New Article: Racist Ashkenazi Jews for Black Lives Matter!
David Shasha
Racist Ashkenazi Jews for Black Lives Matter!
In his latest post, Zachary Braiterman, part of the academic White Jewish Supremacy Eurocentric cabal, alerted me to the new iteration of White Jewish Supremacy:
The post gathers his brief article with a number of different Jewish statements on the Black Lives Matter movement, framed by a New York Times ad signed by over 600 Ashkenazi organizations:
This is their open letter:
Here is the full text of that letter:
We are Jewish organizations and synagogues from across the racial and political spectrum; from different streams of Judaism; whose members trace their lineage from countries around the world.
We speak with one voice when we say, unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.
We support the Black-led movement in this country that is calling for accountability and transparency from the government and law enforcement. We know that freedom and safety for any of us depends on the freedom and safety of all of us.
There are politicians and political movements in this country who build power by deliberately manufacturing fear to divide us against each other. All too often, antisemitism is at the center of these manufactured divisions.
There is a long history to these attempts: during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conspiracy theories were used by white supremacists attempting to delegitimize the extraordinary organizing of Black activists. Billboards were erected smearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a communist, signs and flyers claiming that “communist Jews” were masterminding the civil rights movement were common, and pro-segregation organizations like the John Birch Society popularized these lies.
Black Lives Matter, the recent uprisings across the globe in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and so many others, and the decades of political organizing across the country that have led to this moment are movements led by and for Black people. We see through any attempt to suggest otherwise by pointing fingers, scapegoating, or using antisemitic dogwhistles.
As Jews, we know how dangerous this is: when politicians target Jewish people and blame us for problems, it leads directly to violence against us. When Black movements are undermined, it leads to more violence against Black people, including Black Jews.
Antisemitism is part of the same machinery those politicians use to blame Black and brown people, people who are immigrants, people who are Muslim, and more. But whether they generate division and fear based on our religion, our skin color, or how long we’ve been here, their goal is to keep us from working together to win the things we all need to survive and thrive.
When Jewish people join together with our neighbors across racial and religious differences, as we have in the past, we can protect each other and build the future of freedom and safety we all deserve.
Jewish tradition teaches us that justice is not something that will be bestowed upon us, it is something that we need to pursue, and that the pursuit is itself sacred work. We’ll show up for each other every time one of us is targeted because of our differences, and reject any effort to use fear to divide us against each other.
The Black Lives Matter movement is the current day Civil Rights movement in this country, and it is our best chance at equity and justice. By supporting this movement, we can build a country that fulfills the promise of freedom, unity, and safety for all of us, no exceptions.
Of course, BLM must be connected to Anti-Semitism, because it is always first and foremost about the Jews.
In both the open letter and the Braiterman post the word “Sephardic” never appears.
Though Braiterman is also very concerned with Anti-Semitism and Black people, as he indicates in the following passage featuring a PILPUL on James Baldwin:
James Baldwin writing about Jews speaks to the fundamental tension. On the one hand, he argued that Jews are just like white people, and that is at the heart of anti-Semitism in Black communities, namely that Blacks who hate Jews hate them because they are white, not because they are Jewish. On the other hand, there was a particular intimacy in his disappointment with Jews for precisely just that reason. Because he grew up in Harlem, because his best friend in high school was Jewish; because he understood how Jews would get “singled out” in the Black community; because of the association with the Old Testament reflected in his own religious background, because Baldwin was critical of Christianity and Christendom, including the Black Church.
Indeed, Braiterman’s entire conceptual frame of reference is Ashkenazi:
The relations between Blacks and Jews are not intimate as they were once were and once were imagined in the 1960s. Social historians can track how Jews were part of the great white flight moving out of the urban core for the suburbs, how today the closest neighborhood contacts are in places like Brooklyn and full of friction between working class African Americans and Hasidic Jews. Maybe Black Americans don’t expect anything from American Jews like Baldwin once did; maybe African Americans are not as bitter about Jews as Baldwin. There is indifference, annoyance, and Israel is an irritant. But the larger Black community has bigger problems in this country than Black-Jewish relations. The raw fact remains simple. In this country, there is no equality, no social-economic equality between Blacks and Jews, and no equality of suffering. Add to this the old-new racism across the American Jewish community and the painful experience commonly felt by Jews of Color in Jewish spaces dominated by the demographic majority of white Jews.
His binary is White Jews and “Jews of Color”; the Jews of Color being African-Americans who are part of the White Jewish Supremacy and the concern for how they are dealing with it in the wake of George Floyd. We have seen the Jewish institutional world explode with discussion of the matter, while the Sephardim continue to languish in obscurity.
