Rokhl Kafrissen, "Why 'Ashkenormativity' Isn't a Thing"
David Shasha
Why ‘Ashkenormativity’ Isn’t a Thing
By: Rokhl Kafrissen
The following post comes from a website that proclaims “Yiddishkayt for the new millennium”!
So the defensive tone is to be expected.
Living in a time when White Jewish privilege has reached new heights and where Ashkenazi arrogance has served to overwhelm and erase the Sephardic Jewish tradition, this sort of defensiveness is not only expected, but is part of the larger Whites-only strategy that is being deployed to isolate and marginalize the values of Sephardic Jewish Humanism in favor of “complexity” and “nuance”; code-words for “get these Sephardim the hell out of here.”
But let’s start at the beginning.
The Jonathan Katz article on “Ashkenormativity” was posted to the SHU list some time ago:
The article is a bold and courageous statement by a young Ashkenazi who has actually seen the light when it comes to Jewish history and tradition.
Sadly, this swerve towards Sephardic heritage was not at all unusual back in the 20th century. Many Ashkenazim, pace the vile Ismar Schorsch article “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” actually internalized the Sephardic values of Jewish Humanism and sought to integrate the classical Sephardic heritage into the developing American Jewish scene.
Figures like Sabato Morais and Henry Pereira Mendes, now unknown to American Jews, were giants in the eyes of many:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/morais/davidshasha/owdIgkaZHys/yoRvE37LOI4J
But like the following attack on the Sephardic tradition, today’s Ashkenazim have asserted their privilege in new and dangerous ways:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/morais/davidshasha/rY6tsM-gviU/Ev9p-Fui3wgJ
We have seen scholars like Jonathan Sarna and Zev Eleff desperately attempting to subordinate this Sephardic American centrality; a tactic that has been adopted by their fellow Sephardi-hater Rabbi Marc Angel:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/angel/davidshasha/hpCi8YEfm2o/ih9LXIxY5YQJ
There is a common theme to all these arguments: There is no Ashkenazi Jewish racism against Sephardim. Sephardi discontent is an illusion made up by malcontents who lack a nuanced understanding of Jewish history. More than this, the Sephardim were really not all they were cracked up to be in the first place.
In order to pull off this massive transformation – and Jewish swindle – it is necessary to read the historical record in new and selective ways.
So when we hear about Colonel Mendes Cohen – an Ashkenazi who was part of this old American Sephardic world – we are told by Sarna that he really wasn’t Sephardic in a cultural sense – even though his first name is rather curious for an Ashkenazi!
I was recently reading the 1933 book on England’s Montefiore Endowment called Think and Thank:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Think_and_Thank_The_Montefiore_Synagogue.html?id=LbQSMwEACAAJ
The book describes a thriving Jewish community led by the legendary Sephardic philanthropist Moses Montefiore:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/moses-montefiore-the-most_b_610879.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/finding-jewish-feminism-i_b_572978.html?
As can be seen in the Montefiore story, Sephardim were once actually a central part of the Jewish world and Ashkenazim did not seek to erase them from the culture. Sephardim, unlike today’s Ashkenazim, did not seek to lock out Ashkenazim from the Jewish community. The two groups worked together in a harmonious way without all the rancor and acrimony that now characterizes the relationship.
The strength of Sephardic Jewish Humanism was a vital factor in the larger process of Jewish acculturation; a process that has become very complicated these days given Jewish alienation and internal dysfunction.
I have outlined these issues in my article “A Broken Frame” which reviews this history:
There are a number of processes going on in the contemporary Jewish world that have transformed the previous state of affairs: The shift to a Zionist-based Jewish culture has served to undermine the traditional view of the Jewish past with its Sephardic cultural foundations. Jewish dysfunction is rooted in Ashkenazi anomie and alienation. Demographic shifts have made Sephardim a minority and problems of nomenclature and cultural valuation have become rife in a Jewish community that is in the process of disintegrating.
