New Article: The New White Jewish Intersectionality from Hebrew Union College: Social Science and Sephardi Exclusion
David Shasha
The New White Jewish Intersectionality from Hebrew Union College: Social Science and Sephardi Exclusion
I just received the following announcement from Jewish Currents:
Here is the on-line posting from the HUC website:
It would seem that there is some form of Jewish Intersectionality between JC and HUC, the hub of Reform Judaism in America; proud heir to the legacy of Isaac Mayer Wise, the antagonist of Sabato Morais:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXZ2JkVzdzSU5yZ1E/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXTVBTWXFtZmtsVGc/view?ths=true
It should come as great naches to JC editor Arielle Angel, who has given up on Sephardim, and for equity between our culture and that of the Ashkenazim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Q82jUjKiHMk/m/EYOCbUQAAwAJ
It is so “Post-Sephardic.”
Just get over it!
The HUC program series on Judaism and Civil Society is fascinating for the surreptitious way it promotes White Jewish Supremacy and anti-Sephardi racism; the perfect complement to Ms. Angel’s contemptible self-hatred.
The series kicks off with the obligatory COVID program:
Scriptions: Jewish Thoughts and Responses to COVID-19
Dr. Leah Hochman, Director of the Louchheim School for
Judaic Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Thought, HUC/Los Angeles
Rabbi Michael Marmur, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Jewish Theology, HUC/Jerusalem
And now that they covered that one, it is time to move on to Speaking Truth to Religious Power:
Speaking Religious Truth to Political Power: Values & Voices 2021
Rabbi Andrea Weiss, Ph.D., Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel
Provost, HUC; Creator of American Values, Religious Voices
Hussein Rashid, Ph.D., Founder of islamicate, L3C
Elsie Stern, Ph.D., Vice President for Academic Affairs, Reconstructionist
Rabbinical College
Naturally, we have a Muslim and two women, but no Sephardim. Speaking Truth is clearly not involved with confronting White Jewish Supremacy.
How do Sephardim speak religious truth to Ashkenazi political power?
I am not sure HUC has an answer to that one.
Next, we valiantly Confront Hate:
Confronting Hate in a Broken World: Lessons from the Career of Marc Tanenbaum
Dr. Georgette Bennett, Founder of the Tanenbaum Center
for Interreligious Understanding
Rabbi Judith Schindler, Sklut Professor of Jewish Studies; Director, Greenspon
Center for Peace and Social Justice, Queens University of Charlotte
Here it is worthwhile to look more closely at the program description:
As American society reels from the throbbing consequences of racism, the lure of white supremacy, and the resurgence of antisemitism, we will consider the lessons we can learn from the career of Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, a pioneering practitioner of interfaith communal dialogue, and how these ideas apply to our contemporary challenges. Presented in partnership with the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.
Interfaith Dialogue is fully controlled on the Jewish side by Ashkenazim, as we have repeatedly come to learn:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/3hWrTBPfk0A/m/Lo9hW-rYAgAJ
The “Levantine Option” is not welcome:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
What is Andalusian Convivencia anyway?
https://www.criticalmuslim.io/sephardic-judaism-and-the-levantine-option/
The matter of racism, not Ashkenazi racism against Sephardim of course, takes center stage in the next program:
Language and Racism in the United States Today
Sarah Bunin Benor, Ph.D., Professor of Contemporary
Jewish Studies, HUC/Los Angeles
Jared Jackson, Founder and Executive Director of Jews in ALL Hue
Sarah Bunin Benor is a Yiddishist – as if she could be anything else!
https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/educational-programs/alumni-association/di-feder/alumni-takeaways
Here is her bio from the Yiddish Book Center website:
In 1994 I was looking for a paid summer experience, and a poster about Yiddish books caught my eye. Not only would this internship pay, but it would allow me to learn a new language! I didn't realize what a formative and transformative experience that summer would be. I was exposed to a whole world of Yidishkayt that I might never have encountered. I made lifelong friends. And I began on a path that would lead to my career as a scholar of Jewish languages. Now, in my work as teacher, writer, editor, and internet curator, I often use the Yiddish skills and Jewish cultural knowledge I attained between shlepping boxes and sorting books. Inspired by Aaron Lansky salvaging books from dumpsters, I run an initiative to document endangered Jewish languages and share knowledge about Jewish linguistic diversity with the public. I am forever grateful for the foundation I gained 26 years ago. (Has it really been that long?) A sheynem dank.
