Critical Race Theory has a Jewish problem, and, finally, people are beginning to notice. “Stop being shocked,” implores Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, writing for the Jewish commentary magazine Tablet. Stop starting off sentences with “can you believe…?” It’s a staggering article that cannot be recommended highly enough.
To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be. It was liberal. Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. … No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.
Weiss is correct in her diagnosis and in her identification of the underpinnings of the new ideology replacing liberalism. She describes it as “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality,” to which we should add at least a few drops of the Rousseauian assignment of primacy to instinct, emotion, intuition, feelings, and passion over reason and evidence. The only place her description leaves anything to be desired is in her claim that “No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism.” That may well be the case in that we haven’t decided on the name we’ll use for this ideology, but it does have a name. This ideology is called by at least some of its proponents by the name “Critical Social Justice.” In short, Critical Social Justice—colloquially “Wokeness”—is a toxic fusion of cherry-picked aspects of the many lines of thought just identified, each chosen for its practical utility in advancing its particular line of fundamentally anti-liberal activism.
People need to understand that the new growth of anti-Semitism that Weiss asks us to stop being shocked at seeing is, if not a deliberate feature, a reliable consequence of the ideology of Critical Social Justice when put into practice. Because of the way Critical Social Justice views the world, it generates certain unavoidable and irreconcilable contradictions where Jews are concerned, and lacking the means to resolve them, it finds itself faced with what some are rightly naming a Jewish question that leads to it having a Jewish problem. As few, if any, clear explanations for this worrying trend currently exist, this essay aims to provide one in thorough detail.
A Brief Introduction to Critical Social Justice
Because it looks like liberalism on the surface and yet is openly anti-liberal under the hood, Critical Social Justice is often completely misunderstood by those who have not undertaken the rather unpleasant task of studying it in detail. Critical Social Justice, however, is an ideology that, at the present moment, desperately needs to be understood, not just in its terms but in its totality, including the extremely unpleasant, if not genuinely horrifyingly anti-Semitic, place this new ideology generates for the Jews. Where this ideology’s Jewish problem is concerned, the chief lines of thought contributing to it are the now (in)famous Critical Race Theory and its evil twin sister ideology bearing a lesser-known name called Postcolonial Theory (sometimes, “postcolonialism”). Neither of these sub-Theories has a positive view of the Jews or Jewry, to say nothing of its hostility to the existence and concept of a physical state of Israel. Indeed, anti-Semitic contempt would fall short of the mark by a fair distance.
Like almost everything where the various Theories of Critical Social Justice are concerned, a short primer in how they frame the world is necessary before it will be possible to explain the way they frame Jewishness, in particular. Because this ideology is so successfully parasitic upon liberal approaches, it arises almost invisibly within liberal contexts and enclaves in a rather sneaking way that leads genuinely liberal people—especially if they have progressive leanings and intuitions—to find themselves repeatedly asking their friends, “can you believe…?” This, as it happens, is because it is how live frogs are meant to be boiled.
The Theories of Critical Social Justice, or whatever else we end up calling this ideology, think about the world in exactly one way: in terms of how they conceive of power. They think of power first and foremost in a peculiar but identifiably Marxian way. There is some oppressor, which is a group and not an individual, and there are the groups that are oppressed by it. These are in conflict—zero-sum conflict similar to how Marx envisioned the bourgeoisie and proletariat—for the opportunities, resources, and spoils of society, access to which is referred to not as “equality” but as “privilege.” The groups, today, see the dividing lines of power through a lens to culture that has been boiled down to the meanest of descriptions: identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and all the rest of these soul-crushingly exhausting terms we can’t get away from these days. Here’s where Weiss’s neo-Marxism and identity politics come into the picture.
For those who accept the tenets of Critical Social Justice Theory, power flows through all people all the time in the routine actions and interactions, modes of speech and belief, decisions about what should and shouldn’t be regarded as true or false (or crazy), and the “structures” of our institutions, vital and secondary. You probably didn’t even notice the Marxian thought slip in with “structures” there and almost certainly wouldn’t have had I not put it in scare quotes. It’s that subtle, but it isn’t really Marxism anymore. It’s Marx’s idea of societal conflict reinterpreted through the postmodernism Weiss identified. When these are combined with the neo-Marxism and identity politics (and a rather Rousseauian and pop-psychological take on the originally Christian idea of “social justice”), we end up with most of the ingredients in her rightly named ideological admixture. Critical Race Theory and postcolonialism are, more or less, species within the broader Critical Social Justice order.
Together, these are Critical Social Justice, and they think about the world this way: Society is divided into many different cultural groups defined in terms of the members’ homogenized identities, meaning low-resolution “socially constructed” demographic categories like “white,” “black,” “gay,” “trans,” “brown,” and so on. These are said to “intersect” in “complex” ways, and each lies upon an axis that places some groups on opposite sides of a simplistic Marxian oppressor-versus-oppressed conflict. Oppression is understood only systemically and is indicated only by the phenomenological “lived experience” of harm, offense, and discomfort identified by any member of a group Theory defines as oppressed. Such a claim is unassailable and falls upon society with a warrant to reorganize itself to avoid any possibility of that sense of hurt ever arising again. All of those who are sufficiently oppressed are as a single capital-O “Other,” and everyone else has a moral obligation to be in solidarity with them in all possible circumstances.
This worldview has a consequence: “victimhood,” defined as above and only as above, becomes high currency that will be vied for. Intersectionality, now arguably 43 years old (and certainly at least 31), is the set of ideas and practices, for as a practice it is defined, that grades claims of victimhood according to an outline laid down formally in 1990 rather ominously (or histrionically) called The Matrix of Domination. It is in this place that Critical Social Justice’s Jewish problem exists, because Jews present an intolerable paradox to the Theory.
Jews Under Critical Whiteness Studies
Critical Social Justice has a theory—if we’ll allow the term—of race and racism called Critical Race Theory. It posits that race is a wholly political contrivance of white European people that was socially constructed specifically for the twin purposes of identifying who deserves the spoils of society (themselves) and who will be barred from them (everyone else). Those who qualify are designated as “white,” which means they are in possession of a form of sociocultural “property” called “whiteness,” as the “Critical Whiteness Studies” division of Critical Race Theory holds—and as we heard all summer over the clamor of looting and riots and the roar of burning buildings just behind them. White people and “white-adjacent” people who can benefit from the “system of oppression” (systemic racism) that results from this contrivance are said to have a vested interest in maintaining it and therefore remain willfully ignorant of the “realities” of race and racism, as Critical Race Theory believes them to be.
Among its many properties, whiteness is said to be exclusionary, especially to “Blackness” (this dichotomy, which it wills into existence, is ultimately the only real object Critical Race Theory cares about). Whiteness is Theorized as such to be a form of status that can only be given (to racial or ethnic groups) by other white people and cannot be claimed by those who it excludes. Whiteness is like the badge that lets someone into a sort of elite aristocracy of society, which is called “white privilege.” These ideas are objects of obsession for Critical Race Theory, and their relevance to everything surpasses any other consideration. Needless to say, people have begun to notice. Also needless to say, this isn’t going to paint a comfortable picture for a group like Jewry.
Critical Race Theory doesn’t leave room for alternative interpretations or dissent. In fact, it is a totalizing ideology in addition to being a crudely simplistic one, so this profoundly vulgar mode of analysis applies on every level of society and to every conceivable group. This means it also applies to Jews, whose very existence presents it with a number of Theoretical challenges it struggles to resolve within its simplistic mostly black/white racial framing. Fortunately, some Jews are also beginning to notice. There’s Weiss, for example, and there’s also Pamela Paresky. Yet another example can be found in the fairly recent academic paper “Critical Whiteness Studies and the ‘Jewish Problem’” by Balázs Berkovits, where he writes,
In turn, this type of totalizing criticism is responsible for the emergence of the “Jewish problem” with regard to questions of whiteness and race. For sure, this branch of research constitutes only one example among many contemporary works of social and political criticism, in which the “Jewish question” reappears. (p. 88)
This issue, as the name Berkovits applies to it implies, is no small problem to be shrugged off as a mere quirk of academic social theorizing. Under Critical Race Theory, many Jews are Theorized as having been granted and to some degree embraced—as a matter of effectively indisputable fact if not explicitly in both cases—the status of “whiteness” in contemporary American (and sometimes European) society. This would imply that under Critical Race Theory, Jews have an intolerable privilege they need to check. So demands the new “successor” ideology Weiss warns about in her Tablet piece.
Placing aside the obvious complication that not all Jews are white by any reasonable definition (which therefore may not have anything to do with Critical Race Theory’s definitions), there’s a huge problem with this formulation that every Jewish reader of this essay will immediately realize. Jews have quite the incredible history of incredible oppression, including imperial destruction, diaspora, enslavement, and a literal genocide in the Holocaust. This set of horrors tended to follow a familiar pattern as well, which we now name “anti-Semitism.” That pattern is that Jews are made out to be a group that stands by its own claim as separate from broader society in some significant way and yet finds a way to gain significant privilege, eventually to the point of usurping control of the institutions that shape society. We would be remiss to avoid pointing out that assigning “whiteness” to Jews repeats the opening act of this tragic play.
It’s not so simple here, though, of course, because the Critical Social Justice ideology appears to be devoted to social justice, which even appears in the name, and thus the longstanding and undeniable oppression of the Jews surely must complicate the anti-Semitic narrative for the Woke. That’s a neat trick, however, because this is not so; the ideology seeks something else (“group justice”) wrought in its image. The Jewish problem in Critical Social Justice is born of attempting to solve this impossible puzzle using the tools of an intrinsically racist social theory that isn’t cut out to the task. Berkovits sees this too, writing,
This emergence [of Critical Race Theory’s “Jewish Problem”] can be attributed to the fact that many critical approaches regard the memory of the Holocaust as an obstacle to criticism. There is a perceived relationship between the Holocaust and the social question: the Holocaust seems to downgrade the suffering of other people, as if there were only a limited amount that could be distributed. (pp. 91–92)
Critical Race Theory, it must be understood, only thinks in terms of society and the people in it in terms of the grotesquely simplified concept of “systemic” or “structural” racism. Everything has to be reduced to this one variable, which Critical Race Theory claims an absolute monopoly on analyzing. This requires them to discount Jewish suffering and to guilt everyone, including Jews, into thinking on the terms set forth by Critical Race Theory. Consider Robin DiAngelo in her blockbuster bestseller book White Fragility, which dominated bestseller charts not only once but twice since its release in 2018:
[P]erhaps you grew up in poverty, or are an Ashkenazi Jew of European heritage, or were raised in a military family. Perhaps you grew up in Canada, Hawaii, or Germany, or had people of color in your family. None of these situations exempts you from the forces of racism, because no aspect of society is outside of these forces. (p. 13)
And DiAngelo tells us in another of her books, Is Everyone Really Equal? (with Özlem Sensoy), how this totalizing reductionism to “racism” on Critical Race Theory terms works for Jews, particularly Ashkenazim:
While they may have initially been divided in terms of ethnic or class status, over time European immigrants were united in Whiteness. For example, early Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were not considered White, but they “became” White as they assimilated into the dominant culture. Reflecting on the social and economic advantages of Whiteness, critical race scholar Cheryl Harris (1993) coined the phrase “Whiteness as property.” This phrase captures the reality that being perceived as White carries more than a mere racial classification. It is a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others. (p. 122)
The academic Michael Eric Dyson, who wrote the foreword to DiAngelo’s White Fragility (where he calls her “the new racial sheriff in town”) explains how this happened through acts of cultural betrayal in his “Sermon to White America,” Tears We Cannot Stop, writing,
The battle to become American forced groups to cheat on their old selves and romance new selves. Old tribe for new tribe; old language for new language; old country for new one. The WASPs stung first, but the Italians landed plenty of blows, the Irish fought bare fisted, the poles grimaced and bore in, and the Jews punched above their weight, all with one goal: to champion their arrival as Americans. That’s how you went from being just Irish, just Italian, just Polish, or just Jewish to being white. So please don’t deny this when you approach me to tell me about how your experience as a white ethnic parallels my experience as an African-American. The parallels stop at the hyphen. (pp. 45–46)
These are not fringe positions on Jewish “whiteness” and “anti-Blackness” within Critical Race Theory, and they are repeated throughout the core literature, including in books by both Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who are credited with creating Critical Race Theory. It is also trotted out by another hugely influential and bestselling author, Ibram X. Kendi, who is being paid tens of thousands of dollars (as is DiAngelo) per visit to speak about his vision of “anti-racism.” It is an illiberal form of analysis that if it cannot understand a group in a simple racial narrative that places “whiteness” and “blackness” on opposite ends of a spectrum, with “brownness” between but distinctly neither, it cannot understand it at all.