We are told in the article that Jews today pronounce Hebrew in the Sephardic manner. But given the absence of the Dagesh, the mobile Sheva, the Het and ‘Ayin, and other linguistic nuances in Israeli Hebrew and its American iterations, this is a serious misreading of the situation. Sephardic culture is strictly limited to food and music traditions; the intellectual heritage of the Sephardim and the voices of contemporary Sephardic writers are decidedly not part of the current Jewish discourse.
I have addressed the issue repeatedly:
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Shasha-how-to-speak-about-arab-jews
My article on “The Levantine Option” addresses the existential importance of the matter:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html?
The 1967 article on Jews and Muslims by Trude Weiss-Rosmarin gives us a panoramic view of the situation that we would do well to note:
We can continue to avoid the obvious racism against Sephardim, or we can begin to exhume this lost tradition and make use of it as a bulwark against the current degeneration and malaise that has gripped a fractured Jewish community.
It is indeed possible to continue the attack against Sephardim by raising the issues of “nuance” and “complexity” and by reversing in a perverse way the matter of Ashkenazi privilege and its endemic racism. The “I Know You are, But What am I” school of argument seems to be the way that such Ashkenazim wish to handle the matter. Accused of White privilege and racism, these Ashkenazim arrogantly accuse those who are pointing out the problem of being racists themselves; seeking to divide a Jewish community that does not need such provocations.
In this context there are two problems: the first and most important issue is the Pew Report and the ongoing collapse of Jewish life in America. The Ashkenazi Whites-only model has not led to a stable and healthy Jewish existence. The suppression and erasure of Sephardic Jewish Humanism has led to dissension and dysfunction along the lines of the classic Ashkenazi model where division was a regular part of Jewish life; the only difference being that America offers Jews a way out of the community in ways not before possible in Europe.
I have discussed the general history of this Ashkenazi dysfunction in my article “From Rabbenu Tam to Shabbetai Sebi”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/tam/davidshasha/YukEg78vkCc/VvqGRFxtZkQJ
Beyond this, we have the embittered hubris of Ashkenazim who believe themselves to be the sole possessors of Jewish intellectual values. There are simply no discussions of Sephardi intellectualism in the Jewish media. Academic scholars of Judaic Studies are currently in the process of formally erasing the classical Sephardic heritage and replacing it with an amorphous and historically-impoverished mishmash of Jewish alienation and discontent that refuses the basic tenets of traditional continuity and stability. The Talmud is now less important than the Book of Enoch for the study of Classical Judaism.
So while we see the continuing emergence of a radical Ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism, we are also seeing the simultaneous process of a Jewish exodus from the faith and from the religious community and its hegemonic institutions.
If things are as rosy as this article makes them out to be, why is it then that young American Jews are looking for a way out of the community and for new options that the institutional hierarchy, dominated by an Ashkenazi tyranny, is not providing for them.
Sadly, the combination of institutional stasis and inflexibility rooted in Ashkenazi hegemony is now clashing with Jewish alienation and discontent, most prominently among the youth. In this toxic context the Sephardic option, promoted by the Katz article on Ashkenormatvity, is not deemed a possible alternative.
DS
Maybe you’ve seen it by now, first in New Voices and then in the Forward. Thanks to author Jonathan Katz, the conflation of Ashkenazi with Jewish is no longer the problem with no name. Now it’s the problem with the really, really awkward name: Ashkenormativity. In ‘Learning to Undo Ashkenormativity,’ Katz urges us to uncouple Jewish from Ashkenazi, for the greater good. According to Katz, Sephardic culture is suppressed by Ashkenazi hegemony and Ashkenazim justify this suppression by claiming their culture to be more progressive and more egalitarian than the presumably retrograde Sephardim. Now, these are some pretty big claims. But Katz's thesis seems to have resonated with enough people to make it worth a closer look.
