Their identity politics has always been incompatible with Jewish flourishing.
Their identity politics has always been incompatible with Jewish flourishing.
B y the time the dust was beginning to settle on the evening of October 7, 2023, Israelis knew without a doubt that their lives had changed forever. The year ahead would surely be one of loss, fighting, mourning, praying, and surviving.
But for American Jews, it was October 8 when we began to notice that something was very wrong here at home. Beginning on that day, we saw that “prestigious” American institutions had been captured by an ideology that was largely devoid of the moral clarity necessary to denounce terrorism against Jews. Now, a full year later, and despite the attacks to which Jewish Americans have been subjected, it pains me to observe that much of American Jewry still doesn’t understand the nature of the threat that we face.
The liberal (and therefore mainstream) Jewish narrative of the events leading up to our moment goes something like this: For decades, American Jews marched hand in hand with progressive activists on a wide array of social-justice issues. We fought for marginalized communities against their oppressors. On issues of race and gender, police violence, and abortion, we stood with the Left against the status quo of bigotry. Now, the Left has betrayed us. It has slandered us as “oppressors” and grouped us with the purveyors of evil ideologies. In abandoning us, the Left has also forgotten what it means to be “progressive.”
You could see this narrative begin to crystallize in the weeks immediately following Hamas’s attack. Last October, the New York Times profiled progressive Jews who “feel abandoned by their left-wing allies.” One was Boaz Munro, “who works in technology in San Francisco and is the grandson of Holocaust survivors.” Here’s how the NYT describes his point of view:
While he praised advances in the “racial discourse” in the past decade, Mr. Munro suggested that Jews had been left on the sidelines in that discourse because they were not seen as threatened or deserving of protection in the same way that Black and Latino people are.
“The way the discourse plays out, the Jews end up in the top of the hierarchy,” Mr. Munro said. “It’s not even about Israel. It’s just about being Jewish: You’re white. You access whiteness.”
Notice something striking: Munro doesn’t seem to object to a hierarchy of racial oppressors per se, but only to one in which Jews are at the top.
You can find a similar outlook reflected in a compilation of American-Jewish reactions to the past year, published two days ago by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Here are a few:
“I don’t feel welcome in most communities, especially ones I used to call home like queer spaces, animal activism spaces, feminist and reproductive rights spaces, professional spaces, and even friend circles. I don’t really have anywhere left that I feel I can safely bring my whole self.”
“My life as an American Jew with liberal beliefs has been upended. People who I considered friends, I now believe are antisemitic.”
“As a Jewish American involved in social justice I was challenged for not taking to the social media and streets as pro-Palestine. This led to being accused of genocide supporter and a Zionist. I have refused to polarize my police reform and other justice work with this sentiment.”
“I feel like I’m living in a bizarro world. How are all of the people that I would march with and fight for suddenly telling me I’M the bad guy?”
“I feel I was naive, before, about the degree to which people who profess progressive, human-rights, equity-oriented politics would be able to extend those ideals to Jews and Israelis as fellow human beings. I feel politically homeless now, even though my politics have not really changed much (if at all).”
Even some non-Jewish progressives have adopted the belief that their movement has betrayed the Jews. As Brianna Wu wrote recently:
There’s no kind way to say it — many progressives have betrayed our Jewish friends and neighbors, many of whom stood with us in defeating the 2018 anti-trans bathroom ballot initiative, elevating Black Lives Matter, and donning knitted pink hats to stand for women’s rights. In my experience, every time progressives asked for help with canvassing, donating, or phone banking, Jewish friends on the left showed up in disproportionate numbers.
This narrative, however, begins to crumble when pressure is applied. Namely, it lacks an account of why progressivism decided to betray its allegedly core principles with regard to the Jews. Jewish progressives and their allies believe that antisemitism among their peers, the source of which they cannot truly identify, falsely inverted the perceived hierarchy by transforming Jews from the oppressed to the oppressors. But why does progressivism seem to have this blind spot in its account of the Jewish people? No answer is offered.
Here’s the inconvenient truth that Jewish progressives still don’t want to hear: There is no blind spot. What you have witnessed is progressive ideology applied consistently. In a hierarchy of racist oppressors, some group must be on the top. You just don’t like that it’s you.
The lesson of October 8 and its aftermath, then, is not that Jews should urge the Left to toggle the rankings in its identity hierarchy — it’s that an identity hierarchy is itself immoral because it denies certain groups their inherent human dignity. If Jews weren’t at the top of the Left’s current list of oppressors, somebody else would be. And treating them the same way that Jews have been treated this past year would be just as wrong, regardless of whether they were white, or male, or Christian, or anything. This lesson is especially important for Jews because history has conclusively taught us that identity politics can never serve us well. While racism is always evil, it happens to be that Jews are often its target. Jewish flourishing is entirely at odds with the identitarianism of the modern Left.
The massacres of October 7 coincided with the Israeli celebration of Simchat Torah, in which Jews begin the annual Torah cycle anew. These words from the first chapter of Genesis, therefore, are especially relevant, and they must form the foundation of the Jewish political outlook: “God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God.” This is also the source of the great American claim that all men are created equal, and its corollary — that the treatment of individuals according to their race or ethnicity is evil. It isn’t so much that modern progressivism has betrayed the Jews. Rather, it has betrayed that core American conviction. In turn, American Jews have no choice but to abandon progressivism.