My Ignorance About Antisemitism

I’ve been an anti-oppression educator for a while now. Turns out the oppression I know least about is antisemitism. Ironic, because I’m Jewish—or as I often claim, more -ish than Jew. This way I describe myself? I’d call it antisemitic. It’s how I distance myself from my cultural heritage, it reflects my longstanding and reflexive turning away from Jewish people, gatherings, and topics. In the very way I’ve been socialized into antiBlack racism—something I know a lot about—I’ve also been socialized to be antisemitic. All of us have.

I don’t judge myself for this. My temperament and personality aren’t responsible for me being good at being supremacist; it’s my supremacist culture that’s done a good job of training me to relate to people, including myself, in terms of mattering more and mattering less. Once aware, I learned in the early days of my “white awakening”, I can figure out how to be more responsible, more deliberate, and more defiant in how I do my life.

So this is what I’m up to now about antisemitism. This came to me last week, when many fraught hours of research culminated in me taking the lead (content-wise) for a 90-minute training called Understanding Antisemitism, for a Seattle nonprofit. This was the last in a series of six trainings about a variety of identities (antiBlack racism, Islamophobia, LGBTQIA rights, etc.). The anatomy of the trainings—and of the oppressions themselves—were pretty much the same: step into history, raise complexities, focus on what we can do. Yet I found, deep into the research, that antisemitism is different. Every version of marginalization sucks; I’m not saying this one sucks more. Rather, antisemitism has a specific flavor, a manipulation of visibility and invisibility, and a very particular history that makes it unlike any of the other oppressions I’ve come to understand.

Here are just a few of the more persistent, disturbing, and mystifying things I’m now awake to about antisemitism, from a much longer list:

The Jewish religion started around 1500BCE; it’s the first monotheistic religion, which immediately caused trouble and launched one expulsion after another. Jews are not a nomadic people, yet given the option to convert, leave, or die by one empire after another, we’ve scattered across the globe. The Assyrians, Romans, Babylonians and more recently Russians & Germans (an incomplete list), have booted Jews out of everywhere we’ve landed. I counted 55 expulsions (in Wikipedia) from year 1CE to the mid-1800s, when Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews from Tennessee, Kentucky & Mississippi. I’m wondering now, how does this generational trauma live in me? Certainly this kind of repeated repression and dismissiveness gets embedded, over time, in our cultural and genetic codes. Likely it’s behind my own distancing from most things Jewish across the first five decades of my life.

Malcolm X circulated a horribly antisemitic tome (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) around the Nation of Islam, concretizing anti-Jewish prejudice in the Black Muslim world. Many Catholic Latinés have a grudge from believing Jews killed Jesus. The Arab World holds a lot of antisemitic hostility after innumerable Arab-Israeli conflicts. And me, representing the far left, find myself elevating the status of Palestinians as an indigenous people—with all the honor and right to land that implies—without doing the same for Jews. Yet I just wrote that Jews were native to the same land. This is where my own confusion lies between my anti-Israeli sentiment (I am fervently against the actions of the Israeli government) and my internalized, culturally-fed antisemitism. I can’t take for granted what I know and where I stand. So to prepare for this training, I consulted a keen, thoughtful (formerly observant) Christian; an esteemed friend deeply committed to understanding Jewish history, culture, & spirituality; and my skilled co-trainer, an immigrant from Bolivia. Much of the insights I’m writing here result from how their perspectives moved me.

There are about 17 million Jews living around the world. As a diasporic people, we’ve been influenced by (and have influenced) the cultures and histories of Spain, Morocco, Ethiopia, Brazil, Finland, Australia, China, Canada, and more. We look it, too. Yet, we’re a tiny population—only 0.2% of the world’s population, 2.4% of the U.S. So, world domination? The chant “Jews will not replace us” may be more accurate than white nationalists intend. I’m struck by how obvious the authoritarian playbook is here: test suppression tactics on vulnerable populations first, claiming existential threat. Jews throughout the millennia; and today, trans people, immigrants seeking refuge, and students supporting Palestinians—the absurdity of how these groups are vilified enrages me, and inspires me. I’m determined to stay vigilant, to speak up, to keep learning all these things I have been so cleverly kept from knowing.

Christian Zionists fully support Israel and the hope that Jews flock there. This has nothing to do with Jewish well-being. These folks are following a New Testament biblical prophecy, which mandates Jews filling the homeland as the final step to the second coming. Christian will have their rapture; Jews will then disappear (or convert). There are over 10 million Christian Zionists in the U.S.—and only 7.5 million Jews, many of whom are not Zionists. Pentacostalism, and something called the New Apostolic Reformation, are promising wealth, power, and ultimately the rapture to millions, especially in the global south. Right now. With this one I feel helpless, as I always have when experiencing Christian Hegemony. I felt this despair about antiBlack racism when I first learned about it. And what I’ve learned since then: settle into awareness. That’s where (personal) movement begins.

I could go on. Actually, I plan to. I’ve learned over the years that I invariably end up teaching whatever it is I need to learn. I’d love to create a longer workshop, or a longer article: you can influence me: What is new for you here? What questions do you have? What would you like to understand more deeply? What do you feel tender about? Are you interested in reading materials or the shared experience of a workshop? Do you want citations for anything I’ve written here, or a resource list to launch your own study?

Talk to me. Let's become aware together.

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