The Racist Ideology That’s Infecting Far-Left Anti-Israel Thinking, and Making Its Way into the Internal Jewish Conversation

Recently Chloé Valdary found herself debating proponents of anti-Israel boycotts. She encountered the usual lies and libels—but also something new, as Jews who spoke up to defend the Jewish state were met with accusations of “engaging in whiteness” unless they could prove themselves to be something other than white. Whiteness in this case implies a pathological tendency to oppress, whether by enslaving and slaughtering or by dominating a conversation. Valdary notes a “double irony” in this way of thinking:

[Something similar to this notion of “whiteness”] led to the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust; then, the accusation wasn’t that whiteness was the problem but that Jewishness was and the people advancing the argument weren’t people of color but Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. The second irony is that if whiteness suggests domination while shutting others down, then it was many of the people who were the least white in the room exercising whiteness. They repeatedly sneered and hissed at Ashkenazim, [who, unlike other Jews, count as white], who disagreed with them. But this idea of course is silly, since anyone can behave in an exploitative fashion toward his or her neighbor regardless of skin color. To do so is not “whiteness” but human. . . .

Recently, there has been a debate within the Jewish community about the negative treatment of “Jews of color” within Jewish circles that are majority-Ashkenazi. As part of that debate, a war of words has been waged in the pages of the Forward between African-American Jews who insist that Ashkenazi Jews are white and Ashkenazi Jews who insist that not only are they not white but that to insist they are is an insult to their lived experiences of being persecuted in “white-dominated spaces.”

By “white” those involved in this debate don’t mean “pale skinned” but, once again, practitioners of whiteness—that dominating pathology that exploits and abuses and colonizes everything in its path. . . . Both parties to this debate are passionate and well-intended and also wrong. To believe in the presence of “whiteness”—albeit in the name of defeating it—is to accept a premise made by [racist] pseudoscientists and Nazis in the 20th century. . . . When people of color (Jewish or Gentile) claim that such a thing [as “whiteness”] exists, they are accepting the premise of a racist notion in order to fight against the effects of that racist notion. This is a contradiction that will not end well.

Likewise, when Ashkenazi Jews claim not to be white—i.e., not to be practitioners of so-called whiteness—they too are accepting the premise of a racist notion in order to claim to belong to no part of it. This exercise in linguistic gymnastics is madness.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, BDS, Politics & Current Affairs, Racism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society