Anybody that is even remotely familiar with my work will know that I am passionate about bringing lesser-known Jewish histories to light. I love exploring the nooks and crannies of Jewish history — the big and little things we don’t often hear about. This naturally includes uplifting the stories of minority groups within the Jewish community.
But there is a stark difference between uplifting minority-within-a-minority voices and stories and weaponizing those narratives to throw fellow Jews under the bus.
Today much of the antisemitic discourse that we see across the political spectrum deals with a distortion of Jewish identity, and, in particular, Ashkenazi Jewish identity. Many so-called Jewish activists have responded to this deluge of hate by throwing Ashkenazi Jews under the bus.
Such behavior is fundamentally flawed…and utterly anti-Jewish.
THE SAME TIRED PLAYBOOK
It happens time and time again: antizionists accuse Ashkenazi Jews of having no historic and legal right to the Land of Israel, describing them as European settlers or telling them to go back to Poland.
Jewish advocates retort, “Most Israelis are not Ashkenazi!”
That’s true: a little over 50% of Jewish Israelis are of Mizrahi or Sephardic origin. But what this tactic implies is that the other half of Israeli Jews are have no right to their ancestral homeland. Instead of confronting the bigots for their bigotry, these activists throw Ashkenazi Jews – that’s 80% of Jews worldwide, by the way – under the bus, either to appease the antisemite or to save themselves.
That’s not an effective or honest method for fighting bigotry. You do not challenge bigots by telling them that they have don’t have the entire point, but that they do have a little bit of a point. You challenge bigots by calling them out on their bigotry completely.
A TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE STRATEGY
Today any marginalized person who steps out of the ideological line of the left is subjected to bigotry or accused of being an agent of white supremacy (see Iranian, Cuban, and Venezuelan immigrants to the United States). When a dark-skinned Mizrahi Jew tries to challenge antisemitic tropes about Jews as settler colonialists by arguing that they are brown Zionists, the left will therefore consider them a tool of so-called white or Jewish supremacy.
In other words, this is not only a dishonest and un-Jewish strategy. It is a strategy that doesn’t work.
Diverse Jewish identities can certainly challenge monolithic and reductive judgments of the Jewish people. But combatting historical revisionism not by correcting the historical record but by acquiescing to contemporary identity politics at the expense of most of the world’s Jews is counterproductive and hateful.
JEWISH INTRACOMMUNAL DISCRIMINATION IS NOTHING NEW...
…but it is nowhere near as one-directional as Western (and specifically American) racial dynamics would have you think.
- When Sephardic Jews made Aliyah in the 16th century as a result of the Spanish Inquisition, the new Sephardic refugees looked down upon the native Jewish community going so far as to refuse to eat their kosher slaughter.
- As groups of pious Ashkenazi Jews made Aliyah in the 18th and 19th centuries, they experienced discrimination from the predominant Sephardic community.
- Up until the 19th many established American Jewish communities were of Sephardic origin. When waves of Ashkenazi Jewry arrived at the end of the 19th century, some of the Sephardic elite saw them as culturally inferior.
- In the 19th century, Western European Jews, and particularly German Jews, looked down on Eastern European Jews, or Ostjuden, as backwards and culturally inferior. Both communities were of Ashkenazi origin.
- In the early years of the State of Israel, Mizrahi Jews experienced social and cultural discrimination.
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In the 1990s, Soviet Jews experienced social discrimination in Israel, despite being predominantly of Ashkenazi origin.
So did Ethiopian Jews.
Jewish intracommunal relations have often been messy. But just as Jews don’t fit modern Western social constructs of race, neither does our history of intracommunal discrimination.
And, as you can see, power dynamics between different Jewish communities flipped across time and space.
THE APPROPRIATE JEWISH RESPONSE IS TO LOOK OUT FOR EACH OTHER
"All of Israel are responsible for one another."
Shevuot 39A
Let me be clear: there is absolutely nothing Jewish about throwing another group of Jews to the wolves, especially when they are already experiencing antisemitic discrimination.
- As far back as the first century, Jews in the Diaspora, including in Europe, sustained the disenfranchized Jewish community in the Land of Israel through a charity practice known as Halukka.
- When Ottoman authorities discriminated against Ashkenazi Jews in 18th century Palestine, the Sephardic community protected their fellow Jews, providing them with shelter, funds, and even dressing them as Sephardic Jews to shield them from unequal laws.
- In 1929, the Arab perpetrators of the Hebron Massacre offered to spare Sephardic Jews if they handed over their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters. The Sephardic community refused.
- During World War II, Ethiopian Jews petitioned Emperor Haile Selassie to help the Jews in Europe. They ultimately saved a number of Greek Jews from Hitler’s gas chambers.
- In 1948 and the decade that followed, the State of Israel, whose establishment was then overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, carried a number of clandestine operations to fly or ship Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews to safety.
- In the 1980s and 1990s, Israel carried out rescue operations of Ethiopian Jews.
The Jewish Nation is at its best when we look out for one another, not when we tear each other down.
UNDERSTANDING WHERE RACE FITS IN
Ashkenazi is not equivalent to “white Jew,” “European Jew,” or even “Jew with a Diaspora experience in Europe” (many Jewish communities in Europe were Sephardic, and there are others as well, like the Italkim and Romaniotes).
Whiteness and lack thereof are social constructs with different meanings across different societies and time periods. Ashkenazi Jews were historically regarded by European societies as a foreign race to Europe, and we all know what happened during the Holocaust.
There are Ashkenazi Jews with white skin. And there are Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews with white skin as well. And there are also Ashkenazim with brown or Black skin, and, in fact, the majority of Black Jews in the US today are of Ashkenazi descent.
Applying today’s Americentric racial standards onto a people with a history that is 3,000 years old is a distortion of who we are. It is a violation to the Jewish tradition of education, flattening our nuanced history of intracommunal relations.
(That’s not to say that some of us today don’t benefit in some ways from contemporary American racial dynamics, outside of our Jewish identities. Of course some of us do. And some of us don’t. But the determining factor is not whether or not the person in question is Ashkenazi).
CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM AND ANTI-ASHKENAZI TROPES
Much of the contemporary antisemitic discourse, in particular on the left, revolves around stereotypes and tropes that are specifically anti-Ashkenazi, from the erroneous idea that Jews are white European settler colonizers biologically incompatible with Palestine to distortions of Ashkenazi Jewish history that draw from antisemitic conspiracies like the Khazar Theory.
Of course, antisemitism hurts all Jews, whether they are Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, or anything else. But the predominant antisemitic sentiment is relying more on more on the delegitimization of Ashkenazi Jewish identity.
The appropriate response to the distortion, delegitimization, and antisemitic abuse toward a group of Jews is not to join their distorters, delegitimizers, and abusers. That is the kind of behavior that we should let die with the Association of German National Jews, or “Jews for Hitler,” who projected the Nazis’ hate into Ostjuden, or Eastern European Jews.
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