As I have noted many times, the Jews of Color construct is misleading because that group identifies Jewishly as Ashkenazi:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VtEKpa5fyCo/m/b2D1p2zqBAAJ
As I wrote there:
Indeed, we have seen how quickly the White Jewish Supremacist media and institutions have responded to the George Floyd matter.
Sephardim are still not being represented.
But when you look at the following list of participants from the JTA article you will see how the Jews of Color identify as Ashkenazim:
April Baskin is a diversity consultant and racial justice director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable.
Ginna Green works in the Jewish community and the progressive movement, and sits on the boards of the Jews of Color Initiative, the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, and Political Research Associates.
Yitz Jordan is the founder of TribeHerald, a publication for Jews of color, and a hip hop artist also known as Y-Love.
Gulienne Rishon is a diversity expert and chief revenue officer for TribeHerald Media.
Isaiah Rothstein is a multiracial rabbi who serves as the rabbi-in-residence at Hazon.
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is a musician who blends traditional Yiddish and African-American music.
Tema Smith is a writer and the director of professional development at 18Doors, an organization for interfaith families.
Enzi Tanner is a social worker in Minneapolis and works with LGBT families experiencing homelessness.
Evan Traylor is an educator, activist and soon-to-be rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion.
There are of course varying levels of participation and different ideological colorations, but the list is a fairly good barometer of where the White Jewish Supremacy world is right now.
Just to make the point crystal clear, the following JTA article on the Jews of Color shows us how the construct is Ashkenazi:
The signatories to the Jewish BLM letter – as far as I can see – are all Ashkenazi institutions; there are apparently no Sephardic institutions listed.
The White Jewish Supremacy is not being seriously addressed in any of these BLM-related texts, because the Ashkenazi-Sephardi binary is being ignored. The discourse we are asked to process is couched in a fully Eurocentric language, with no room for Andalusian Convivencia and the traditional Sephardic cosmopolitanism.
Not that it makes much of a difference, because Sephardim do not even control their own institutions, which are run by Ashkenazim, as I have bitterly catalogued:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gm1W7pJHRYI/m/LArV53KjBQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/tx3nIc6cMeM/m/thIKdqeTBQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/-kLsi6o2ssk/m/JY9NCio7BAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SkbtROTYj2k/m/IdAHA7GuBwAJ
And the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community is even more Ashkenazi – and more Trump! – than the Ashkenazim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/uNq0KgEOO9k/m/FiE89xyUAgAJ
They are truly “Idiot Sephardim,” without a shred of self-awareness and dignity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fUx-B5XHPIrr7b_7xS4ZpmiEmvo_qBy0pKqOAtmJ5WI/edit?usp=sharing
I have addressed Sephardic Self-Hatred and Ashkenazi racist exclusion in the following article, originally submitted to +972 magazine and ultimately rejected for publication:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/nflvXJbNHD4/m/XuOYp_htCAAJ
Indeed, after seeking to erase our history and culture under the weight of Jewish Orientalism and its debased Eurocentrism, the Ashkenazim have turned most of us against ourselves; leaving Sephardim bereft of their traditional consciousness, and party to the most repugnant values of Jewish ethnocentrism and prejudice.
As I wrote in that article:
It is commonplace among these Sephardi “leaders” to present an arrogant and bullying posture when it comes to Israel and Zionism, but remain chillingly and offensively silent when it comes to Sephardi issues that would put Israel and Zionism in a poor light. It is doubtful that such blowhards would be able to pass a cursory examination of Sephardic history or would be able to identify the milestones of the Sephardic literary tradition.
It has brought us the twin evils of Zionist extremism and “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit:
What culture we get from Sephardic institutions these days can best be called “Bourekas and Haminados” identity: a vain exoticism that we can clearly see reflected in the following story about a group in Washington, DC:
Of course it is much easier to use the megaphone that such people have purchased in order to add their voices to the bully Jewish echo-chamber which has little concern for or knowledge of the classical Sephardic Jewish tradition. It is all Zionism all the time. And this means that Sephardim and their heritage take a back seat to the Ashkenazim and must not assert themselves as equals. We are expected to know our place and not speak out of turn.
Israel must never be questioned.
To be constantly lectured by self-hating Sephardim like David Suissa is truly offensive and galling. The loss of our cultural heritage and illustrious history has been enabled by the endless genuflection of such “leaders” to the Zionist idol. The pressing question of Sephardic continuity is a real one and will not be answered by those who are all too willing to subordinate our intellectual and religious history to those Ashkenazim who are so intent on eliminating it.
