While it is old news that hostility toward Israel is part and parcel of far-left ideology, American Jews also face other, perhaps even more insidious, threats from the new progressivism. Jack Wertheimer and Samuel Abrams write:
Increasingly, Jews are defined as being on the wrong side: they are castigated as privileged, white, and part of the oppressor class, never the victims—even as the incidence of anti-Semitism has exploded in America, including on campuses and in class discussions. Tragically, many American Jews naively internalize this hostile critique and blind themselves to the scarcely veiled anti-Semitism motivating it.
Worse still, some Jewish day schools and other Jewish educational institutions are conveying to their young charges that by virtue of their skin color, they are responsible for wronging others and must atone. This is the stuff now being taught to preschool and elementary-school children who do not yet have a sense of history or an ability to think critically about the race theories. Do proponents of new curricula seriously believe that evoking guilt in students for being white will make them more tolerant? What, aside from demoralization, can such pedagogy hope to accomplish?
Equally dangerous, if not more so, is the new doctrine that elevates “equity”—or uniform results—over equality of opportunity, undermining the very system that has allowed Jews and countless other immigrant groups to flourish in America.
Jews face discrimination because they allegedly are co-conspirators with white supremacists or are simply part of the undifferentiated mass of American whites, the oppressor class. The name-calling and stereotyping are bad enough, but if the equity agenda is broadly enacted, Jews will find few opportunities to land jobs in the civil service, education (especially in higher education), corporate America, and the innovation-based, creative economy emerging today. After all, Jews constitute only 2 percent of the population, but they are overrepresented in these fields.
In the cause of pursuing equality of outcomes, quotas are now proposed as the solution to ensure proportional representation by every subgroup in every sector of the economy. Jews have seen this movie before: their numbers at European universities were limited, as was their representation in the civil service of some countries. . . . For a small minority population, this would lead to marginalization and downward mobility, and eventually emigration to countries that value merit.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/samuel-abrams/wokeness-threatens-america-and-american-jews/