I just got back from Berlin, Germany, after another great round of teaching “Jewish Concepts of a Peaceful Coexistence”, and it occurred to me there that what so enrages me about modern Jewish politics is the same as what irks me about Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism.
Here’s a Jewish joke for you: It’s the World Series and the Yankees just won. A little boy is running through the streets of The Bronx waving a Yankees flag. He runs through Little Italy and yells “The Yankees win the pennant!” and all the Italians are shouting and dancing and celebrating. He runs through the Greek neighborhood and yells “The Yankees win the pennant!” and all the Greeks hoot and holler and throw their plates on the ground in celebration. And on it goes through the Hispanic neighborhoods and the Irish neighborhoods and the Black neighborhoods and everyone is celebrating. Then the boy gets to the Jewish neighborhood and he sees an old Jewish man in a big black coat and hat and he says again “The Yankees win the pennant!”. The old Jewish man looks at him, shrugs, and says “But what does it mean for the Jews?”.
Half of Germany’s Jews today are refugees from the collapsing Soviet Union
By this joke’s logic, Jews have a long tradition of looking out for Jews. But in fact Jews also have a long history of social justice activism. Back when Jews were fighting for our own rights, we were also fighting for the rights of our fellow citizens, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were both drafted in the conference room of a major Jewish organization, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. But in the intervening time, Jews in America have been acknowledged as basically white people, so many of today’s leading Jews no longer feel the same solidarity with America’s oppressed, and the Jewish mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, trashes Occupy Wall Street’s library (a modern book-burning) and pushes forth racist policies like Stop-and-Frisk.
Jews have a long, treacherous history as refugees, and in fact half of Germany’s Jews today are refugees from the collapsing Soviet Union, many of whom have chosen not to integrate yet still have great power through the voice of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der deutschen Juden, hereafter Zentralrat). However, since there are very few new Jewish refugees coming in and most of the current refugees heading towards Germany are Muslim, the Zentralrat feels it’s ok, the Jews are safe, and they have called for a limit to refugees entering Germany.
No longer is it the Hannah Arendts or the Mel Brookses or the Jon Stewarts or the Emma Goldmans
I’m teaching this course on Jewish Concepts of a Peaceful Coexistence, and I know that I am driven by the charitable teachings with which I was brought up to do the right thing and fix the world. And I know I’m not alone in this, that there are still Jews today that are fighting for other people’s rights, for human rights, and in fact we are many. I would venture that we make up the majority of the Jewish diaspora. But we are not the loudest, we are not the most successful. The Zionists and the racists among us, the ones who throw around words like “assimilationist” as an insult against those who seek to fix the world and work toward reconciliation, the Netanyahu’s and the Bloombergs and the Zentralrats, they have become the face of modern Judaism. No longer is it the Hannah Arendts or the Mel Brookses or the Jon Stewarts or the Emma Goldmans, not even Bernie Sanders who rather plays down his Judaism on the campaign trail despite obviously being the political incarnation of everyone’s adorable Jewish grandpa yelling at the Teevee. It’s hard not to feel like those of us embracing the peaceful coexistent side of Judaism are losing to those who embrace the power of white supremacy now that Jews are considered white.
Our biggest names today are burning books and racially profiling and casting refugees back to near-certain-death in the sea or the desert or prison. (We’ll ignore for the sake of space and not losing our thread the crimes of the leaders of the state of Israel). All the while they play up their Judaism and the victimhood or chosenness or whatever that goes along with it to pull in support from other Jews while acting in ways that could not ethically be considered in line with Jewish teachings or culture. And this is where I get to Hillary Clinton.
Hillary doesn’t embody the kind of feminism with which I was raised any more than Michael Bloomberg embodies my kind of Judaism
At least as intensely as Jewish teachings affected me in my upbringing, I was also raised starkly feminist. And feminism, as much as Judaism, has a strong broad-social-justice solidarity side to it. The same things I said about those Jewish organizations fighting for voting rights and civil rights can be said of feminist groups and feminists. On the other hand, you could take that same joke and change the rabbi to a Hillary-Clinton-style feminist asking “but what does it mean for upper-and-middle-class (mostly white) women?” Hillary Clinton helps her friends build new prisons that have drastically increased the percentage of women of color incarcerated in America. Hillary Clinton negotiates tens of billions of dollars worth of arms deals to some of the most repressive, anti-feminist regimes. Hillary Clinton votes to send the US military to wars that inevitably, by virtue of being wars, harm women significantly more than men. And while she does this, she makes a big show of how important her womanhood is to all women. So to watch Hillary Clinton become the face of feminism, to watch people unquestioningly hand her the mantle of feminist revolutionary champion just because she has the right anatomy for it, to me that’s like saying I should support Netanyahu because we were both circumcised at eight days old.
Netanyahu IS a Jew and Hillary Clinton is welcome to call herself a feminist, but they are neither my kind of Jew nor my kind of feminism. Feminism is an ethos, like social justice Judaism is an ethos, and Hillary doesn’t embody the kind of feminism with which I was raised any more than Michael Bloomberg embodies my kind of Judaism (Ruth Bader Ginsburg embodies both, but sadly she’s not running for President). To me, Clinton and Bloomberg both represent white supremacy, and that’s neither Jewish nor Feminist.
