Many American Jews, especially those involved in the Reform movement, see “social justice” as a key component of what it means to be Jewish. Many look with nostalgia to the 1960s, when a number of Jews became involved in the civil-rights movement. But now, argues Josh Block, the progressive left, contaminated by the worst excesses of postmodernist and intersectionality-soaked academic theory, has rejected the values that animated the activists of yesteryear. Worse, despite its obsession with identity politics, the new progressivism has no room for Jewish particularism:
Today’s . . . social justice does not have the same goals as that of the 1960s, which sought equal rights and opportunity and was rooted in the traditions of Western law and philosophy—and ultimately of Judaism. To the contrary, [it] seeks not equal treatment for all under the law, but to create an equality of outcomes by trashing the systems [of law and rationality that have developed in the] West. It embraces a relativist basis by which to judge human conduct and seeks to delegitimize the foundations upon which Zionism and the rights of the Jewish people rest. . . .
We Jews have [our own national] history [as well as] values that are universal and that have given rise to the modern view of human dignity, but these count for nothing in a world where [advocates of] social justice put daily demands on our children to dismiss Jewish identity, uniqueness, and rights as . . . illegitimate views produced by white men of privilege. The view that pits Jewish particularism against universal values is contrary to the lived experience of our people, and to the kind of liberalism that the American Jewish community has long endorsed—but that’s what [many Jewish] philanthropists are now paying for. . . .
If those who seek to engage in Jewish life believe that the universal good always outweighs the needs of the Jewish collective, we will not have a Jewish collective a generation from now, and the Jewish people and America will both be impoverished by that loss. . . .
Ironically, Jewish particularism has become acceptable only when it involves vehement critiques of Israel, whether over its policies toward the Palestinians or its very existence as a sovereign state. When young Jews come together in such a framework, the net result is to make Judaism and Jewish history a source of shame instead of pride—to the point where students interpret the anti-Semitic demand for dismantling the Jewish state as a positive demonstration of opposition to racism and “colonialism.”
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/250923/is-social-justice-jewish