In the past several years, “whiteness” has emerged as a ubiquitous academic buzzword, spawning an entire field of “whiteness studies.” While the term sprung out of efforts to deconstruct notions of race, Balazs Berkovits argues that it has become part of a worldview based on immutable racial characteristics. Experts on “whiteness” also tend to ignore anti-Semitism, or engage in it, as Berkovits explains in conversation with Alan Johnson:

Within “woke” discourse everything can be reduced to race, to racial and ethnic group membership. Individuals are construed as being fundamentally determined by collectives that are often racially defined. This is how “white privilege” is acquiring importance in the discourse on social inequalities. The term white privilege not only expresses inherited social status as unmerited advantage, but it narrowly associates it with skin color. Also, it often signals a kind of original sin, which is why white people in the U.S. and maybe also in Britian are often sent by educational institutions or their employers to participate in training sessions to confess their guilt.

For example, in Karen Brodkin’s so-called pioneering book on “Jewish whiteness” (How Jews Became White Folks, 1998), the [term] “Euro-ethnics” seems to refer implicitly to skin color, subverting the original thesis according to which “whiteness” is a historical construction. This is why she gets into circular arguments, since it is not clear whether Jews are already white, or at least prone to whiteness, . . . or, while considered non-white at the beginning, they only acquire this status over the period of couple of decades.

Coming to terms with the presence of anti-Semitism would have made this kind of theoretical overdetermination based on color difficult to maintain. This is partly the reason why Jews constituted an (epistemological) obstacle to that criticism, and received the “white” label. This obstacle is clearly expressed by Matthew Frye Jacobson, a “whiteness scholar.”

What’s more, Berkovits argues, this nonsense doesn’t simply place Jews in the irredeemable white category, but plays directly into the demonization of Israel as a “white, settler-colonial state” which must therefore be destroyed.

By purportedly using some social-scientific concepts and procedures, whiteness and race scholars as well as other “social critics” frequently implicitly, but occasionally even directly, support a number of anti-Jewish stances that are presented as anti-hegemonic positions. This means that the critique of Jews in Western societies is presented as a legitimate social critique, stemming not from hostility to Jews, but from a political position, susceptible to being bolstered by rational arguments.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.