Katz’s analysis draws on the ubiquitous language of critical theory. For example, I assume the newly coined Ashkenormativity is a nod to ‘heteronormativity’, a term coming out of early 1990s Queer Theory. Heteronormativity is a discourse which enforces the naturalness of heterosexual male-female pairings and excludes the possibility of that which is non-heterosexual. Presumably, Ashkenormativity is a Jewish discourse in which Ashkenazi is the default.
Katz could have just as easily framed his argument around the even more topical ‘check your [ ] privilege.’ The new vocabulary of power and ‘privilege’ has been incredibly successful at creating dialogue around some of the thorniest questions facing us today. Are there structural advantages and disadvantages accruing to different races, classes, and genders? How does history inflect the individual experience in the world? How can an individual with more privilege use that privilege to be an ally to those with less? The answers to many of these questions require sensitivity to history and awareness that events of even hundreds of years ago continue to shape our present reality.
Katz exhorts his fellow Ashkenazim to learn about Sephardi and Mizrahi history “and ... not in the ‘heroic Ashkenazi savior’ mode.” I’ve never heard anyone refer to ‘heroic Ashkenazi savior mode’ but I’m quite familiar with the problematic figure of the ‘white savior’ discovering the Other; think of Bono in Africa. The White Savior discovers people and cultures which have existed for centuries. He presumes to speak on their behalf, often imposing culturally inappropriate solutions rather than listening to those he claims to help.
Rather than critically interrogate, Katz reifies socio-racial binaries like Ashkenazi-Sephardi. After all, if we're going to fight against cultural hegemony, shouldn't we be fighting for a discourse with room for the global multiplicity of Jewishness? Nowhere does Katz propose an alternative framework that would make visible traditionally marginalized communities, communities that are swallowed up in monolithic concepts like Sepharad.
I don’t doubt his good intentions, but Katz is too eager to critique without first defining terms. By doing so, he comes perilously close to becoming what he warns against. Indeed, Katz critiques the supposed erasure of one culture by another with an argument itself predicated on erasing cultural differences and ignoring the way one group historically used the other to construct its own Whiteness.
In order to understand that, however, we have to unpack a couple things, starting withAshkenaz. The word Ashkenaz is found in the Tanakh and eventually came to be applied to the medieval Jewish settlement in the Rhineland area. As the Jews moved east, they took Ashkenaz with them. And though Ashkenaz came to refer to an enormous area, from the Rhineland to Russia, there was always a tremendous cultural diversity within its boundaries, the most important boundary being between the Jews of Eastern Europe and German language identified Central European Jews. Beginning in the early 19th century, with the advent of the Jewish Enlightenment, the relationship between German Jews and their Eastern co-religionists has been one in which German Jews constructed an identity explicitly predicated on the Otherness of Eastern Jews, an identity which elevated German Jews in contrast to the primitive Ostjudn.
If German Jews were to distinguish themselves from those other inhabitants of Ashkenaz, they needed to look outside for a new cultural model. And where they looked was (a highly idealized version of) medieval Spain. The great historian Ismar Schorsch describes this historical phenomenon in his classic essay, The Myth of Sephardic Superiority. It’s no surprise that a giant picture of Maimonides appears at the top of Katz’s article in The Forward. The figure of Maimonides was, and apparently still is, among the most evocative in this turn toward Sepharad. One example from Schorsch’s Myth of Sephardic Superiority should suffice:
Between 1794 and 1795, a German maskil named Aaron Wolfsohn published a Hebrew language satire called Silha be-Eretz ha-Hayim (A Conversation in Paradise.) In it, the founder of the Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, arrives in paradise. There he is welcomed by another Moses, the medieval Sephardic philosopher, Moses ben Maimon-- Maimonides. Maimonides is relieved at Mendelssohn’s arrival, saving him, as it happens, from the uncouth badgering of a Polish talmudic scholar who is demanding that Maimonides test his learning. The Polish scholar cares nothing for philosophy; he’s only concerned with “matters of import-- the laws governing sacrifices, family purity, and financial affairs.” As for theology “he firmly believed that lightning was created to punish the wicked and personally warded off its destructive force by placing salt on the four corners of his table and opening the book of Genesis.”