The uniquely Jewish combination of a long history of terrible oppression of a people that isn’t just (at least partly) fair-skinned but also highly successful in what the Theorists would deem a “white” milieu is, in fact, completely intolerable to Critical Race Theory. The Theory distrusts Jewish success as such and, as with everything it analyzes, believes it must have something to do with having been granted access to the privileges of whiteness—illegitimately, by betrayal, and at the expense of blacks. It would then, in due course, demand that (“white”) Jews accept and atone of their whiteness by the familiar process: recognize it in themselves, acknowledge their de facto complicity in “white supremacy,” critique their own unwitting participation therein, and then submit to and promote the Critical Race Theory worldview in both ideology and deed, which takes the form of their brand of “anti-racist” social activism—for life. This, however, requires asking Jews to deny both their history and what makes them Jews in the first place.
Berkovits does an incredible job of summarizing the reasoning behind this problem—indeed, it’s the kind of explanation for it that I read and at once wished I had been fortunate enough to write in the first place. He observes,
“Whiteness” in Critical Whiteness Studies is meant to express a position of domination. Therefore, it is neither a descriptive nor simply an interpretative but a critical concept, meaning that whoever is found to be white enjoys white privilege. This is to say that the white individual, merely by his social position, practices racism and discrimination; therefore, he does not need not be racist himself, as he automatically benefits from racially marked social structures and perpetuates them. He partakes in social but also economic oppression, against minorities, that is, people of color. … Therefore, assimilating Jews to whiteness conceived in this manner is not innocent social history, but reveals a clear political ambition: it has to be proven that the fundamental racial issue is linked to the color line between whites and blacks, while everything should be considered negligible. Ethnic identities, differences, controversies between ethnic groups, and discrimination on any other basis than color should be considered as insignificant in the light of the plight of the black population. The particular traits of antisemitism, that is, everything that renders it different from racism, becomes irrelevant. (p. 92)
A number of pertinent facts jump out here. First, Critical Race Theory genuinely is as simplistic and totalizing as claimed, and it therefore has to shoehorn Jews into its broken analytical framework. Second, this is a wholly political analysis that assigns privilege and domination to all who are marked with it. Third, it both hides and misunderstands anti-Semitism, which allows for a particular pernicious variant of it to come into existence under a full-throated denial that it’s anti-Semitism at all. This isn’t a good mix.
Consequently, unlike the liberal ideology it replaces, Critical Race Theory is not capable of being reasonable about the “whiteness” it clumsily assigns to many Jews (and certainly all Ashkenazim) by virtue of their complexion or general social acceptance by people with that particular complexion. It is not capable of seeing in the Jews highly successful people who sometimes have fair skin (often in North America) and who are mostly accepted and welcomed by a liberal society that, finally, has offered Jews true breathing room outside of their own state. Critical Race Theory sees that society and its liberalism as fundamentally corrupted by whiteness, and thus, playing directly into the roots of the nastiest strains of anti-Semitic thought, assumes Jews must somehow be profoundly complicit in it.
Adherents to Critical Race Theory, for all their claims upon sophistication in analyzing group standing in society and its subtle meanings in terms of power, do not possess the conceptual resources needed to deal with historically oppressed white people—unless they’re fat, disabled, maybe gay (that’s complicated now), or trans, none of which would have anything to do with them being Jewish in any case. Critical Race Theory therefore places Jewish people into a very dangerous spot within their Theory: they are a group that has tremendous privilege they don’t deserve who also have an apparently ironclad excuse not to “do the work” of dismantling their own whiteness.
This explains in far starker terms what Weiss rightly observes in her essay,
By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”
This summary of how Critical Race Theory understands Jews and their history is correct. Under Critical Race Theory’s analysis of whiteness, Jews are assigned the unenviable status of being systemic oppressors who get to pretend that they aren’t. In a very real sense, the Critical Whiteness analysis within Critical Race Theory holds that Jews have been unfairly granted the social property of “whiteness” by a “white society” that is no true friend of theirs and have thrived at the highest levels of sociocultural production in it—all while they also retain a legitimate claim on well-recognized historical victimhood statuses (again, slavery, diaspora, persecution, ghettoization, targets of a genocide just teetering at the edge of living memory) that allow them to deny their privilege at all. In some sense, Jews get to claim oppressed status while occupying the highest heights of privileged status, at least according to the reckoning of Critical Race Theory.
If this weren’t bad enough, the simplistic black/white analysis at the very heart of Critical Race Theory has to weigh in on the matter—because of course it does. Thus, this tangle of illegitimate Jewish privilege (in the eyes of the Theory) is analyzed in the typical fashion for Critical Race Theory: Marxian conflict theory across racial lines that really only make sense in the specific context of American race politics of decades long past. The result is that Critical Race Theory is forced to say that not only is Jewish “privilege” illegitimate in a multitude of ways but also that it was acquired by ripping off black Americans. As you might expect, this multiplies the sin under Critical Race Theory and cements Jewish status within the intrinsically “anti-Black” frame of “whiteness.”
Berkovits documents this hideous and thorny issue within Critical Whiteness Studies quite clearly, to draw on several passages at once:
In Brodkin’s account, Jews are not discriminated against in the U.S. any more, and have benefited from post-war policies given only to whites; that is, Jewish success, in spite of their common belief, is something that they do not “deserve,” it is owing not to their individual or collective merit, but to discriminatory practices against other minorities which they supposedly benefited from. (p. 94) […]
Now, while in post-war European social history Jews were synonymous with progress and universalism, Critical Whiteness Studies introduced a very different perspective. Karen Brodkin tacitly, and at times quite overtly, asserts that the whitening of the Jews took place to the detriment of blacks, or even, that Jews used blacks to assert their own whiteness. (p. 95) […]
Jews became the “interpreters of white America in the 1950s”, says Brodkin, meaning America as such, but which is also a racially marked America. According to her, the rise of ethnic pluralism instigated a type of Jewish whiteness “by contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.” Therefore, as paradoxical as it may sound, Jews reinforced white supremacy. By their own success as a minority group, and their own ideology, based on “merit,” they highlighted the fact that blacks were not successful. Thereby, it is possible to conclude that they were instrumental to modern capitalism, in which, at least in Brodkin’s frame (“the racial metaorganization of American capitalism”), racial discrimination is supposed to be essential. (p. 96) […]
“The construction of Jewishness as a model minority is part of a larger American racial discourse, in which whiteness, to understand itself, depends upon an invented and contrasting blackness as its evil (and sometimes enviable) twin,” [writes Brodkin]. Or, again: “For white ethnics to claim their whiteness would seem to depend upon denying equal entitlements to nonwhites” (154). (p. 96)
This wretched analysis positions Jews very badly in a paradigm that is only equipped to think about race in terms of zero-sum conflicts for societal standing and resources. Jewish “whiteness” is believed to be established beyond a shadow of a doubt not just by the (allegedly false) embrace by “white” society but also by having thrown blacks under the bus. This status is made more concrete by reframing Jewish success in many industries as having usurped the hyper-privileged mantle of being the top producers and influencers of “white culture.” And all the while, the Jews can point to millennia of oppression and a Holocaust that some, now very few, can still remember surviving.
Here, then we discover a straightforward contradiction that Critical Race Theory is poorly equipped to resolve: in the final analysis, are (white) Jews oppressed or oppressors? This question is generative of the fundamental and unavoidable contradiction that deserves to be called Critical Race Theory’s Jewish problem. Weiss, for her part, doesn’t miss the crucial essence of this point or the fact that because of the power of this racial dialogue, it is able to fracture any hope of Jewish solidarity quite effectively, writing,
“It’s hard to overstate how suffocating this worldview is to specifically Jewish college students,” Blake Flayton, a progressive Jewish student at GW, wrote me recently. “We don’t fit into ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’ categories. We are both privileged and marginalized, protected by those in power and yet targeted by the same racist lunatics as those who target people of color. The hatred we experience on campus has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ideology simply by existing. So it’s not so much that Zionism is racism. It’s that Jewishness is.”
Let me pull that out for you. This isn’t about Zionism or landlords or capitalism or AIPAC. We live in a world in which everyone is being told to side either with the “racists” or the “anti-racists.” Jews who refuse to erase what makes us different will increasingly be defined as racists, often with the help of other Jews desperate to be accepted by the cool kids.
That is to say, Critical Race Theory interprets very badly, bordering on horrifically, the fundamental contradiction it, itself, produces by adopting an anti-liberal stance and assigning Jews to privilege within it. It views Jews, or Ashkenazim at least, as not only as being white but also as occupying the highest echelons of privilege within a white society that has embraced them in a way that multiplied other axes of racial oppression deemed ideologically fatal to the entire project of liberalism. Simultaneously, it sees them as the bearers of a kind of shield that prevents them from their necessary obligation of “checking their privilege” so long as they identify first as Jews and only later as “white” and believe the history that makes them who they are has any truth and significance to it. That is, Critical Race Theory interprets Jewish status as being rather illegitimately placed among the most privileged in society even while they enjoy an even further privilege in not having to accept themselves as such. If anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews born of believing them to be illegitimately privileged, this kind of analysis is quite literally the stuff of horrors.
Are Jews White?
Of course, this cartoonishly simplistic racial analysis flattens the fact that, quite clearly, not all Jews even have melanin counts that would lead to them being identified as “white.” More plainly, some Jews are, rather crudely, “brown Jews,” or, in the silly but politically expedient fashion of the day, “Jews of color.” This matter of the physical realities of the range of skin tones of various Jewish people is simultaneously irrelevant and politically useful under the unrepentantly inconsistent analysis of Critical Race Theory. It is irrelevant in that being “white” is, in Theory, a sociopolitical status above all, and “white” people have largely accepted Jews as ones of them. It is useful in that the white/brown division is productive of their neo-neo-Marxian analysis across racial lines. (And no, that they do both things at once doesn’t have to make sense.)
Indeed, Critical Race Theory is prepared for this seemingly devastating issue for its impoverished analysis in a way that allows them to mask their anti-Semitism nearly entirely under heaps of impertinent race dialogue. As Berkovits explains, drawing upon analysis reinforced by the noted “friend” of the Jews called Linda Sarsour (as we shall soon see),
Interestingly enough, this view has equally been echoed and perpetuated recently for example by voices at a national gathering of “Jews of color,” reported on sympathetically by the Forward. The participants at this meeting, or at least the majority voices, expressed the intention of tracing the color line even inside the Jewish community, by separating the Ashkenazi Jews, those of “European extraction,” from all the others. Ashkenazim are white, therefore privileged, whereas Sephardic and Mizrahi “Jews of color” are oppressed both in the U.S. and Israel, suffering essentially the same lot as the Palestinians. The assertion is not only that the division between white and non-white should be relevant in the interpretation of privilege and domination universally; but more importantly, that these phenomena should be conceived exclusively in terms of color. The antisemitic phenomenon, under its various forms appearing in human history, is completely excluded by this imaginary division of Jewry, as, according to the participants, “anti-Jewish oppression itself replicated an Ashkenazi view of anti-Semitism”, and as “our prevailing concept of anti-Semitism is a European construct.” Therefore, by extension, Israel is equated with this kind of Euro-American whiteness. (p. 88)
The net result is, as noted above, further fracturing of anything that might look like Jewish solidarity around the strictures of yet another wholly intolerant racial ideology that has taken root in our otherwise liberal world. By placing all sociocultural and political relevance into race—and, indeed, all beliefs about on which side a person stands with regard to “domination” or “oppression,” as Theory conceives of them—Critical Race Theory elides in one inapposite stroke the fundamental religious unity of Jewry and the universally anti-Jewish racism of anti-Semitism. It does so in a way that simultaneously flattens Jewry, as Weiss observes, and slices across it with a genuinely irritating question that should be irrelevant in any genuinely liberal—or Jewish—society: Are Jews white?
The answer to this particularly ugly question is, of course, complicated. Some Jews accept the mantle, qualified or unqualified by their status as Jews, and others don’t. It is similar with broader society, much of which is rather ignorant of the division or the questions. Within Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies, however, it all comes down to what’s most politically expedient in the moment. Ashkenazim are universally designated by Critical Race Theory as white, especially when they protest; other Jews, designated by the Theory as “brown Jews” or “Jews of color,” may be when complicity in whiteness is useful for achieving some political end (perhaps as “white-adjacent” Jews, if nothing else) and tend not to be when it’s more useful to consider them “brown.” This may be to divide Jewry along racial lines (as in the quote above), or it may be to recast the anti-Semitism faced by “Jews of color” as a kind of racism instead of as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from racism.
As John-Paul Pagano notes, writing for Tablet in 2016, this last error allows “anti-racism” to erase anti-Semitism by completely misunderstanding it and recasting it in terms that get it dangerously backwards:
For one, color bias is an insignificant factor in the history of Jewish persecution, so foisting “white privilege” on Jews is parochial—it shoehorns centuries of Jewish suffering into the particular American experience of racism, which centers on anti-black bias. But more important, anti-Semitism doesn’t work like most forms of racism, which denigrate their victims as inferior. Anti-Semitism is special in that it often perceives its target—Jews—as having too much privilege and assails them for it.