Indeed, you could not find an Arab Jewish academic with her ample CV:
Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, where she teaches mostly masters students in the School of Jewish Nonprofit Management and undergraduates at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as many articles about Jewish languages, Yiddish, and American Jews. Dr. Benor has received several fellowships and prizes, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, and the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature. She is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and co-editor of Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Luminare Press, 2017). She founded and directs the HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, which includes the Jewish Language Website and the Jewish English Lexicon. Her current projects analyze Hebrew use at Jewish supplementary schools and the names Jews give their children and their pets. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Mark, and their daughters, Aliza, Dalia, and Ariella.
Here is her HUC homepage, which provides a strong sense of what White Jewish Supremacy is all about:
http://huc.edu/directory/sarah-bunin-benor
Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic are certainly two very different things when it comes to the academic study of Judaism.
Professor Bunin Benor will be appearing with the African-American Jew Jared Jackson, who leads a group called Jews in ALL Hues:
https://www.jewsinallhues.org/board-and-staff
The organization is yet another “Jews of Color” construct, which means all sorts of diversity – without Sephardim!
The idea is, again, to integrate African-American Jews into the White Jewish Supremacy while leaving us in the dust:
https://www.jewsinallhues.org/programs
Then we get one more program on African-Americans and Race:
Race and Identity Today
Kerwin K. Charles, Ph.D., Indra K. Nooyi Dean, Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management, Yale School of Management
Professor Charles is an Ashkenazi Jewish Liberal’s dream:
https://som.yale.edu/faculty/kerwin-k-charles
His Yale bio says it all:
During his scholarly career, Dean Charles has studied and published on topics including earnings and wealth inequality, conspicuous consumption, race and gender labor market discrimination, the intergenerational transmission of economic status, worker and family adjustment to job loss and health shocks, non-work among prime-aged persons, and the labor market consequences of housing bubbles and sectoral change. He is the Vice President of the American Economics Association, the Vice Chair of NORC at the University of Chicago, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economics. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, is a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, and sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Labor Economics.
It reminds us of how the Ashkenazim can be racist against Sephardim, while still present themselves as Anti-Racists to the larger world.
Just make sure to keep Sephardim silent and invisible!
Robin DiAngelo should heartily approve such “White Fragility”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/c1_dJkCTKhw/m/Zq36INbHBwAJ
Keeping to the African-American Social Justice theme, we also have a program on incarceration:
"Let My People Go:" Personal Reflections on Freedom and Injustice
Chester Holman III
Alan J. Tauber, First Assistant Defender at the Defender Association of
Philadelphia
Rabbi Andrea Weiss, Ph.D., Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost, HUC
Mr. Holman III was wrongly imprisoned for a crime he did not commit:
The HUC program description makes the White Jewish intent clear:
After spending 28 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Chester Hollman III was exonerated in July 2019. His heartbreaking experience, the subject of the Netflix documentary “The Innocence Files, Episode 7: Wrong Place, Wrong Time,” offers a compelling perspective on the meaning of freedom and justice as we approach Passover. Probe the larger issues of injustice and racism in our justice system today in this conversation between Holman and his attorney Alan Tauber.
The Ashkenazim want you to know that African-Americans need them, and should be happy that they exist!
There is then a program on Children and the Right to Vote – whatever that means:
Children and the Right to Vote
Daniel Weinstock, Ph.D., Director, McGill Institute for
Health and Social Policy; Katherine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and
Public Policy in the Faculties of Law and of Arts, McGill University
Rabbi Dvora E. Weisberg, Ph.D., Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Rabbinics;
Director, School of Rabbinical Studies, HUC
Then we finally get to the obligatory “Jews of Color” program:
Jews of Color
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, Central Synagogue, New York City
Bruce Phillips, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology & Jewish Communal Service,
HUC/Los Angeles
Professor Phillips is, naturally, a scholar of the Social Sciences; an academic discipline that has continued to demean Sephardim, as we have recently seen in the work of his colleagues Laura Leibman and Devi Mays:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ggJAFoCD7us/m/llz_Gl0BAgAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/i7GjycvgTh8/m/WXhKM8lgBwAJ
As a reward for their racism, both scholars have been feted by the Jewish Book Awards:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/0_no6RCwidg/m/ia0c6ATVAwAJ
Ralph Ellison was indeed correct when he castigated the Social Sciences for their implicit racism.
