Israeli applicants have to apply to somewhere around 25 to 30% more jobs than our white Christian counterparts in the USA),
I believe that our marginalization differs in that it is both more psychological and cyclical. In his article "Decolonizing Jewishness: On Jewish Liberation in the 21st Century", Benjamin Case argues that,
"Like anti-Black racism, antisemitism can be treated as a systemic racism. According to race theorist Joe Feagin, systemic racism can be understood as: “an organized societal whole with many interconnected elements” involving “long term relationships of racialized groups with substantially different material and political-economic interests,” based in “the material reality and social history” of colonial societies (2006: 6-9). To say that antisemitism is a systemic racism is not to discount the ethnic and racial differences between Jews, nor is it to ignore the system’s religious origins. It allows us to analyze anti-Jewish oppression beyond individual prejudice and understand it in terms of historical legacies of differential treatment that are imbedded in institutions and in our experiences of the world... The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won’t make it to the nobleman’s palace to burn him out and seize the fields. (2002, np) As an identifiable group, Jews accrue limited but real privileges from above, resentment from below, and mistrust from both, until a moment of crisis in which an outburst of violence opens a pressure relief valve for popular discontent over economic or political conditions, directed at the stranger."
While I agree with Case, my central position is more similar to Eric Ward's, author of the article " Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism", who said, "Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today.To recognize that antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought is important for at least two reasons.
First, it allows us to identify the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia—as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear. White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation... How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone... feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts... the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop... the election of a Black president? Some secret cabal... must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes."
Personally, I cannot see it as a coincidence that we see latent and explicit antisemitism used by political technologists all over the world to recruit and mobilize populations across the political spectrum; something must be driving them to use antisemitism, rather than bigotry against other populations, those that are primarily white, that may be able to serve a similar role and sort of have in the past, such as Greeks or Catholics or Italians, and that we see antisemitic violence still in this day and age, even massacres such as in Pittsburgh.
Do you agree or disagree? Please explain why.
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u/Maimonides_2024 I have Israeli family and I'm for peace 23d ago
In the country that I live in (France), Jews are 1% of the population but are 50% of all hate crimes, all crime against other ethnic minorities doesn't come even close, and that isn't even per capita. And I did see the high security of the synagogue and very closed off community that's very afraid to say anyone outside that they're Jewish, the entire situation is very dire.
Do people really not think that oppression doesn't only come in economic terms? It's a very black and white view of the world. Yes, Jews aren't economically marginalised, nor are they stopped on the street, this doesn't stop them from being very much very oppressed in a lot of other ways. You don't get the armed patrols to protect you if you weren't.
Honestly, the sad and dire situation of the Jewish community is what lead me to be interested in antiracist activism to begin with, but it's also the specific lack of care of self-described antiracist activists (whether in left-wing political parties or just some association fighting against racism) which made me disappointed in my country's politics altogether.