Unlike racism, whose modern versions stem from 19th-century pseudo-science, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory and at root all conspiracy theories envision a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. They may alight on eclectic topics—war, UFOs, weather and climate, food, medicine, the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, to name just a few—but if you delve deeper, you will find that every conspiracy theory is a narrative in which a secret society of the rich and powerful controls the banks, the media, schools, and governments in order to enslave and exploit the rest of humanity. Anti-Semitism is a name for the conspiracy theory which holds that “the Jews” are this evil elite. To the anti-Semite, Jews are the ultimate bearers of privilege.
It isn’t just in the case of erroneously treating anti-Semitism as a form of racism (for brown Jews, but not white ones) that Critical Race Theory loses sight of it, including its own. In all cases, anti-Semitism drops off the radar. Returning to Berkovits for an explanation,
In fact, one of the main methodological principles of Critical Whiteness Studies dealing with Jews and Jewish assimilation, even if it remains implicit or unstated, is the interpretation of antisemitism as just another form of racism. However, this tacitly applied methodological principle is converted into an empirical finding: as if the history of Jews in the United States followed the pattern of assimilation of every other “white” minority ethnic group. Once each and every one of them were discriminated against (because non-white or “less-than-white”), but eventually they became integrated into the dominant white majority. People who are now considered “white” do not have to endure racism any more, for they are meanwhile placed on the safe side of the color division. As Jews have also become white, there cannot, by definition, be any discrimination against them, or if there is, it cannot be “systemic”, that is, meaningful. (pp. 92–93)
This point is not a small one. Critical Race Theory is able to pretend to acknowledge the oppression of the Jews, misunderstand its fundamental nature, reproduce its fundamental nature itself without realizing it, and yet deny that anti-Semitism counts as a form of group oppression at all because it is not in any way “systemic,” which is the only sort of oppression that counts under its narrow-minded rubric. Through this completely avoidable superhighway of racist confusion, Critical Race Theory is able to maintain not only a complete denial of anti-Semitism, including its own, but also a reproduction of anti-Semitism by placing onto Jews even more status as being (illegitimately) privileged and in unjust control of society. As a consequence, denial of Jewish oppression—however real it was historically—and viewing Jews as usurpers of cultural privilege are mainstream beliefs within Critical Race Theory.
In the name of fairness, this ridiculous mode of analysis is the bread and butter of the Critical Race Theory approach, which it applies to everything. Therefore, these beliefs are unlikely to be the result of Critical Race Theory intentionally targeting Jews for being Jews. That’s not the issue; Jewry falling outside of the range of cogent—if we’ll stretch the term—analysis within the theoretically and ethically impoverished domain of Critical Race Theory is. Ugly as this situation is, it helps make sense of an important related point Berkovits raised slightly earlier in his paper:
Antisemitism is mentioned practically nowhere [in Critical Whiteness Studies], or is downgraded and relegated to the background, as if it were not relevant any more. For sure, it has to be downgraded and minimized, because it would supposedly weaken the criticism conducted in favor of the “really oppressed,” which the Jews are not. Linda Sarsour, the “new face of intersectional feminism,” who had also been invited to the “Jews of color” gathering before she participated in the panel on antisemitism at the New School for Social Research, was very clear on the subject. Speaking in a video published by the Jewish Voice for Peace, she said: “I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic. […] Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level… but it’s not systemic, and we need to make that distinction.” Here, Sarsour implies that first, it is not a collective or structural phenomenon, but the sum of scattered individual acts, and second, and more importantly, that antisemitic attacks carried out by other minorities (which is most often the case) cannot be significant, for those are not the actions of the dominant (white) groups, who determine the permanence of structural racism. The theoretical underpinning of this view, besides “intersectionality,” comes from a theory of structural racism. (pp. 88–89)
The broken thing in Critical Race Theory is Critical Race Theory—the theory of “structural racism” Berkovits points at here. The entire approach and the contradictions upon which it is based are incapable of dealing with its Jewish question, which, in the extreme, sometimes leads adherents to downplay the relevance of the Holocaust, again under heaps of impertinent racial analysis. Perhaps most visibly among these attempts are (admittedly rather fringe) quite vicious claims that Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is only assigned in our educational systems because Frank was a privileged white girl. As Berkovits observes, “many critical approaches regard the memory of the Holocaust as an obstacle to criticism,” particularly of the privilege afforded to Jews in their alleged “whiteness.”
As indicated previously, the genuinely ugly question of Jewish whiteness is what might rightly be called the Jewish question in Critical Race Theory, and it defines one of the two foci (these being like the center of a circle but for an ellipse) of a bigger Jewish question in Critical Social Justice. The other focus of Woke anti-Semitism concerns Zionism and thus the existence, meaning, and implications of a Jewish state of Israel existing in its promised, historical location.
By considering these two poles as centers of theoretical gravity, an anti-Semitic ellipse (or more of a rotten egg) outlined by Critical Social Justice Theory becomes quite clear. At one focus is the question of Jewish whiteness, as analyzed under Critical Race Theory and its Whiteness Studies, and at the other is the question of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in its appointed location—which Jews believe was promised to them specifically in a covenant with G-d. This second dimension is analyzed through the West-hating Postcolonial Theory, though with much help from Critical Race analysis, to which we shall now turn.
Postcolonial Theory, Israel, and Zionism
It shouldn’t be far from anyone’s mind that the Woke, as a rule, are hostile to the existence of Israel. The relevant ideology is, in fact, deeply invested in uncritical support for Palestine and is openly anti-Zionist, often to the point of openly calling for the destruction of Israel. Weiss captures the public results of this attitude well, including the confusion among Jews who still think these ideologies are liberal, writing,
The most recent major outrage in the Jewish community, now several news cycles behind us, came on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—when many American Jews seemed dumbfounded by what was to me predictable news: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressive superstar, had pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated because of his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was, as Bill Clinton said at his funeral, “a martyr for his nation’s peace.”
Many Jews were shocked. If Rabin, the symbol of progressive Zionism, is out of bounds, are any Israelis acceptable? What about the 95% of Jews who support the Jewish state? Why would the congresswoman from the Bronx—representing the political party to which upward of 70% of American Jews have been consistently loyal—possibly do such a thing?
The answer to whether any Israelis are acceptable under Theory is no. For those who understand that Postcolonial Theory generally believes all actions made by the West anywhere else in the world, and especially where brown or black people live, as intolerable acts of Western colonialism and imperialism, this isn’t shocking, however. It’s perfectly consistent with what its activists continually say and its Theorists continually write. Israel would be considered in Theory as the result of white, Western imperialism and colonialism—largely in cahoots with conservative Christianity—robbing poor, brown Muslim Palestinians of their land, not least so that there is the ability to assert further Western hegemony and militarism in the Middle East (for the purpose of murdering more brown Muslims). The whole point is to establish, yet again, white supremacy in the Middle East. Its terms really are that stark. In the politically polished words of Linda Sarsour, which invoke precisely the crude racial frame of Critical Race Theory to make their effect,
Ask them this, how can you be against white supremacy in America and the idea of being in a state based on race and class, but then you support a state like Israel that is based on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.
While Critical Race Theory sees Israel—no matter its racial makeup—as structural whiteness occupying the (brown) Palestinian Middle East, Postcolonial Theory regards the existence of the contemporary Israeli state in a way that is wholly critical (as Marx would be) of both it and the West that supports it. This is what Postcolonial Theory does; it claims that the West constructs the “East” (here: Palestine) in a way that is meant to make its own values look superior by virtue of being better than the “Other’s” values—a process now unfortunately called “Orientalism.” The point of Orientalism is to enable a means of domination that might then justify Western occupations of non-Western lands and people, which will then hold to its own ideologies, methods, and values. Within the Theoretical wing of the contemporary left, Israel is regarded as one such ongoing project even in a (Western) world that has rejected the idea of colonialism more or less entirely.
Again, as with the issue where Critical Race Theory collides with Jewry, this wretched analysis is exactly what we should expect from Postcolonial Theory’s collision with Israel. It simply lacks the tools for a more nuanced or reasonable analysis of the admittedly complex affair. Take the Palestinian-American Edward Said’s analysis in his landmark Orientalism, which is in some sense recognizable as the birthplace of Postcolonial Theory, wherein precisely this simplistic, cynical, zero-sum thinking can be found:
Thus if the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is as a negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or in another view of the same thing, as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Insofar as this Arab has any history, it is part of the history given him (or taken from him: the difference is slight) by the Orientalist tradition, and later, the Zionist tradition. Palestine was seen—by Lamartine and the early Zionists—as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom; such inhabitants as it had were supposed to be inconsequential nomads possessing no real claim on the land and therefore no cultural or national reality. Thus the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow—because Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semites—can be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards the Oriental. For the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has bifurcated: what we have now is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a reconstructed cult of the adventurer-pioneer Orientalist (Burlon, Lane, Renan), and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab Oriental. Isolated from everything except the past created for him by Orientalist polemic, the Arab is chained to a destiny that fixes him and dooms him to a series of reactions periodically chastised by what Barbara Tuchman gives the theological name “Israel’s terrible swift sword.” (p. 286)
In Said’s telling, in the existence of Israel, Jews are falsely and unjustly elevated to the status of “hero” by a supportive West that, at best, takes no notice of “Arab Orientals” and, at worst, merely constructs them as a shadowy enemy to Zionism and foil against which that Western-Jewish hero is given meaning. (This is how Postcolonial Theory thinks about essentially everything, by the way.) That this narrative itself might support anti-Semitism is nowhere to be found within Postcolonial Theory analysis. Indeed, it, like the relevant facts of Jewish history, is buried under other issues that, through the usual Critical Theoretical inversion of values, renders Jews untowardly allied with illegitimate “Great Powers” most interested in imperialistic manipulations in the Middle East. For Said, and Postcolonial Theory in his wake, the “electronic, postmodern world” we now occupy (he was writing in 1978, by the way) has resulted in a clash of hyper-simplistic narratives in which Israel and its legitimacy resides in the crossfire:
Three things have contributed to making even the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam into highly politicized almost raucous matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as upon both the liberal culture and the population at large; three, the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Furthermore, it hardly needs saying that because the Middle East is now so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs, the chances of anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East are depressingly small. (pp. 26–27)
Said, like almost all other Postcolonial Theorists, also understands the colonialist mindset in terms of racial politics, writing about its prerogative, “a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition ‘it’ is not quite as human as ‘we’ are” (p. 108). Indeed, because “whiteness” is associated with being European or of European descent, whereas other places are typically designated as “non-white” (the Eastern bloc and Russia notwithstanding, one supposes), Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory have much overlap in their ideas. This shared ideology owes much to the fact that Critical Race Theory asserts, not wholly wrongly, that white Europeans invented race and racism in part to justify to themselves the brutal cruelties of colonialism (though the lion’s share of that analysis is given to the Atlantic Slave Trade). As a result, Postcolonial Theory draws heavily off the analyses of Critical Race Theory to bolster its own arguments about the relevance of race in analyses of colonial environments. Thus, many of the arguments made within Theory about what it regards as “colonialism” or “settlerism” are made in terms of racism and an alleged aim to establish a “white” racial hegemony where it doesn’t belong.
Berkovits explains this phenomenon in somewhat more digestible language:
That the tag “whiteness” is susceptible to be turned against Jews, not merely as a “critical” concept, but rather in an explicitly accusatory manner, is evident if one takes a look at how whiteness and racism scholars analyze the state of Israel. For example, the eminent racism scholar David Theo Goldberg presents Zionism as a European white movement, intending to colonize and civilize the aboriginals in the Middle East. But he also offers a different, and maybe broader and more metaphorical, definition of Jewish whiteness: “Israelis occupy the structural position of whiteness in the Middle-East.” (p. 100)
Thus, seeing the matter of race (Jewish “whiteness”) and the matter of colonization (existence of Israel in its historical location) as intertwined, if not two manifestations of the same phenomenon of oppression, is what Critical Social Justice Theory does. Race and colonial status therefore become, as noted, two foci that together trace out the boundary in which Woke anti-Semitism arises from its own theoretical contradictions, effectively invisible to itself. This new brand of anti-Semitism bears special hatred for “white” American Jews (particularly Ashkenazim) and an absolute and absolutely intolerant rejection of Israel in a twisted and perverse way that allows almost no reasonable analysis to penetrate. Indeed, the full weight of the “colonizer!” argument against Zionism and Israel and the “racist!” argument against (American) Jews blend into a senseless whole that allows rampant anti-Semitism to hide behind those apparently culturally impenetrable rhetorical screens. In Berkovits’ summary,
[F]or Abigail Bakan, working in a Marxist and postcolonial vein, it was Zionism that whitened European Jews, whereas American Jews were whitened during their American history, what she learned from Whiteness Studies. The two processes, she asserts, intersected and thus created Israel. … Bakan, detects “the role of Zionism in the transition of Jewishness from non-white to a specific form of whiteness”, what she terms as “‘whiteness by permission’” (pp. 100–101)
Put even more straightforwardly, it is both colonialism and racism simultaneously that defines the existence of the Jewish state, and both of these sins are regarded by Theory as in immediate need of “disrupting and dismantling.”