It is this Sephardic Self-Hatred that enables the following passage from HASBARAH maven Jonathan Tobin, whose repugnant article is presented at the very end of the Braiterman post:
The willingness to buy into the big lie about Israelis teaching Americans to kill minorities is based in ignorance of the true nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestinian terror groups. Contrary to the intersectional myth, Jews are not colonial oppressors in Israel. Jews are not only indigenous to the country that is their ancient homeland. A majority of Israelis also fall into the category that left-wing ideologues would term “people of color” since their families came to the country from homes in Arab and Muslim lands from which they fled or were expelled after 1948.
Its apologetic defensiveness is similar to that evinced by Rabbi Marc Angel, a prominent Self-Hater, in his own take on BLM which is permeated by the Neo-Con ethnocentrism of people like Tobin and Alan Dershowitz:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/WYu7hu9cYAY/m/Qrol0TiRBQAJ
In Angel’s debased words, which are more common than not in the Orthodox Jewish community:
While these racial tensions clearly need to be addressed in a serious and productive way—avoiding violence and hatred—voices within the “Black Lives Matter” movement have veered from its primary focus in order to attack and malign the State of Israel! During the current mass demonstrations--most of which have been peaceful-- there have also been acts of violence and looting, including targeted attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses.
Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote: "Being on the right side of one racial issue does not give one a license to be on the wrong side of the oldest bigotry. It would be sad if the good work done by Black Lives Matter were allowed to be sidetracked by the mendacious and irrelevant accusation of “genocide” and “apartheid” against one foreign democracy — Israel.”
Certainly, black lives matter…but so do Jewish lives matter…so do all human lives matter. Injecting malicious slanders against Israel or the Jewish people does not advance peace among human beings. On the contrary, anti-Semitism is a malignant virus that infects not only the haters, but endangers the well-being of society as a whole.
In my article I contrasted Angel’s Ashkenazified Jewish ethnocentrism and its expeditious departure from the tradition of Sephardic Humanism, with a beautiful text from Rabbi Albert Gabbai of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia:
We who believe in the eternal message of the Torah that tells us that EVERY human being is created in the image of G-d (Betselem Elokim) and have seen the horrendous murder of George Floyd at the hand of an inhumane policeman (with his accomplices) cannot remain silent. How could this happen in a “civilized’ society? We want to scream from the top of our lungs. Enough!
Gabbai is an exponent of the Sephardic tradition, and his beautiful words present a stark contrast to what we see in the Orthodox community:
We are blessed to have at Congregation Mikveh Israel a family of different ethnicities and races. We strive to work in harmony unified in praying to our Creator. We recall the words in the Bible stated by Job 31:15: “Did not He who made me in the womb make them?”
Indeed, we are one family.
Yes, in our American society there is racism and there is antisemitism. This issue is very complex and I will not dare express arrogance of knowing a simple solution. But our Jewish teachings tell us that when we teach compassion, we get compassion. We MUST be kinder to each other and welcome everyone “Besever Panim Yaffot" -- with a happy countenance. And as long as we raise our voices and act (as many Jews did in support of the civil rights marches in the 1960’s) there will be hope for a better future.
We pray to the Almighty that as we inch away from this pandemic we should take a deep “Heshbon Nefesh” (personal accounting) and be guided by the imitation of G-d’s thirteen attributes of mercy, compassion, truthfulness, slow to anger, plenty of kindnesses, etc.
As we will read in the Parasha Naso this Shabbat we pray that the Holy one blessed be He gives us blessings over the whole world: "Yebarekhekha,” May the
Lord bless you and guard you.
“Osse Shalom Bimromav Hu Ya’asse Shalom Alenu,” may the Almighty grant us peace to all. Amen.
But, as we have unfortunately seen, his words are outliers in a radical religious world that reflects the ambivalence and dysfunction of Angel and Tobin. Gabbai’s Sephardic vision has been overtaken by that Ashkenazi dysfunction.
Indeed, Sephardim have forgotten who they are, and for this they have been forcibly excluded from the Adult Jewish Table where only Ashkenazim are allowed. We lack civilization, as we lack refinement. As I have learned from bitter experience, no one even fights back anymore, preferring instead to placate the well-connected Ashkenazi bullies.
We are utterly unable to present our native understanding of an acculturated Judaism that was once the primary model of the Enlightened Jews in early Modern Europe:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/kKoo0WTd4Pk
As I wrote in that article “Sepharad in Ashkenaz, That Is the Question!”:
For the Ashkenazi Sephardi-deniers there are only literalist readings of both Judaism and Philosophy. Lines are drawn in sharply absolutist terms, as any attempt at synthesis is obstinately refused.
