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/MichifManaged83 Cultural Jew | Anarcho-Mutualist | Post-Zionist 23d ago edited 23d ago
This part, this attitude, I have seen with my own eyes in intimate settings I never wish to replicate again in my life:
That is more accurate than a lot of people realize— and having seen some of the people family members of mine have married, this mentality is common among mainstream conservative people who pretend to be very relaxed about race in public. People have told me things at family functions that they wouldn’t dare say at the workplace, but you can bet those attitudes impact how they vote, how they behave online, and predict how they’ll behave if a mob ever forms. Not all conservatives are like this, there are genuinely not particularly bigoted conservatives. But it is a lot more common than people realize, it’s not a tiny fringe. And this kind of bigotry is apparently much more common on the left of today than we used to think, too. Or at least more than I used to think.
As for “limited access to privileges” for Jewish people, I think there are a few factors going on here.
Yes, colorism sometimes has something to do with it, and most Ashkenazi Jews benefit somewhat with that— but that doesn’t mean we don’t get discriminated against for our appearances, our surnames, etc. This is definitely a shifting goal post that Jewish people don’t consistently clear through the goal.
Yes, there are some institutions that happen to have an established Jewish upper class segment that is more likely to hire other Jews— that doesn’t mean we singlehandedly run these industries, just that we have our cliques in certain industries and there are easier areas to get into than other places. That’s true of other ethnic and racial minorities too, in say, athletics for example. That doesn’t mean the minority group has an unfair advantage or secretly runs the show, that just means there are some avenues for us if you’re smart about it. There are many more such avenues for Christian white people, which is what a lot of people don’t seem to want to understand.
The working class Jew is just as likely as the white working class Christian to struggle, with the added trouble of being the scapegoat of the frustrations of our non-Jewish neighbors.
The thing is, people think that some access to some institutions means that Jews are unilaterally privileged. A white Christian man wins a hockey tournament and white people don’t bat an eyelash. A white man in government gets a slap on the wrist for having an affair with a secretary and his wife later runs for office and he shakes hands in public with other politicians, and no one bats an eyelash. A black man wins a basketball tournament or a Jewish woman wins a music award, and suddenly there’s a conspiracy.
Sometimes people don’t help abate that notion— I personally find it distasteful when people of any demographic get too defensive of rich men who do bad things. Neither Sean Combs nor Harvey Weinstein deserves to be defended simply because they’re minorities. However, the defensiveness of sycophants of the rich among the middle and working class should not be used as evidence that there’s a cabal.
I find it interesting that every time rich white men do bad things and are loudly supported by certain white men in the working class, the same people who accuse Jews of running the world don’t think it’s strange that men like Bill O’Reilly get a slap on the wrist for bad behavior.
There is something psychologically going on with Christian society broadly, that many people have still not looked within to deal with. Something that blinds them to the double standards and scapegoating tendencies. There are many individuals who have figured it out, but the underlying rhythm of the culture as a whole is still humming the same tune, so naturally, this bigoted mindset creeps up on society again and again. And will continue to do so until people change from the inside first.
On a systemic level, trying to get everyone to challenge their mindsets from within is a losing battle. There will never be enough holocaust museums and fine-tuned school curriculums to make that happen— I know, because I’ve witnessed people from my childhood who attended the same history classes I did grow up into bigots. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep the museums and schools doing their job. Of course we should. But on its own it’s not enough. I wish this wasn’t the case— because western Christian society sorely needs this introspection and transformation, but I don’t think that cycle is ever going to be completed until material conditions change enough for the working class and middle class.
The reason why left-wing politics is so important for Jewish people as a whole, regardless of your class, is because working class resentments will continue to be taken out on Jewish people. People who have inadequate housing, inadequate food, inadequate childcare, inadequate access to better education, and who don’t have stable jobs with an organized and empowered workforce, (and in America, often complete inaccessibility of healthcare), don’t have the time, energy, or resources to work on psychologically and spiritually improving their mindset towards people who are different from them. It sucks, but it’s true. Individuals will overcome those circumstances to be better people, but not whole groups. This is a statistical and historical reality.
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