Sadly, this extremism represents no exaggeration of the belief or intent within Critical Social Justice with regard to Jews and Israel. As explained before, the Critical Social Justice ideology, whether with regard to race, colonialism, or their admixture, is wholly intolerant and absolutely totalizing. As Berkovits explains about it,
[T]here is a unanimous intention of radical criticism, and total political agreement on the evaluation of Zionism, Israel, and Jews in the Middle East. A furtive look into these texts would be sufficient to conclude that whenever it comes to Israel, political criticism fully subordinates any interpretation. It is also evident that the concept of “Jewish whiteness” serves that kind of criticism, by which one can comfortably detect that Jews have not only become part of the dominant majority, but also the ruling white elite or “caste” exercising their domination on racist grounds, thereby forming one of the most oppressive majorities in the world. To be sure, in these works, the arbitrary usage of the concept of “whiteness” becomes even more conspicuous than in Whiteness Studies proper, as it encompasses an increasingly diverse set of phenomena. However, this fact does not bother totalizing critics emboldened by their academic prestige. (p. 101)
To Theory, Jews are white, Israel is whiteness established in brown lands, and the combined whole proves a hyper-privileged status for Jews, who then get to hide behind a mantle of oppression that Theory refuses to recognize. Anti-Semitism therefy falls completely out of focus even as it heats the water one degree at a time, leading shocked Jews to express their disbelief more and more frequently at the anti-Semitic hatred not only coming from the usual suspects on the right but, confusingly, from the Woke progressives on their left. Bari Weiss is right. It’s time to understand this ideology for what it is and to stop being shocked.
Critical Social Justice’s Jewish Problem
The set of allegedly high-minded beliefs described so far, which are core to Theory, mixed with a fundamental failure to understand that the Critical Social Justice ideology is genuinely this illiberal, including by Jews, explains the shock that Weiss implores her fellow Jews to stop expressing at the things they keep seeing happening around them. She captures the mood neatly here,
Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?
Readers need to understand that this is no mistake, no anomaly. It is all perfectly consonant with the underlying Theory, which is anti-liberalism dressed in liberalism’s skin. The people behind the shocking incidents Weiss documents have imbibed that Theory to varying nontrivial degrees and believe it—and acceptance of these ideas is accelerating.
All of this treacherous analysis places Jews in a precarious position as the ideology of Critical Social Justice mainstreams further and further in our otherwise liberal societies. In Weiss’s incisive words,
The dominoes are falling hard and fast. That’s how you get pulpit rabbis who argue that Jews should not claim ourselves to be indigenous to the land of Israel. Or an organization meant to fight anti-Semitism that aligns itself with Al Sharpton. Or a tinderbox in the city with the largest Jewish population in the country, whose communal outfits seem to care more about lending cover to politicians than ensuring the physical safety of Jews.
The physical safety of Jews—and of Israel—depends upon liberalism and thus cannot be guaranteed by anything that accepts Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory. Those two, together, like so many hideous ideologies before them, generate a Jewish question they cannot answer which results in a Jewish problem they cannot solve.
Critical Social Justice has a Jewish problem. Jews are Theorized at the height of white privilege—illegitimately and to the detriment of other minorities—and as the minority usurpers of the coveted status of being “the interpreters of white society.” Yet they also carry an ironclad reason not to “interrogate” that privilege as the Critical Theories of Social Justice demand of them, which Theory must therefore dismiss as illegitimate. Furthermore, Jews are not just complicit in whiteness but also in one of the most intolerable acts of Western colonialism that Theory takes umbrage with: the establishment of the state of Israel on land it deems wholly Palestinian. This crime they can also plausibly deny on the grounds that they were, in fact, driven from that, their indigenous, land in acts of unequivocal acts of oppression and genocidal violence.
In Theory, Jews aren’t just at the height of privilege in their whiteness and in an unjustly granted colony in Israel. They’re also deemed privileged even further by having a cultural history that liberal people rightly believe is characterized by millennia of systemic oppression. They’re a dominant group that nobody outside of Theory—least of all themselves—regards as dominant.
These are evil ideas that are new only in their outermost manifestation: “whiteness,” “colonizer,” “settler.” They, are anti-Semitism that, like their predecessors, are the results of forcing bad solutions to fundamental contradictions that necessarily arise from within the bowels of impoverished and illiberal social theories. In liberalism, as Weiss observes, we have at the heart “the idea that we should judge each person not by their station or their family lineage but by their deeds” and “that human beings have agency,” which she also notes “are revolutionary ideas that are, at root, Hebrew ones.” In Theory, one’s station—called “positionality”—is the main dimension of judgment and human beings who lack a critical consciousness—who aren’t “Woke” and in agreement with Theory—necessarily have a false consciousness, like “internalized dominance,” and no true agency.
At the moment, we are losing liberalism to Critical Social Justice, which isn’t just inimical to liberal beliefs but also believes they must be torn out by the roots—which, if Weiss is right, will include Hebrew roots. This simple truth, hard-learned so many times before about shallow social theory, is a danger to us all. It poses a particular, though not wholly unique, danger to Jews.
For the present, there is still some daylight between Woke anti-Semitism and older, more recognizable forms of Jew-hatred, but there’s no guarantee that will stay the case. Indeed, the edifice already seems to be crumbling. It’s worth stating, then, that the only difference between historical applications of ideologically driven anti-Semitism and Woke anti-Semitism, then, is that the current approach comes at the issue in an apparently novel way by shoehorning Jew-hatred into a drastically oversimplified framework of American racial history—one with a great deal of current cultural cache—which is to say that the differences are mostly a matter of window dressing and time. That is to except one other difference: those have no positive branding and no Jewish support, whereas Woke anti-Semitism currently enjoys a reasonable degree of both.
Critical Social Justice is, in its vulgar simplicity and pretentious racism, neither sophisticated nor liberal enough to handle the straightforward facts of Jewish life and history, which make an inconvenient misfit to its profoundly inadequate notions of social power and conflict. It must therefore be said that this paucity of sophistication and liberalism within Theory render the contradictions at hand both unavoidable and irreconcilable for Theory. This, in turn, defines a fundamental and intolerable Jewish problem in Critical Social Justice that, if history writes any guide, will find its “resolution” in the decrees of the Theorists, if they become sufficiently empowered. We must not allow this to happen.
122 comments
You can tell that Tablet Magazine is a fake news site, simply by reading any of its articles on COVID.
I read one of its articles on a supposed anti-racism pamphlet. I clicked on the link, and the article is an obvious fraud. These days it seems everybody is so keen to call the opposing party evil that they accept even the most ridiculous satire as evidence.
The article probably came from a right-wing troll factory called the Health Sciences Consortium.
Howling with laughter at Weiss’ pretentious lies: pretending that she speaks for all Jewish-Americans, and that all Jewish-Americans are ultra-liberals who believe in equality. I am a goy who has been surrounded by American Jews my whole life. Jews most certainly do not believe in equality, they think every race is beneath them except whites, who they envy so much that they pretend to be us. They are self-hating Arabs who want to be white so desperately that they bleach their hair & bleach their skin and get plastic surgery and fake contact lenses to try to look like whites. I have been a victim of Jewish racism my whole life, so I am not fooled by their virtue-signalling lies about “equality”. They hate other races so much that they almost inbred themselves to extinction by becoming infertile, lol. Now they marry other races simply to get a little genetic diversity, but they will always despise other races, except for whites whom they envy so much that thet pretend to be us. Whites are the only race that is stopping all the other races from murdering each other to the brink of extinction, the only half-civilized people in a world full of brutish hateful sub-human animals. They want to make whites extinct and replace us, which is fine, because without whites to civilize the animals, the animals will be left with nothing but the Hell-On-Earth of their own creation, which is all they deserve.
GREAT article. And so Whoopi goes on National TV declaring the Holocaust was just fight between a bunch of Whites. Thus Jews really do not qualify as victims and Jews are White privileged and are really oppressors. Whoopi is really advocating antisemitism , and for this she gets a 2 week vacation.
Great article.
What a thorny thicket of lies and hatred we face!
There are more ethnicities in the world than “black” and “white,” Theorists! What are we, three years old???
The core problem with BLM and the woke view of the world is that both deny the ability to change, which is complete contrast with the Jewish view as expressed in the Torah, Talmud and rabbinic writings that man can change and has the ability either for living a morally great life, as opposed to being condemned to life because of Adam’s eating from the prohibited Tree of Knowledge.
And the terrible truth is that Homo sapien is still an animal which by instinct strive for whatever is “Perceived” as being “best” for that individual. What is “best” and what is “perceived” vary by time and circumstances [also known as “civilization” and “society”] It can be as simple as dreams of getting free housing to living in opulence. ergo: the advocates of CRT are going through contortions of rationalizing to ultimately get what is “best” for themselves, personally. While praying on ANY others , to that end. Whether they realize it themselves or not. {witness the super wealthy or the dregs, while they bitch …..for a price of course}
All this does Not make them right or wise.
A story as old as life itself. Yet, thus far, those “western values” seem to provide the “best” outcome over time.
This is the first article I’ve ever read by Lindsay that I’m genuinely disappointed by. I was agreeing with the first half–the “problem” that the woke have with the Jewish–but then truly shocked and disgusted in the second half when he takes Bari Weiss’s stance (who is a minimal intellect at best) that all protest against what’s happening in Palestine right now is a result of anti-Semitism. The argument was very poor and basically reliant on quoting just a few scholars instead of actually going out there and doing real investigative journalism which involves talking to people who are against the Israeli occupation and asking them why they are against it. Lindsay, like Weiss, smarmily attaches all these fancy theories in blanket fashion to everyone who holds this viewpoint and attacks them as anti-Semitic; ironically, using the EXACT same tactics as the woke left do. Just lost some respect for this guy right now–I guess no one is infallible.
Your use of the term “the Israeli occupation” betrays your ignorance of history, and calling James smarmy and Weiss dim are just as hominems.
I very much doubt the goal of this article was to analyze the very complex history of the Israeli-Arab/ Israel-Palestinian conflict (which is such a sensitive topic that even the name for the conflict is contested). Note that the article also doesn’t mention Islamism, Islamic terrorism or the more old-fashioned anti-Semitism in the Arab world.
What is being discussed here is meta-political and not political: how do we discuss problems and conflicts? What epistemological tools do we consider to be valid? What broadly shared moral framework do we appeal to while negotiating about political interests, preferences and priorities?
The issue here is that a CRT and/or post-colonial inspired “lens” is fundamentally simplistic, i.e. Israel bad because product of colonialism and/or whiteness. That is the fundamental premise. Any instance of Israeli military violence, police brutality, collective punishment, religious intolerance from Orthodox Judaism etc. etc. merely provide rhetorical fodder in service of a preconceived conclusion. Simultaneously, every mention of terrorism or problem arguably emerging from Islamism and conservative Islam is “deconstructed” as being Islamophobic justifications of colonial oppression and genocide.
TL;DR we can’t talk productively about messy and contentious real world conflicts before we accept, at least implicitly, some sense making ground rules. There is an ideological movement that only cares, if it does at all, about this conflict because it serves a larger ideological purpose.
Excellent comment. see: Edwin Black’s “The Farhud”
While recently reading through some late 1960s issues of a radical and influential old far left but also avant-literary publication called “Evergreen Review” that I found in my personal library, I was shocked to discover the hatred of Jews so blatant in all of the black power writers of the time, all of whom now form the source thinking and root documents of woke “anti-racist” CRT. Related was a re-listening to 1970s Giorno Poetry System albums from my collections where I was shocked to read and/or listen to Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka’s poems of almost Nazi-level Jew hatred (paraphrase: pig Jew landlords raping the black ghetto people, etc); as well as Chicago 8/ Black Panther Bobby Seale’s KKK-like poem “We Hate White People” (paraphrase: Die, mo-fo honkey, die!). Also a gushing white leftist fan interview in Evergreen of (paraphrase: anti-imperialist liberator of the colonized) Yasser Arafat from 1967 was literally sickening to read. I also rewatched Godard’s 1968 “Sympathy for the Devil” and ignored the parts with the Rolling Stones to focus on the shockingly hate-drenched black power revolutionary segments of the movie. All of this 1960s black hatred of whites and Jews was not just a pattern — it was a blueprint for the 2000s.
When I read and heard these hate screeds 40 years ago I dismissed them as crazed hyperbolic rantings of a few obscure malcontents and refocused on the sex and drugs and artistic rebellion of the white writers and poets of the time. I had no idea these black writers would be resurrected as the mainstream culture of the politics of cruelty of the 21st century. Part of the problem is not merely ignorance of all these source materials but refusal to even want to know about them. Most of my family members who are Jewish (by marriage) are all suffering from what Arab-Jewish professor Gad Saad calls Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome, an understandable but very dangerous avoidance response to events and writings they do not want to know are happening. You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. It always bites you in the ass no matter how deep you bury your head.
