Bilal Barakat 🍉 on Nostr: ❞ White Jews have often complained of their exclusion from the ranks of ...

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White Jews have often complained of their exclusion from the ranks of “marginalized peoples,” bemoaning being treated not only as white people, but as white people par excellence—avatars of power, privilege, and fragility. Now, it is precisely this doubled position—claiming the moral authority of a dispossessed group while reaping the material benefits of whiteness—that has attracted the right, which sees in the figure of the Jew a Trojan Horse for the interests of white America and the heavy hand of the state. After all, it would be difficult to get mainstream Democrats like New York Governor Kathy Hochul or California Governor Gavin Newsom on board with complaints that school curricula are “anti-white,” but alarm bells ring across the political spectrum at the claim that they are anti-Jewish.
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Many American Jews, raised on tales of their own immutable peril, have proven eager to be used in this way or at least susceptible to the narrative. But this affiliation comes with its own dangers. In becoming the state’s favored minority—the purported reason for suppressed graduation speeches and campus events and lesson plans, for mask bans and increased surveillance, for cops on campus and mass arrests—Jews risk being confused for the state itself, the release valve it offers for the frustrations of its many repressions.
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That the only history of persecution the American far right can stand to teach is that of European Jewry should raise some questions. How exactly is the history of the Holocaust being taught if its lessons do not unsettle present-day fascists?
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Only by recognizing the fuller context of both Jewish victimhood and domination can Jews understand their own place in history, and stop aiding those intent on extending these brutal pasts. This would mean recognizing that the plight of European Jewry had some of its roots in colonial conquest, and that many of those practices have been reproduced in the settler colonial machinations of the State of Israel.
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https://jewishcurrents.org/more-truth