Ashkenazi intellectuals like Leo Strauss, Ismar Schorsch, John Efron, David Ruderman, and Carlos Fraenkel reject the values of Religious Humanism; instead seeking to separate Judaism from general culture. Their binary view of Judaism fits with the larger attempt to separate Sephardim from Ashkenazim, as the latter have ultimately determined that a Jew can only be a strictly Orthodox rejector of Modernity or a Modern rejector of the classical Jewish tradition.
We have seen this in the ongoing attack on Convivencia, and the refusal to make use of the classical Sephardic tradition as a bridge mechanism for renewed ties to the Arab-Muslim world.
Indeed, we would do well to recall the visionary leadership of Naphtali Herz Wessely, an ally of Moses Mendelssohn, who sought to integrate Ashkenazim into the Sephardic Jewish Humanist tradition, as Haskalah scholar Shmuel Feiner has written:
In the old Sephardi cemetery in Altona, tombstone No. 1308, decorated with a drawing of a deer and inscribed with Hebrew verse, marks the grave of an Ashkenazi Jew of Ukrainian descent who was buried there in 1805. This is neither a coincidence nor a mistake. Naphtali Herz Wessely, the Hebrew poet and philologist, one of the fathers of the cultural renaissance of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewry, spent his last years in Hamburg. There he made a surprising, unconventional request of the community: he asked to be laid to rest in the Sephardi section of the cemetery, deliberately forgoing burial in the Ashkenazi section where he would have been interred near two of the most prominent rabbis of the previous generation – Jonathan Eybeschuetz and Jacob Emden. This was far more than a symbolic act. It was a twofold statement, through which Wessely disassociated himself from the contemporary Ashkenazi culture and identified with what he considered to be the source of inspiration best fitted to a new direction in intellectual life. Wessely had already chosen the Sephardim as his cultural reference group in the formative stage of his life when, in the 1740s, he joined the circle of Amsterdam Jewish scholars who cultivated the Hebrew language, the Bible, poetry, and philosophy. According to one of his biographers, his identification with the Sephardim was so strong that, in his old age, the Portuguese community in London invited him to serve as its Hakham (rabbi).
Since Wessely, the Ashkenazim have splintered into bitterly warring factions, as I assert in the conclusion of my article:
It is therefore important to note the deleterious impact of such Ashkenazi hard-nosed rejectionism, and the dangers it posits for an already-dysfunctional Judaism that continues to drift further and further away from the synthetic, integrative values of general human interaction, as was the ideal for many centuries in the Sephardic world; a world now in the throes of complete erasure.
This fracturing has led to many complex movements within Ashkenazi Judaism; movements which are ultimately exposed in the often-duplicitous presentation of Jewish Anti-Racism in the BLM context.
As Braiterman unwittingly indicates, there is a lot of self-serving and self-dealing in the open letter when it comes to the basic understanding of Judaism and the Jewish tradition, and how it insidiously plays into the mélange of conflicting texts that close the post:
At play is the relation between foreground and background. The statement is pitched towards the broadest possible area of ideological agreement internal to the Jewish community, includes Jews of Color, supports immigrants, and rejects Islamophobia. Notably, the text of the statement includes without foregrounding Jewish experience or Jewish slogans. No Hebrew script that might highlight Jewishness. The one vague and pro-forma allusion to “Jewish tradition teaches” appears without any direct quotes from a classical source. In the moment, the focus is on Black lives, equality and justice. Visually stunning, the primary statement is set in two large black boxes. (A third, thin black strip runs across the top of the page.) The Jewish signatories appear in small, almost microscopic black type. The Jews are brick-like and organized in rows on a white background to create the impression of a massive wall upon which to support the banner of the new civil rights movement for Black Lives Matter.
Once again we see how Judaism and Humanism are in disharmony, and how the idea of Sephardic Humanism remains contested in a White Jewish Supremacy that, as was the case at the time of Mendelssohn and Wessely and the controversies they engendered with the Orthodox rabbis, cannot find a “traditional” way to integrate the parochial and universal aspect of Torah.
It is all a reflection of the Anti-Sephardi racism that permeates the institutional Jewish world, which is paradoxically affirmed by its fierce commitment to BLM and Anti-Racism.
And while it is certainly important to examine the ongoing problems of African-Americans in a racist society, it is equally important to confront the toxic Ashkenazi hegemony, which has consciously rejected the Sephardic synthesis and its centrality to Jewish civilization and its historical foundations in the Modern period.
David Shasha