I could’ve saved myself a lot of time by just reading this comment instead of the entire article.
I was raised an indigenous Englishman in England.
The non English people’s of the UK gleefully cling to the idea the English are illegitimate interlopers who evicted the “Celtic” people’s from their supposed rightful territory England after the Roman’s left.
Victim status, and racial legitimacy are a constant excuse for spiteful recrimination that can date back thousands of years.
Just as claims similar claims of legitimacy can survive several millennia.
The fact the Jews are so racially diverse has to make you question the degree of legitimacy of Jews to their racial status as indigenous Semites.
There are no “Semites”. The term semitic was coined by 18th century linguists to describe a family of middle eastern languages, including Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Arabic. It was never meant to describe ethnicities. Later, the term was appropriated by Jew haters who wanted a more palatable identification than Jew haters, so they came up with “Anti-semites”.
Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are very closely related, according to DNA studies, closer to each other than they are to either Arabs or Europeans. Their closest genetic relatives are the Kurds, another middle eastern nation that nobody wants to have their own country.
Of course their genetic mix has changed over the millennia. That can happen very quickly in any population, and that is not the basis for their claim to being Semitic. The basis is a continuous unbroken cultural tradition going back to ancient times, most of it taking place in the Ancient Near East, plus a Semitic language spoken by their ancestors, preserved in all their histories and sacred texts, now revived as a modern language, but still influencing whatever language they grow up speaking as a first language.
Apparently she was fine with the prevailing orthodoxy and the New York Times until it happened that it was her ox being gored.
She was interviewed on Triggernometry. She reported a noticeable shift in the Overtones window during her time there, having been imported from a far more based publication.
Discussion of Jewish whiteness should consider the context of postmodernism that ties race to culture, and more specifically, ties whites to the culture resulting from the Western Age of Enlightenment.
Western culture went through a Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment which developed an outlook that made possible free, benign, prosperous societies. It was made possible by the likes of Thomas Aquinas who convinced his fellow Roman Catholics that Aristotelian reason was compatible with Christianity.
Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides who functioned in North Africa had accomplished the same for Judaism about a century earlier. This effectively made Jews more Western than most Westerners, or, to use postmodern parlance, more white than most whites.
The left started out as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment with the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau saying that science is bad, that civilization is corrupt and the innocence is to be found among primitives. Postmodernism is just the latest incarnation of the leftist reaction.
Various leftist causes encourage victims of white oppression, male oppression, or oppression by straights to widen the resentment they feel about their oppressors to encompass the entire Western culture, specifically the values of Western Enlightenment. In so doing, they manipulate such victims into embracing their mortal enemies. They get women and gays to embrace Islam that oppresses women and kills gays. They even got certain blacks to embrace Nazis and, at least in one case, the Ku Klux Klan.
I really hope that Jews don’t allow themselves to be similarly manipulated.
A lot of misinformation about crt there are several critical jewish scholars who unpack the intersection between white and being jewish as a multidimensional concept where one can exist in multiple communities at once
“critical jewish scholars”, i.e. latter day hof Juden [court Jews] cravenly seeking acceptance by Jew haters.
Woke culture wouldn’t be an ongoing and increasing threat to individual liberty and classically liberal ideals if corporate America, apart from corporate media, wasn’t so solidly supportive of it. It’s currently spending perhaps billions to spread it. My own corporation reinforces BLM mantras and slogans, including the term “systemic racism,” so frequently I no longer open company emails. I’m sick of the propaganda. The question is why are they doing this? Is it really that profitable to support what is clearly anti-liberal ideology? What can these CEOs gain?
This is a phenomenon with complex roots.
In short, it’s probably a combination of the desire to stave off online outrage mobs, prevent savvier activists from targeting clients, and younger generations of people who have bought into this ideology moving into positions of greater influence within those companies.
This can always, always be traced back to academia.
Mark,
I meant to add that I suspect many of these CEOs aren’t weighing the financial consequences, but use more of a moral calculus. In essence they perceive their gain in terms of righteousness.
Of course, there’s also the fact that some of them (Apple, Nike) do it to deflect attention from some of their more unsavory business practices.
The quote from Michael Dyson:
“The battle to become American forced groups to cheat on their old selves and romance new selves. Old tribe for new tribe; old language for new language; old country for new one. The WASPs stung first, but the Italians landed plenty of blows, the Irish fought bare fisted, the poles grimaced and bore in, and the Jews punched above their weight, all with one goal: to champion their arrival as Americans. That’s how you went from being just Irish, just Italian, just Polish, or just Jewish to being white. ”
Strikes me as being reasonably on-the-money – UNTIL the last word. Change “white” to “American” and it does seem that every new group, Jews included, fought to establish ourselves. And, perhaps, that’s as it should be.
(Ashkenazi Jewish, by the way.)
The madleft’s poisonous and dangerous joke “anti-racism” is a merely a label for neo-Marxist anti-whitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Westernism. At its heart is a demonstration that fascism is late-stage Marxism.
Excellent analysis. Conservative Jews, like me, have seen this coming for awhile now. It’s becoming more toxic by the day. And, dangerous for Jews.
It’s can not be overstated how blatantly and absurdly Americentric all of their analysis is. Almost like the belief system was built specifically and with malice to take down the American Experiment or “Empire”, and cannot be applied reasonably anywhere else except where the aim is to annihilate freedom and equality.
PS “trans” people are not victims, the women / public that they force into their delusions are.
Read Abigail Schrier’s “The Trans Cult.” Any book that the ACLU wanted banned a college professor called for the burning and Target and Amazon almost wouldn’t sell because it offended the SJWs on this issue is must reading on this issue.
james — being critical of Israel is NOT antisemitic, it’s the logical conclusion of an the implementation of an ethnostate, but thanks for FINALLY showing you bow to Zionists
I posted several articles by David Cole ripping the “Holocaust frenzy” and hypocrisy
but, if I haven’t written this before, I — as a person, not as a Jewish person — don’t GAF about Israel being an ethnostate … and neither does Richard Spencer, by the way.
When I was a self-righteous Leftist, I was against Israel and took sympathy for the helpless Muslim Arabs living in certain areas of Palestine, but that was before I read the Hamas Charter, and the history of Mohammed, and quite a few Right-leaning but careful-accurate essays on Islam, and especially ex-Muslim essays on the Islam they were born into.
Now I think, transform Israel into a democratic, open, MULTICULTURAL, mixed religion (it already has to some extent), mixed culture (it already has to some extent), with equal representation for Muslims and Jews … HA HA HA HA that’s horse-crap. That’s SHARIA. That’s the extermination of Jews, this time. I also DO NOT support the influx of large numbers of Muslims and imposition of Sharia into England, Sweden, France, or the USA.
now now, at least admit the jews have their own sharia. never trust a jew
Have you ever criticized any of the dozens of Arab ethnostates? If not, you’re a Jew-hater.
Natalie – Using your logic, don’t feel sad, angry, puzzled, scared – or other emotions – if anyone is critical of either your behavior, your loved one’s behavior, your favorite activity, et al.
After all, they really love you and are only pointing out your negative behaviors – and not your essence – they’re only doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Right?
Isn’t that what strangers always do?
And when you criticize James – as you just did – it’s really out of love. Right?
You’re not really making ad hominem attacks at James. Right?
And, when you criticize Israel, it’s really out of love. Right?
You’re above all that. Right?
MarshalStalin is completely correct. That’s an extremely good analyses. Especially when you watch this: https://youtu.be/vbtm5fTrXo4
MarshalStalin-
In NJ (wretches in disgust-I live here), NY and IL (probably some other states as well) Holocaust studies are mandated by the state. The schools focus almost exclusively on the Holocaust. There is only a brief nod to all the other genocides in world history like-Mao’s Revolution, China’s Uighur tortures, Stalin’s deliberate starvation of his people, the genocides of the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire of Greeks, Armenians, and so on.
There’s no denying Nazi Germany of Jews was horrible and wrong. I question why that seems to be the focus. Anybody know?
Look at the comparison in numbers, scope , planning and execution and underlying ideology. The Holocaust clearly takes precedence in all of the above.
I would posit that those other atrocities that also occurred within living memory were committed by international socialists, who still enjoy quite a large share of power in the world, as opposed to the national socialists, whom they despised.
It’s bad PR to refresh the public’s memory of atrocities that, in comparison, dwarf those of the Left’s Emmanuel Goldstein.
A quote from the article I left above for MarshallStalin includes the entire beginning section on Holocaust Education, followed by a finale on AN ACTUAL ANTI-JEWISH POGROM in Los Angeles that the “never again” crowd completely ignored and denied.
Why?
Cole says that it’s because “Never Again” is meant to highlight “Nazis” which tends to include “White people” and “conservatives” as “pro-Nazi” but EXCLUDES The Left, so he’s saying the Never Again thing is political, ideological, and hypocritical.
Cole: I’m reminded that every few decades a bogus Holocaust survey is released to gin up a “never again” frenzy
https://www.takimag.com/article/never-again-some-restrictions-may-apply/
The Nazis “industrialized” the slaughter of Jews – men, women and children – all in the name of “race” …
The Jewish problem in CRT is that CRT is largely Jewish. The author even repeats the quintessentially Jewish narrative of perpetual victimhood, while also saying narratives of victimhood are problematic. This Jewish victimhood narrative is the origin of critical theory, which began with Marx (grandfather was a Rabbi) and became dominant with people like Derrida, Marcuse, Adorno, etc. It isn’t just CRT. Our entire culture is saturated in it. Our national religion has become a. Slavery and b. The Holocaust. As someone who grew up around Jews and has Jews in their family, as well as someone who has read extensively on critical theory and general trends in the last century, Jews have never had a truly “liberal” philosophy – militant ethnocentrism for Jews and liberalism for everyone else. It’s not some far out theory that Jews have enjoyed incredible success by, on the one hand, being “white” and, on the other, claiming victimhood status that makes them an aggrieved minority with special privileges and status that makes them exempted from criticism. What is the ADL for? Or the AJC, or AIPAC, or even the SPLC (founded by Jews)? They are groups with massive resources dedicated to two ends: advancing Jewish interests and oppressing any form of white ethnocentrism. There is nothing liberal about any of it. And those are just more blatant examples of Jewish ethnocentrism within a supposedly liberal system. It has always been in the interest of Jews to weaken the collective power of the white majority and advance the interests of minority groups, of which they are one. The problem now is that this is coming back to haunt them. After making minority status the greatest good and white identity the greatest evil, groups like American Blacks have realized that many of these supposed “white” elites, the people that own the tenements they live in, that lend them money at interest, that run the legal system they are trapped in, that own the record labels their favorite musicians belong to, aren’t WASPs or Pollacks or Italians. They’re Jews, who never seem to tire of talking about Hitler and antisemitism and how they have been oppressed and persecuted for all time, but who do not appear very oppressed or very persecuted. Rather, they appear to be incredibly powerful, out of all reasonable proportion. When the PM of Israel can show up to humiliate Obama and get 25 standing ovations from congress, but the media just talks about “Russian interference”, eventually people start to notice. You can guilt whites about the Holocaust, but why on earth would a black person (or a Mexican, or a Chinese) care? As far as blacks are concerned, Jews aren’t just white – they’re whites that exercise power over whites. So now Jews like Bari Weiss have a problem. They can’t and won’t disavow the victim narrative, but they don’t want it turned on them. They don’t want to openly say that they aren’t white, but they don’t want to say that they are either. And they are upset that the Holocaust is getting downplayed and forgotten now that their ideology has been used to make slavery the ultimate evil. It was one thing when “Nazis” were being banned from social media, but now “cancel culture has gone too far”. So you get a lot of confused convoluted pieces like this that try to thread the needle. If I was the author, I would have just stayed away from this issue entirely, because you can’t tell the truth without getting kicked off the internet and being put on the ADLs hit list, but putting all these blatant contradictions on full display and trying to write something the censors will accept will simply erode the author’s credibility. You can call me a Nazi or an antisemite, I do not care. Explain to me how I’m wrong.
you are the only person with reason i have read in this comments section so far
Wake up and smell the coffee:
1) Name any other country that fought a civil war, passed constitutional amendments and legislation ended slavery and via the courts and legislation enforced by the courts eliminated the vestiges of slavery in 100 years
2) The Holocaust, while an important event in European and Jewish history, arguably contributes nothing positively to Jewish identity and knowing what happened between 1933 and 1945, which was the near physical elimination of a thousand year presence on the continent of Europe, is of less importance than having a positive sense of Jewish identity rooted in transmitting the heritage of Judaism from one generation to the next. That has been achieved and revived only in the Orthodox communities who fill stadia and concert halls for celebrations of the study of the Talmud, as opposed to heterodox movements who can believe mistakenly that being woke as much as possible is the definition of a Jewish identity
3) Look at your own communities-without a stable family structure and commitment to education, crime and anti social behavior are obviously a result and success in music with violent and mysognistic imagery and sports are unfortunately viewed as the way out of the inner city.
verbose bigoted nutcase.