Maimonides asks Mendelssohn to explain what has brought Ashkenazi Jews to such a vulgar state. In this way Wolfsohn, the author of the satire, is able to place a typical maskilic critique of Eastern European Jews into the mouth of the great emancipator himself.
At the close of the story, Moses (no last name needed) appears to welcome Mendelssohn to Paradise. It’s a powerful, if crude, encapsulation of a new cultural dynamic ushered in by the Haskalah. As Schorsch writes: “Collapsing the Moses of Egypt and the Moses of Dessau into the Moses of Cordoba rendered the philosophic strain of Spanish Judaism both pristine and normative.”
The imagined Sephardic tradition was so appealing to German Jews because of its ultimate connection to Greek learning and its “implicit univeralism”- one perfectly suited to the news goals of integration and assimilation. The imagined Sephardic tradition was everything the little Polish Jew of Wolfsohn’s story could never be. As Schorsch demonstrates, the self-conscious emulation of an imagined Sephardic Golden Age found expression in, among other things, architecture, literature, and normative Hebrew pronunciation.
If you think the 19th century obsession with an imaginary Sephardic ideal has no political or cultural implications today, try speaking Ashkenazi Hebrew in the 90% of the Jewish world where the havara sefardit is normative. I’m always amazed at the strong emotions – anger, disgust, pity—aroused by the mere sound of a final sof. Forget about arguing for the inherent value of Yiddish. This phenomenon is itself bound up with the history of Zionism, also a product, in large part, of an ideological repudiation of Eastern Europe.
So, if history is more complex than an Ashkenaz-Sepharad binary, and the cultural dynamic is, among other things, a product of hundreds of years of rhetorical negation of one group to the benefit of another, why does this idea of Ashkenormativity have so much traction? What’s it really getting at?
When I probe people about what they think Ashkenormativity is, and why it’s problematic, what comes up is the presumption of Jewish whiteness. (For the sake of argument, I’m going to ignore the reality of Jews who are both non-white and Ashkenazi.) American Jews are largely of European descent. The flip side of cultural and racial homogeneity is the uncomfortable possibility that encounters between white (largely European) Jews and Jews of color will be defined by a kind of self-absorption that plays out as dismissive, exclusionary or condescending.
The exclusion of Jews of color from American Jewish discourse is a problem and we (desperately) need to define and talk about. But we already have a word for it: Racism. With a big dollop of ignorance. I’m all in favor of building a Jewish community which is less racist. Halevai! But does that racism really spring from something unique to ‘Ashkenazi’ culture? Indeed, what unites Jews everywhere is the smug certainty that real Jews look like (and pray like and eat like and vote like) they do. I have Syrian friends whose families would rather die than allow them to marry one of us (Yiddishy Yids). And when white elites in Israel use state power to create permanent underclasses of North African, Arab and Ethiopian Jews, yup, that’s racist. (Really fucking racist.) But to imagine that somehow Yiddish, that reviled, shat upon yerushe of millions of Israeli and American Jews, bears responsibility as cultural oppressor, it really beggars belief.
No doubt there’s plenty of plain old ignorance on the part of Ashkenazi Jews when dealing with cultural minorities in their midst. But the problem isn’t too much cultural specificity on the part of one group, it’s not enough for everyone. Though I often complain about the marginalization of Yiddish, at the same time I emphasize that I am a linguistic maximalist. The health of global Jewry depends on access to the multiplicity of Jews and Jewishness. Katz complains that Ashkenazi and Sephardi institutions exist separately. But it is making room for, respecting and educating each other about cultural differences, which is what we really need to be fighting for.
From Rootless Cosmopolitan, April 7, 2015