And then we get the piece de resistance:
Intersectional Jewish Identities
Dr. Mijal Bitton, Scholar in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute
We must once again give a tip of the hat to Dr. Bitton; she certainly knows her way around the White Jewish Supremacy, as we saw when she tried to co-opt the work of Rabbi Jose Faur for the racist Tikvah Tablet:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/blWoxt23bvk/m/ZAMDGuYsAgAJ
Note well the description of her HUC program:
We often speak of American Jews in ways that elide their differences or that assume they are all Ashkenazi or white. But American Jews are characterized by vibrant ethnic and racial diversity that must be understood by those of us working to build inclusive Jewish communities.
The flaccid language of the program description, so very Kum Ba Ya and cheerful, bespeaks the problem we face as Sephardim. The matter of racism and the “Jews of Color,” meaning African-American Jews who identify as Ashkenazim, is addressed directly in the other programs, but the Sephardim are not allowed to call out Ashkenazi racism for what it is.
Key to this is the fact that HUC does not apparently have any Sephardim from their vast cache of professors in its myriad institutions to present the matter.
“Inclusion” must begin at home.
But not for the HUC.
More than this, the matter is not presented as a Sephardic issue, but as a much less subversive take on “Diversity” and “Intersectionality”; amorphous concepts that emphatically do not point a finger at the ubiquity of that Ashkenazi racism and its toxicity in the Jewish institutional world.
And while it would not be possible to say that HUC or any other Jewish educational institution would be able to completely ignore Sephardim and Sephardic culture in their curricula, the way the matter is presented here is through the Social Sciences which serves to abstract Sephardic humanity and its place in the White Jewish Supremacy:
Through her sociological scholarship on Sephardic Jews in America and her own identity as a Latina immigrant, Dr. Bitton will help us consider what is required to nourish a Jewish American diversity project that is complex, rich, and compelling.
Now, we have already come to understand too well where Bitton stands on the matter of Intersectionality and contemporary politics; as she wrote in a 2018 Forward article on New York State Senate candidate Julia Salazar, attacking the value of Identity Politics:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/L267qR8lPqE/m/tztAITSGBAAJ
In addition to her attempt to provide a version of Jose Faur that would be palatable to the Neo-Con Tikvah Straussians, and it appears that she was successful in that regard, she wrote another Right Wing leaning article for JTA on the Trumpist values of Sephardim and other “Jews of Color”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8InDVESFuJs/m/37KvpqkmAQAJ
In her articles – and in her hitherto hidden academic work on the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community as a Sociologist, Bitton has chosen to utterly ignore the intellectual-literary Sephardic heritage and speak strictly as a Social Scientist who is immersed in the usual German Positivism of her chosen field.
She is herself a product of the current Sephardic rupture, which has turned Sephardim into variations of our Ashkenazi overlords, as we turn our backs on the most basic parts of our historical identity.
She does not seem to be aware that her conceptual-academic process is deeply antithetical to the Sephardic heritage, with its cosmopolitan and integrated values. As Faur taught in his Post-Modern Sephardic Judaism, there are no “innocent” readings; our perspective is always tied up in ideology and institutional biases.
It is thus quite possible to speak of the Sephardim, without actually acknowledging that you are really speaking at them, as if from on high.
Rather than actually discuss the books and ideas of the classical Sephardic heritage – which she presents no working knowledge of, as has become common in our community – she remains chained to the regnant Social Science model that is identical to the White Jewish Supremacy which is a sad reflection of the Ashkenazi racism that she obstinately refuses to call out through an expeditious combination of naked ambition and depraved cowardice.