Marshall, you will probably appreciate this ‘complex’ article from David Cole, who you probably already know. For any who don’t
Cole made “corrections” to the Holocaust story, without total denial that it happened. He claimed a solid basis for numbers and stories he kept and what he rejected.
Needless to say, Cole has enemies among HC Deniers for insisting that ANY of it isn’t a HoloHoax, and far more hatred and violence among Left & Jews like JDL for criticism of the narrative.
The article in question echoes a lot of what you say, but then describes a LEFTIST attack on “Jew Areas” of Los Angeles, and how the Anti-Defamation League — which purportedly exists to defend Jews against pogroms — DENIED that the anti-Jewish riots promoted and organized by ANTIFA & BLM on Instagram were anti-Jewish.
Cole is a snarky writer for any who like that.
https://www.takimag.com/article/never-again-some-restrictions-may-apply/
Great post.
Brilliant summary
“The problem now is that this is coming back to haunt them”. 100%.
Just a test of commenting here, but what a valuable place this is! Plus a succinct article exactly describing something. There are divisions among White people–some are not as “White” as others. I myself look dark-eyed Slavic because that strain came “Mendeling” through in me. Critical Social Justice–must remember that. Everyone and everything has some “privilege” almost like some de Broglie wavelength for Critical Theory.
Critical racial theory operates from a number of clearly historically wrong suppositions and omissions of major historical events Here is a short list:
1) Slavery economically was the foundation of the US
2) The Founding of the US cannot be understood in the context of the late 18th Century
2) No other society in ancient, medieval or modern times experienced society
3) Slaves in the US experienced the equivalent of Jews under Nazi Germany
4) Violent Crime in inner city communities cannot be seen as the product of dysfunctional families
5) The US fought a bloody war, passed constitutional amendments, gradually passed significant laws to enforce those amendments, and has had an African American head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, members of Congress and the Supreme Court and a president who was elected and reelected president
Point Number 5 is factually correct and therefore is in opposition to points 1 through 4.
Point 5 is ignored by the advocates of CRT , and was especially absent by the authors of the 1619 Project. Points 1 through 4 are among the main points of contention of BLM which bases itself on CRT
‘Thus any movement that targets Western civilization and its values will eventually target Jews.’
And the reverse is true. Any movement that targets Jews will inevitably also target Western civilization.
My late father (who was born a hillbilly) often remarked that Jews were the leavening of civilization. Too little leavening, the civilization becomes stagnant; too much, and the civilization explodes (or implodes). I don’t necessarily agree with his reasoning (a bit simplistic, but he knew that too), but I can understand where it came from. He like Jews and enjoyed their company, was very interested in Judaism as both a religion, a way of life, and a culture, and thoroughly enjoyed his one trip to Israel in the 1960’s after the 7-Day War.
The left started as a reaction to the Western Age of Enlightenment with the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau saying that science is bad, that civilization is corrupt and that innocence is to be found among primitives.
As Enlightenment values resulted in more or less benign governments presiding over free and prosperous societies, the left reaction to the Enlightenment results in a yearning for societies characterized by repression, squalor, terror, mass murder.
Postmodernism is the latest incarnation of the left reaction to Enlightenment. Postmodern liberals say that all cultures are equal and tied to race, and that all the evil in this world resulted from Western claims of superiority.
Due to the works of great Jewish philosophers from Moses Maimonides to Moses Mendelssohn, Jews have become strongly identified with the values from the Western Age of Enlightenment. In one sense, Jews are more Western than most Westerners.
Thus any movement that targets Western civilization and its values will eventually target Jews.
Dialectics defined: any systematic reasoning, exposition (see EXPOSITION sense 2a), or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict : a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth..
This is sewage wrapped up in PhD-speak: Piled Hhgher and Deeper. Information theory dictates that this will only destroy information or “truth”. It is impossible to attain clarity by seeking any “opposing” idea in the human sphere against which to synthesize greater understanding.
Critical Race Theory is multidimensional dialectical reasoning. It is the merging of any number of selected views in a futile attempt to achieve some moral clarity. So of course no clear answer ever comes from it except those that only frustrate the novice and ensure the expert can write more research papers and give more paid lectures. It is intellectually and morally corrupt, and corrupting.
Critical theorists will turn on any ethnic or religious group that have succeeded in America. In other words, they will turn on every group that has contributed to making America a great nation and a nation that immigrants throughout the world want to come to.
Critical theorists will turn on Jewish Americans.
They will turn on Chinese Americans.
They will turn on Korean Americans.
They will turn on Japanese Americans.
They will turn on Indian Americans.
They will turn on Mormon Americans.
They will turn on Philipino Americans.
They will turn on Lebanese Americans.
They will turn on Russian Americans.
They will turn on Thai Americans.
They will turn on Atheist Americans.
They will turn on Agnostic Americans.
As long as they see success as oppression, they will turn on anyone who makes the world a better place to live in,… except possibly Woke Black Trans handicapped autistic women.
The sooner that every ethnic and religious group wakes up to the existential threat that Critical theory represents, they will keep singling out individual groups while the other watch hoping to not become a target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/
Name the group that you listed whose roots are slavery in America.
I can’t see how that’s relevant to the comment.
I find your assertion that atheists and agnostics as a group have made America better to be questionable at best.
I haven’t made it half way through yet, but it started off bad and got worse. You reference Weiss’s definition of American Liberalism, “the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God…“ Hahaha, this is laughably and fantastically disingenuous. The indisputable facts are that the roots of America, regardless of the liberalism as Weiss defines it, began with defining the indigenous population as inferior savages. A large part of that inferiority label they gave Native Americans was due to the fact that they didn’t worship the same God. Not to mention God or Jesus is most often depicted as a white man in those times. Our founding fathers then established a system of chattel slavery which became a basis for racial codification. Once again, putting them at odds with a group of people that didn’t look like them or their God. If American liberalism began as Weiss defines it than MLK Jr. wouldn’t have ever become famous. Marcus Garvey would have felt no need to create a Black Star Line, nor would their have been a need for WEB DuBuois’s talented tenth theory. This isn’t fuzzy math or theory either. They have Slave Codes, Black Codes, Jim Crow, Redlining, Plessy vs Ferguson and on. America began with racism leading the way and the racism evolved and grew in new ways throughout its history. Those that you see claiming victimhood didn’t define themselves as black, but were given that designation by people that defined themselves as white. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.” If racial identity is flawed- by God it is indelibly flawed- then it’s the original people that created the racial designations that are at fault, certainly not the people that were enslaved and once powerless to create a designation for themselves. Every group that came over after slavery has seen themselves above blacks in the same way as the founding fathers. Almost as an act of imitation of the American values at play that they witness when they got off the boat. Everyone came to America to become like those at the top of the economic ladder, not like those at the bottom of the economic ladder. I’m giving all immigrants the benefit of the doubt that they held no pre-exisitng prejudices toward’s people of color. A highly suspect claim, in and of itself. Moving on to the subject of Jewish people and their success. Jews didn’t start at chattel slavery. They have a long history and culture of business success. I’m pointing out 1 point but there are many and black people control many of the variables that can lead to better outcomes. Another point is that Jews can be victims of antisemitism and still harbor racial prejudice against other groups of people. The position that you take is the broadest of strokes. Even Thomas Sowell, an archconservative, knew why the gap between Jews and Blacks socioeconomic status is incomparable. You may want to reflect upon the actual culture of slavery. The same places Jews faced discrimination in the early 20th century, blacks weren’t allowed. They dealt with the discrimination or bigotry and then leverage the knowledge or credibility gained by exposure to power and influence to put themselves in a better position. An impossible feat when you aren’t allowed in the room. Please note, I’m describing a past environment. Our founding fathers did great things and held great ideas that molded our society. Their ideas on race weren’t one of those great ideas. **Please excuse all typos and grammar errors. This is an informal reply. If you see a flaw in my logic please do reply. I enjoy a good debate.
So you open by objecting to Weiss’s definition of American liberalism and offering a historically questionable reference to the founding of the United States?
To illustrate your historical error, consider that the “founding fathers” did not “establish a system of chattel slavery”, that system was already in place having long since been established by European colonial powers. The founding fathers were left with the unenviable task of breaking from their European masters while maintaining some sort of unity. Had it not been for the abolishionists among them and the Enlightenment ideals they espoused, the very concept of liberalism (that you seem to object to) that later evolved from the United States may not have spread backwards through Europe. In fact, the United Kingdom didn’t ban the use of slaves in its other colonies until well into the 19th century.
I could continue dissecting your historical presentation, but you (hopefully) get my drift. Weiss wasn’t making an argument of how American liberalism came to be, but merely offered a description (including a metaphor about God that you seem to have taken literally) of what we understand it to be today. All developed countries and peoples have evolved from less-than-savory origins.
The rest of your response seems to have little bearing on the original post.
The “problem” is the Jewish and Christian proscription of homosexuality. Nazism (socialism) was spawned in the gay rights movement of Germany. The Nazis were gay socialists just like today’s American Progressives. Notice a pattern? Read “The Pink Swastika”
Almost all socialists are gay. Notice that the ANTIFA rioters / criminals are all gays. The truth is that most serial killers and violent criminals are homos.
At first they said that all they wanted was to be left alone…fast forward to today and they now demand that children be given sex-change operations even against the will of their parents and gay indoctrination.
Critical Race Theory sounds like an offshoot of Critical Theory which is basically just constantly complaining about anything and everything in order to progressively destroy the culture in a bid for socialist revolution by dividing the people and turning them against each other,
There are foreign powers that are bribing schools to propagandize and brainwash. The end result is Stalin or Mao if they are successful
“Almost all socialists are gay. Notice that the ANTIFA rioters / criminals are all gays. The truth is that most serial killers and violent criminals are homos.”
Evidence?
How many here are familiar with critical legal theory? It sees law as in need of complete revision.. The entire framework is just Critical Theory. In other words, the goal is to replace enlightenment ideas with social justice.
Critical legal theory is unfortunately part of the curriculum in the mainstream legal academy today. There are more than a few judges who espouse its perspective in their opinions as well
ewww.
obnoxious length and font color. at least its not all caps.
SJWs: If people don’t become anti-racist, the USA will become a facist dictatorship just like Nazi Germany! Look what they did to Jews in the Holocaust!
Also SJWs: Jews are basically white colonialists so let’s cancel them
I’ve only made it through about half of this post, but isn’t the more basic point that CRT is deliberately dehumanizing to everyone. So why should Jewish people not be dehumanized with everyone else. If poor, rural whites are an oppression on rich, urban blacks just by their existence, why shouldn’t the existence of rich urban Jews be an oppression as well?
Short version: Jews shut up. CSJ treats everyone like crap. You aren’t special.
But Jewish history, and the venom shown by CSJ toward Jews and much of the world toward the only Jewish state, shows that, once again Jews ARE special, though their fervent wish is not to be.
Was reading this; https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/the-real-abbie-hoffman about the Chicago 7 Trial and recently released Netflix film. There’s a passage describing (at variance with the film) how Abbie Hoffman baited the trial judge with the Yiddish slang; “shanda fur die goyim”. Interesting in the context of this article as it’s stated that this means “a Jew who embarrasses other Jewish people by doing the dirty work of the gentiles”.
https://mediaburn.org/video/tales-of-hoffman-abbie-and-julius-and-the-chicago-conspiracy-trial-3/
There is the problem of the transatlantic slave trade. There was a huge Jewish involvement and that had yet to be looked at and acknowledged in a non-anti-Jewish way.
But, in reality only few whites and Jews were ever personally involved in the suffering of African people. Global slavery needs to be looked at through the lense of different religion, CRT and liberal humanistic developments.
If we are not getting this right for the good and benefit of all of humanity, we are creating ever new ways for further self-destruction. Every human must be cherished for their preciousness and unique contribution to life. Let all people on earth have food, clothe, shelter, healthy medical care, education, meaningful work, and supportive lovingness. There will be differences in life force. For instance, I am not able to work 80 hours. I rather have less income and walk in the woods anyway. Differences are ok. We all contribute as we can. Of course, contributions depend on opportunity, lets share our smarts to create inspiring paid service opportunities for all. Of course, capitalism needs a wealth cap for the rich. Nobody needs billions of $$.
And who appoints you the arbiter of what people need? How do you determine “need”?
My preference is to re-cast arguments about “nobody needs billions” to older, more conservative views
corporations are granted existence, as collectives offering limited liability to owners and managers, BY the state
corporate “rights” of Artificial Persons has been defined by an activist (conservative activism) Judiciary, and then by Congress
ideal free markets would be so competitive as to eliminate excess surpluses
jobs and growth in a market economy is driven by Demand, primarily consumer-Demand as well as Govt-Demand
hence Keynes and post-Keynes (not Neo-Keynes).