While I do not have any advance knowledge of what she will say in her presentation, it is already clear that she knows who butters her bread, and how the rules of the game have been set out against Sephardim.
I am sure that she will again be auditioning for her Ashkenazi audience, and not seek to make them uncomfortable by pointing out what vicious racists they are.
Sephardim are also excluded from the final two programs; one on Latinx students, the other on Jews and White Privilege:
Not the Same as White: Latinx Students Talk About Jewish Schooling
Erik Ludwig, Ph.D., Director, Zelikow School of Jewish
Nonprofit Management,
HUC/Los Angeles
Sasha Dominguez ‘20, Executive Director and Founder of Kol Connection
Sasha Dominguez, an HUC graduate, is another perpetuator of the fake Jewish “Pluralism” that we see throughout the series:
https://www.kolconnection.org/about-us
Music is the key:
Kol Connection aims to create sound Jewish pluralistic community through a communal music and learning environment. Participants connect with each other and Klal Yisrael through intimate music and learning events.
More Kum Ba Ya!
It then all comes to a screeching halt with the problem of “Whiteness”:
Jews, Whiteness, Power and Privilege
Marc Dollinger, Ph.D., Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair,
Social Responsibility,
San Francisco State University
The final program is the proverbial icing on the racist cake:
Are American Jews white? The question, answered differently by different generations of American Jews, gets at the heart of American Jewish identity. Have Jews remained separate and distinct from the rest of middle-class America or have they assimilated so much that they have become white? Come explore the contentious history and sociology of Jews and racial definition. Journey back through history and discover some (surprising) insights into the debate over Jewish whiteness.
Professor Dollinger is another eminent Social Scientist, specializing in the American Jewish community, and something called “Social Responsibility”:
https://jewish.sfsu.edu/people/staff/marc-dollinger
As we will now see, he himself is a model of the White Jewish Supremacist.
I was curious to have a look at the Table of Contents for his 2014 textbook: American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader:
It is not hard to see that the story begins with Sephardim in 1654 – but that Sephardim are not to be found at all after page 132, with Emma Lazarus and her “New Colossus” from 1883:
From 1883 to the present, Sephardim are apparently not part of American Jewish history.
Indeed, that is what I would call “Social Responsibility”!
It is very similar to what we have seen in the Leonard Levin textbook on Modern Jewish Philosophy:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/PIQl0sj5em8/m/rFRBXPlLCAAJ
I would thus point to Mijal Bitton and her lack of knowledge of the field of Jewish Literature and Jewish History, which would effectively prevent her from being part of any discussion having to do with Dollinger’s racist textbook.
Not that she would ever choose to have such a discussion.
Just as we have seen in her pusillanimous obeisance to the Shalom Hartman Institute and its North American director Yehuda Kurtzer, who, like Dollinger and Levin, has viciously erased Sephardim from the contemporary Jewish discourse:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ytx5ztODWRA/m/MiqL6_6fBQAJ
The idea is that Sephardim get railroaded into the new “Jews of Color” construct and “Intersectionality”; our illustrious history and the Jewish Humanism it represents made into a lacuna which is then papered over by House Negroes like Bitton, who serve at the pleasure of the racists by pretending that the Jewish institutional racism does not exist.
Indeed, how could it if they are recognizing her and letting her speak in the ways that affirm the White Jewish Supremacy.
Isaac Mayer Wise once had to deal with Sabato Morais, today it is no match at all.
That the field of Judaic Studies, in and out of the academy, is now completely controlled by Ashkenazim does not matter to Uncle Tom Sephardim like Bitton, who do not seem at all disturbed by our lack of institutional representation.
She might want to speak to HUC Professor Rabbi Michael Marmur, currently Chair of Rabbis for Human Rights, who ignored my attempt to engage with him on the issue of Sephardic equality and dignity. It was yet another pathetic example of the Ashkenazi racists who pretend to be Progressives. Indeed, it is hard-wired into White Jewish Supremacist institutions like HUC.
HUC’s lack of Sephardic professors does not seem to bother Bitton at all. And for good reason. Her perfidy might all be worth it if the institution would give her a job!
David Shasha