There is also an economic system in which Supply-Side and Supply-constraint ideas are more valid: The Soviet Union and other centralized systems with form of GOSPLAN economics.
money — as money of account, not barter in tangible scarce minerals — is a function of Law and state power, so there’s another unavoidable relationship which cannot be easily untangled from Power
back before Scientific Socialism of Marx and before Economics pretended to be a hard science like Physics, the term used in the days of Adam Smith was “political-economy” meaning that it was WELL UNDERSTOOD BY ALL that competing human-political interests were at play, and that wealth creation and accumulation did not follow “iron laws” or “natural laws” such as “social Darwinism”.
Smith — like Marx after him — differentiated between productive wealth created by industry Capital-Money-Capital in contrast to M-M which means wealth transferred by unproductive forces, by mere ownership and exclusivity (toll booth economy), by debt creation, and by purely financial speculation and ‘claims’ on tangible wealth.
One can look there without completely throwing out understandings of Value which aren’t tied to Ricardian Labor Theory of Value nor Physiocrats idea that all Value emerges from farming and productive land.
In conclusion, it’s possible to breach this topic in a fairly-libertarian context, WITHOUT writing or evoking Red Terror and Leninism or some such, and instead a more western-liberal approach to a well-functioning and fair economy.
It would be good to do so BEFORE mass poverty grants the memory of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin any more popularity than they currently enjoy.
ultimately your utopian vision is a fantasy
Kiran: see below
You wrote in relevant part:
“There is the problem of the transatlantic slave trade. There was a huge Jewish involvement and that had yet to be looked at and acknowledged in a non-anti-Jewish way.”
Proof please from a normative and objective historical source?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook/article/abs/generation-of-monsters-jews-prostitution-and-racial-purity-in-the-1892-lviv-white-slavery-trial/5E1D15E448A77DEE164BAC669C21D9D8
https://www.joimag.it/jewish-mafia-and-prostitute-traffic-zwi-migdals-forgotten-story/
Is it not true that “shanda fur die goyim” is typically used to describe a Jew who soils the reputation of Jews generally in the eyes of the public by behaving in a disgraceful manner (such as Jeffrey Epstein).
And we saw what happened the last time someone in power with lunatic social ideologies had a “Jewish question” and a “Jewish problem.” You’re already starting to see some of that play out with all of the anti-Semitic attacks happening in New York that the mainstream media refuse to report on since they aren’t being perpetrated by the right and/or white people.
james, you are the best at cutting through this ideological mess to explain how we arrived at this moment (and youre often very funny). I hope you manage to break through to larger audiences of people who suspect something wrong with the current climate but cant quite understand the rhetoric couched in words like “structures” and “systems” , especially since on the surface it seems to care about morality more than anything. Many jews, particularly Israelis and those that support israel, have felt like the canary in the coal mine for the past 20 years or so against this current, and it is enormously helpful when someone smart who isnt just from the right wing side of politics can analyze the situation with an honest lens. keep up the good work and funny tweets, especially in response to some of the insane replies you get
Trump President. Take 2
by
Dave Kabay Oct 2020 ver1
In 2016 Quillette, a publication for self proclaimed intellectual Homo sapiens, showed its Voltaireian colours (though not to the extent that Voltaire himself said he would die for your right to speak) proclaiming it has published “The article about Trump nobody will publish”-the “nobody” being 45 other publishers of intellectual elite writings!! Clap clap!!
In 2020 Quillette “declined”, in my first approach, to publish my article “Trump 2020 President!. A intellectual analysis of why” (the article can be found on the Academia edu. web site). It was long, detailed and assumed much of the reader regards their understanding of words/phrases, current woke and non woke political thought and their independence from MSM journalist thinking regards the difference between Thump the man and Trump the president and the actual existence of common sense and humanity to be found in “We the People” (WTP or what Hillary called the “Despicables”) who constitutionally elected for him the USA President. Which is a good enough reason not to accept I suppose. However the other reason perhaps Quillette rejected it was because it had only been rejected by the MSM 6 times. There are standards in Quillette you know that need to be up held.
My second approach, to get published in this esteem journal that supports, in a non dying way, real intellectual free speech, is to submit to Quillette a review of that already published article by James A Lindsay and Peter Boghossian that documents what was said at that time and if their predictions came true regards Trump and his election as the 45th President of the USA. Note that James and Peter belong to the cream of soft science academic intellectual elite, classical examples of the new top “managerial” hierarchical class of “The managerial Revolution” Burnham 1941 or the similar “Symbolic-analytical services” worker of Reiches “Work of Nations” 1991 that are replacing the capitalists of old (who in turn replaced the feudal class of the ancients). James is a mathematician and Peter a philosopher. Both have published several well reviewed nonfiction books. .At the time in 2016 both had published a book that proved God does not exist (Understand that the soft science can do this. Real science knows that from Popper you can only disprove something not prove it!). This finding really cemented their reputation amongst the elites at that time as the “cream”. This in turn explains the 45 rejections they experienced for any writings of members of managerial class that so ever hinted at a positive Trump -which is a definite No No amongst self proclaimed interlectuals. Fancy making up their own minds about Trump (which you really think intellectuals would be renowned for instead of group thinking)!. This characteristic of them made them stand out like 2 sore thumbs and attracted me to their paper. But before discussing their “never Trump elite” rejected paper, let me tell you what I found when I Googled their names (I know I shouldn’t trust that Orwellian 1984 tool-but I am 73 and haven’t the time to go down to the local library). Now wait. They are 2 of the 3 who were behind the New Sokal hoax!! (I don’t have time to go in details if you don’t in the hell know what I am talking about-look it up!) They immediately became my intellectual heroes-us 73s can be groupies too!! With those “experiments” they showed the dismal state of soft woke science and personally showed the two the truth about their book supposing having “proved” God is not exit. True Kama eh You and soft science have to “DISPROVE hypothesises”- even those about God!
Now before I go on, though I haven’t yet seen it, Peter and James may be in the process of writing up a 2020 follow up op piece for Quillette and haven’t yet got 46 different rejections! Reputations have to be maintained and records have to be surpassed!!
The first 2 long paragraphs outline the character of Trump the man, as was common during those strange times. Compared to that now in 2020 the same character prevails – Trump still is Trump-and no new character flaws have been discovered even though distant Trump relatives, “friends” and, sacked incompetent employees have tried to get into the best seller list of the New York Times with their exposés. What is interesting though is that some non groupies, similar to the characters Peter and James, have looked more into the hypocrisy of “who hates Trump the most” media. Books like Victor Hanson’s “The case for Trump” 2019, shows the group thinking of most journalists and MSMs and the utter hypocrisy of the so called Wokes, Progressives, “Liberals”, modern Democrats, Academia, the deep USA bureaucracy and all the born to rule political elites, and groupie intellectuals. Thank goodness for the common sense character of We The People (WTP) and their innate Homo sapiens’ fear of all things that smell of Totalitarianism in so called elite representatives instead of leadership and love of the Common Man. The Founding Fathers knew of this and the USA Constitution reflects this fear.
The paper then goes into something strange for that period. They mention a “cancer” that infects the left and right and spends five paragraphs detailing this “cancer from within”.
The first is the mainline Republican Party due to the opposition to Obama’s leftist political agenda. I thought this was a positive for a conservative party, but as the Black President was the intellectual’s atonement for slavery, it is understandable that, anything the best ever orator in the world wanted, he should have it by default for all our past racist sins.
The second (having 2 paragraphs itself) is, and I quote, “the shrieking, victimhood obsessed culture on the far left” or aka the Politically Correct left is a cancer. And still is in 2020. Trump, though has stood up to it, and hasn’t affected “the cancer” during his presidency. Like all thinks the buck stops with us. It’s up to us WTP. It just needs another 4 years and wokeism PC should be forgotten.
Just an aside and looking at the bigger picture, could this “cancer” be Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” 2018 and Michael Posner’s “Public Intellectuals .A study of Decline” 2003 symptoms? I think it may be.
The third is campaign financing. I really have no problem with this as long as it’s not my taxes. My only beef is that during elections MSM seem to have give up their civic responsibilities as the 4th estate of government and want to actively push 1 barrow. This has been very apparent over the last 4 years other than the odd James and Peter types popping their head above the trenches and venturing out from the barricades spreading the non groupie messages and “fact” news.
So having out lined the big picture and the existential threat to American western democracy, Jame’s and Peter’s reasoned recommendation is though their hearts say “we do not (not even needing the ‘as liberal” qualifier ) want to vote for Trump”, their evolutionally superior cognitive powers of their brain over willingly says “vote Trump “it will get rid of the PC bastards and hand democracy back to WTP!” – or something like that!
How is this going in 2020? Well the bastard cancer won’t die!!! It’s like the last gasp of what Covid 19 (aka “Xi’s Flue”) will look like in 2021/22. It’s hard to easily get rid of the policies and continuous out breaks of the thinking of “The World’s Greatest Orator”. Wokeism is the current new dance of the Swans; Capitalism is having wonky knees being Twitterised every day; PC though in a punch drunk stupor is not on its knees, professional journalism only exist in a few, all MSM have gone over to the Orwell 1984 side in their shrilled animosity towards any and all that is Trump. Only WTP are keeping up the good fight. Though they haven’t yet gone to the level of Churchillian beaches, hills, landing grounds and streets to fight, their unique rights given to them in the Constitution suggests they will never surrender and appeasement is not in the American blood!
The Republican Party now seems ok. The choice of another 4-8 years of a corrupt Clinton dynasty was enough tp “rouse sleepy mainline republican limberals from their dogmatic slumber” and vote for their person! The results was, except for the “never Trump” political elite republicans born to rule over the hillbillies, the GOP has arise to become the true protector of the common man’s rights, supporting small but relevant government, allowing WTP to become the benefiters of true capitalism with the reduction of red tape and bureaucratic inhibitors to small businesses.
On the home front, Obama’s (the world’s greatest orator) economic flatulence, non advancement of the coloured community welfare and employment opportunities and the increase in crime in their neighborhoods’ and that in the general community has been reversed with vengeance
On the world front Thump is expecting the free world especially the EU to take more of their own in defense and against terrorism, getting rid of Global PC in international relations and institutions, drawing red lines and getting rid of Obama’s international relationship legacies with totalitarian and political Islamic ruled nations and even finally solving the Middle East crisis without a Nobel Prize!
So, to finally show the USA and the world that it is not just a passing WTP phase, Trump needs another 4years to convince them that WTP have always liked all people but don’t like woke feelings and their like jammed down their necks! So vote Trump November 2020 for the final lap for the permanency of the freedom of Western Liberal Democracy in the coming 4 years and beyond! Remember the constitution, as Peter and James said in 2016, in 2020 will save us from Trump, but nothing will save us from a sleep Joe , the current new extreme Progressives, the deep state within the bureaucracy that serves them rather than WTP,. BLM and ANTIFA domestic extremists and Sander’s socialism!
Can we get a character limit for this lepton?
Why a limit Arthur especially when one is try to explain the impossible to 1/2 wits.
Dave Kabay
You might need a little less free time.
“In 2020 Quillette “declined”, in my first approach,”
May I be the first to write that it is easy to imagine why they declined. It is not enough to have good ideas; you must be able to express them clearly, succinctly, and in a way that makes your logic transparent. Find a good editor and you’ll have more success.
Thanks Kurt. Difficult at 73. Just hope some are interested enough to plough though based on 73 years of wisdom
This is a mess. It also doesn’t belong here.
If you can’t get it published, perhaps you should be willing to entertain reasons which begin with you, rather than pinning the blame on others.
Would you care to go into a little more detail?
Excellent piece. If Critical Social Justice warriors decides Jews are not “white,” that puts them on the same side as white supremacists. If they decide Jews *are* white, that makes them anti-Semites. So either position is actually identical to the views of white supremacists. Which we all know Critical Social Justice warriors are, just from a different perspective.
I take issue with many aspects of critical race theory. I also take issue with anti-semitism. But I’m not sure what the argument is here. Is it that CRT is itself anti Semitic or are Jewish CRT folks upset that they are being left out of the victim olympics?? The Jewish people have struggled against oppression throughout their history and finally this a moment to feel safe and celebrate having a homeland, and celebrate hard earned achievements. Instead they are haunted by and in fact obsess over their history. Why?
“Safe” is generous. Per capita, Jews are on the receiving end of more hate crimes in this country than any other group, including Blacks. Israel is targeted in a ridiculously disproportionate manner by the international community, (see UN resolutions) when there are countries who commit far worse crimes, and against their own people. It’s the only country I can think of that is regularly suggested to be dismantled, and with social acceptability. Why not Pakistan? It was created at around the same time Israel was. And it was created because Muslims could not tolerate sharing India with Hindus. Are Pakistanis such a kind and benevolent people that they deserve no such recommendation for state-dismantlement, but the Jewish state (and only the Jewish state) does?
Unless you count police brutality as a hate crime. Which BLM does.
israel is an ethnostate that should have never happened…
But it did. Deal with it.
What kind of states do you approve of , if any? Why not look at the Torah where the Land of Israel was and is explicitly promised to the Jewish People?
you fail to see the point b/c james has none, he is an intellectual huckster, a charlatan. he has no idea what he’s talking about most of the time and just bloviates garbage.
I marched for Palestine and for a 2-State or 1-State solution. Negotiated compromise that could satisfy both groups, if not perfectly. I didn’t realize that Allah FORBIDS compromise and any secular political compromise treaty brings hatred of Allah and eternal Hellfire.
That means, not only would Jews be sacrificed to Sharia, but a step closer to global Sharia, such as what’s been emerging in Sweden and England and France, etc.
If Jews could live everywhere with routine expectations of security like the English or Spanish or other nationalities, then formation of Israel would be redundant.
Especially if we discount the “ancient homeland” argument.
Initially, Jews moved “home” as more-or-less refugees from Europe, while there were still Jews living there who had never left. The Arab residents of Jerusalem were — ironically — roused to bitter hatred of “refugees” or “immigrants” .. ironic because of the refugee crisis and accusations that this is anti-Muslim bigotry.
Back when I was marching for Palestine, I was disgusted by hearing that Golda Meir said “there is no such thing as the Palestinian People”.
NOW I understand that “Palestine” was a name given by the Romans for the region of the defeated Kingdom of Israel, and that there wasn’t an organic “Palestinian race” in the sense of Arabs or Syrians. I recently heard that a Palestinian leader years ago proclaimed that Palestinians ARE south-Syrians.
Then I heard that Muslim Brotherhood invented “Islamophobia” to compete politically with “anti-semitism”
Then I learned that Yasser Arafat & the Soviets created “The Palestinian people” as such to appeal to American Leftists who saw Israelis as underdogs or victorious underdogs near the peak of the pyramid of Oppression at a similar level as African-Americans, but Jews needed to be re-envisioned into Colonial Oppressors.
another fact-free assertion, where one true charlatan projects onto someone else who provides facts for his very well taken assertions.
CRT is rooted in Marxist theory which offers no place for the Jew as a separate ethnic or religious identity.
Overheard at the Y:
Jewish man: UC-San Francisco was my son’s first choice for medical school. He didn’t get in, but he got into Harvard, so he’s going there.
Second Jewish man: He was good enough for Harvard Med, but not UCSF?
First Jewish man: NOW, we’re white.
Hmmm. You do realise that Jews are vastly over-represented at Harvard compared to non-Jews and Asians. Time to drop the victim complex?
“Victim comples”– how often do I hear this? What an absurd thing to say, just historically….
It is NOT that Jews today in America ARE currently in victim mode. No.
Nor should anyone dismiss the arguments of some conservative Jews — which inadvertently echo WN conspiracy theories about Jews seeking to replace them — that Jews (blame intergenerational trauma and fear?) have leaned TOO far and TOO long into ANTI-Nazi positionality and solidarity, in effect becoming a parody of anti-fascism AND inviting the contempt of minority “allies” while awakening the hatred of “enemies” this stance seems to create.
Of course Jews oppose fascists, and don’t oppose “White people” as the WN’s claim. But when the Rad-Left makes Whiteness synonymous with Fascism, it becomes a problem, bubula.
I have noticed in history that Jews in historical Israel or in Diaspora enjoyed relatively brief periods of people NOT trying to destroy them for one reason or another: being non-Christian, causing the Plague (before anyone knew about “germs”), sacrificing Christian children for blood rituals, being too capitalist, being too socialist, not being farmers (couldn’t own land), being too smart, etc.
Now, there seems to be an emerging threat of being labeled “White-Adjacent”, for not fitting a good racial category on the Progressive Stack of Oppression.
We’ll drop the “victim complex” when people like you stop harping on about the Jews, who, if they are indeed overrepresented at Harvard, is because each individual earned their place there.
amazing. I could do a whole sketch show without punchlines about wokeness.
Orthodox Jews, generally less liberal politically than other Jews, have seen this problem coming for some time.
Woke is not the Jewish people’s friend. It is, in fact, an anti-Semitic ideology (though it is not only that). Its anti-racist stance works only too well to fool some Jews that they are safe among the Woke. Worse, as Lindsay writes, “Woke anti-Semitism currently enjoys a reasonable degree of both [positive branding and Jewish support].”
What! Some American Jews support anti-Semitism? Crazy! Inconceivable!
But James Lindsay is absolutely right. There are Woke Jews who think their brethren are too privileged. There are Woke Jews who would dismantle the State of Israel. They must be repudiated by liberal and conservative Jews alike.
Horribly, one small step in the right direction is to vote for Trump. And, yes, his values — if they can be called that — are often inimical to Jewish ones. But at least Trump opposes CRT. Biden does not.
Donald Trump is the best friend Israel and the Jewish people have had in the White House for decades. Ditto for Mike Pence.And they are opposed by two candidates who are openly anti-Israel and always have been. Both of them boycotted the AIPAC event this year along with every other Democrat running for the Presidency and both have said they would impose sanctions on Israel to force them to make what amounts to suicidal concessions to Israel’s enemies that would force Israel into indefensible borders. Both also favor the anti-Semitic congress members in the ‘Squad’ and have an anti-Israel voting record . The Dems are now the new home of Israel hatred and Jew hatred. Voting to put them in power will change things in ways many Jews can’t imagine
The real truth is simple. It is no secret that Jews organized and financed the Civil rights movement and even shed Jewish blood for it. And it is also no secret that the reward Jews received for that was anger, violence and Jew hatred…not from all blacks certainly, but from a startling number of them. The NAACP was organized and funded by Jews, but you will see no mention of this on their web site. And what you will also find if you look is a video of the standing ovation Louis Farrakhan got from them when he spoke at a Founder’s Day event.
Rather than being ‘shocked’ and making a real effort to oppose BLM , an openly anti-semitic group who launched a pogrom at Jewish homes, businesses , schools and Synagogues in Los Angeles where the LAPD was not allowed to intervene by the city’s mayor, or the carnage that occurs every day in Queens and Brooklyn, many American Jews simply stay quiet. This is suicidal.
That, of course is the root of this problem. Many Jews would rather be ‘liked’ and fit in or so they think, then speak out against Jew hatred or racism of any kind if it comes from blacks who are anti-semitic or ‘woke’ politicians. This has happened before in Jewish history and it has NEVER ended well.
As for critical race theory, it is simply an tool to excuse hatred of ‘whitey’ in which Jews are of course included since they take it quietly and apologetically and might even write a check to prove how ‘nice’ they are. It excuses hatred of America and its values is meant to gain money and power for its proponents. The truth is there IS no systematic racism in America. For that to be it would have to be true,it would have to be de jure, a matter of law. Nor is it de facto. There is nothing but opportunity in America which is why so many people want to come here..If anything, it is the reverse. Certain demographics now get ‘diversity points’ on their SATs while Jews, white males and Asians actually get their scores reduced. This is official College Board policy. And there are a number of Universities (SF state and Irvine in California among others) which openly tolerate Jew hatred and anti-Israel hatred and do nothing about it.
Why? Because too many of America’s Jews stay silent. And refuse to unify. And many unfortunately don’t understand how important Israel is to Jews who live int he diaspora
Well said. It’s not just lack of unity- it’s the naive suspension of wariness. I am always surprised at Hollywood which has a significant Jewish segment from what I understand. It drives the CRT agenda hard, even though the logical end of that is anti-Semitism. Spielberg delivered “The Post” with alacrity, but as far as I know, has been silent about the anti-Semitism in New York. That’s either tragic self-delusion or a remarkable blind spot.
The left views all anti Semitism in the world as originating on the right, and denies the presence of anti Semitism in its midst when in reality the intersectional progressive CRT social justice world has been propagating and peddling the same for years in academia and the media for years. Who desecrated synagogues across the US all spring and summer if not disciples and fellow travelers of the left?
YES, there are Jews who feel sufficient guilt within that narrative to be willing to dismantle Israel. And go WHERE?
I, myself, spent some time with a Left pro-Palestinian Justice (all the right words and ideas) Quaker-ish group in America. Israel seen in the same light as the Bush Admin’s invasion of Iraq (which I was told was done *for* Israel but later found out Israel didn’t want to topple Saddam (not that there was any love) but needed to be pressured and bribed to support Bush & Neocons).
ANYHOW, in the discussions — mostly among Christians, Arab Christians, Liberals, Leftists, Peace Activists, etc. about whether a 1-State Solution would be better or a 2-State Solution, I had not gotten around to reading the Hamas Charter.
I had seen the Palestinian issue as one of property, land, and rights .. to homes. Sensible from a normal western Materialist frame of either capitalist property rights or Marxist scientific materialism. (This argument is not 100% absent validity. People did lose homes, but people were doing pogroms to drive Jews out of their homes in Jerusalem and Hebron etc.)
So in the western sense, a solution would be to work out SOME FORM OF COMPROMISE, such as Land + Money perhaps, trade treaty, or multi-cultural democracy. This solution might not be loved by everyone but can be accepted by everyone, if grudgingly by some.
Peace. No more dying.
Those peace terms are absolutely unequivocally UNACCEPTABLE and forbidden by Allah.
No compromise on the Waqf, no friendship allowed with Jews or Christians or Poly-theists (such as Hindu) ANY Infidels, or you disobey Allah, Allah hates you, and you burn in Hell for eternity.
This post is an excellent comment on a superb article. It is tragic but not unexpected that the heterodox movements of Judaism and more than a few Jewish secular communal agencies have embraced the goals and ideology behind BLM which is critical racial theory. There are indeed more than a few Woke Jews who read books such as those in the article and “Caste” etc, and will end up becoming not just anti Israel but self hating Jews. I encountered some of supporters during the riots in NY during this past June as well as with a recent conversation with a family relative and their views show the effect of such a perspective. The only effective response to CRT is a set of values that promote a positive view of Jewish observance and tradition as opposed to substituting CRT and social justice aka Tikun Olam for the same
I would like to point out how this only became a problem once Critical Race Theory started getting practiced by non-Jewish people.
Are you implying that Jews started this mess and are now getting their just deserts?
How, for God’s sake, did you arrive at *that* conclusion?
Yes
Hey man, just FYI, your jackboots are showing.
That is the least cogent sentence that I have read in quite a while.
The historical emergence of the Institute for Cultural Studies in Frankfurt — and the path from Marcuse to Angela Davis to Derrick Bell to Kimberlee Crenshaw and bell hooks and others — the role of some Jewish Leftists is undeniable.
But it SOUNDS LIBERAL. Most average liberal-minded White folx and Jewish folx do support the “rights” and “justice” paradigms because they echo the Enlightenment and echo Civil Rights. It is not easy to discern the degree of ANTI-Liberalism within, especially when the Media is telling us that ANTIFA burning police stations and assaulting people is a myth and that’s all going away now that Joe Biden is poised to replace Donald Trump.
People BELIEVE that when someone states that gay minority journalist Andy Ngo IS a fascist and neo-Nazi, that’s a fact, and that explains why he must be “doctoring” photos and videos of ANTIFA, to spread Nazi propaganda.
I totally get that. The argument that Critical Social Justice theory and action doesn’t mean actual social justice and individual human rights is not so obvious, because it’s convoluted.
I’m not familiar with Weiss’ older writing, but the Eggshells article on this site – it isn’t about Weiss but includes a section on Weiss and the NYT – depicts her as a centrist not a “woke-ist”.
————–
Weiss describes her daily work situation with this damning recognition of the obvious:
“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.”
And yet, it did require bravery. Why? Well, when does one need to be brave? When you’re threatened, that’s when. In Bari’s case, these threats manifested socially- with the occasional violent innuendo on her work slack channels. The organizational culture Weiss described at The New York Times was one seemingly created by an amalgam of the loudest voices (she credits Progressive Twitter), and a few de facto leaders (my assumption being The 1619 Project czar, Nikole Hannah-Jones, though Weiss is savvy enough to not mention anyone specifically).
Practically speaking, how did this environment impact those who were within it? Again, Weiss paints a clear, but bleak picture:
“Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times…And so self-censorship has become the norm. What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”
Self-censorship. Fear of stepping out of line. Bullying. Shaming unapproved or heterodox ideas. Sound familiar? “Maybe he doesn’t hit you, but you have to walk on eggshells every day to ensure he is satisfied enough to remain calm and happy.”
The Road to Hell is Paved with Eggshells
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/11/road-hell-paved-with-eggshells/
I think for the sake of context there should be some acknowledgement that CRT actually borrows heavily from Weiss’s mentality (you begin to wonder if she is actually upset with Kendi mostly for stealing her ideas).
yes, this piece is entirely a reversal
Perhaps the issue is not the whiteness of Jews, but rather the Jewishness of the underlying theories of ‘wokism’