On Jewish Identity
May. 31st, 2005 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gaudiorThe other night, I dreamed that someone (I think ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thespooniest, actually) was telling me I hadn't updated my journal with anything meaningful in way too long. Which is accurate. So, therefore:
Last Friday, as my (you know that stage where you know someone, but s/he's not quite a friend yet, but s/he definitely could be and probably will be when you know him/her better? She's like that.) K and I drove home from field placement, she brought up something she had been wondering about. In our class's many discussions of race, one of our classmates had frequently argued that as a Jew, he wasn't white. This puzzled her, because he certainly looks white (he doesn't even "look Jewish"), and he'd occasionally mention that he had white male privilege. So, she asked, what's going on?
Jews, I explained, have a long history of being Everyone's Favorite Group to Hate in Europe. Oh, there were certainly other groups who were treated badly, but when I went to Sunday School (I was Reform. I don't think I ever went to Saturday morning services in my entire childhood until my Bat Mitzvah, but I was sent to get a Jewish Education one day a week from the ages of about six to thirteen), the impression we got was certainly that Jews got it most and worst. We learned about pogroms, exiles and blood libel in detail-- spent an entire year studying the Holocaust. Jews, we were taught, have always struggled on against persecution, and have never really been safe anywhere. That's why Isreal is so crucial-- it's the first country that we can't get kicked out of, and so would be our safe haven if America ever turns against us.
Which is interesting because America seems, at the moment, extremely unlikely to do so. True, when the first waves of Jewish immigrants came to the country, there was a fair amount of discrimination. My grandmother told stories about want ads making it clear (usually through questions about "regular church attendance") that Jews were not wanted, and my grandfather told about hitting a man ranting on a streetcorner about how Hitler was right. There's a movie (I wish I remembered the title), sort of a precurser to "Black Like Me," about a Gentile reporter who posed as a Jew for six weeks just to see what all the discrimination was like. But even then, the persecution was just not as bad as it had been in Europe at its worst. There were, as far as I know, no massacres of American Jews. And time went on, and Jews took advantage of the educational system, and gained power and prestige and acceptance. Jews were neither a threat to the Christian majority nor sufficiently different to be scapegoats (especially as Reform and Conservative Jews shaved their beards, moved out of the Jewish neighborhoods, and, at least on the part of Reform Jews, started eating cheeseburgers and working on Saturdays and being pretty much indistinguishable from non-Jews), and other groups came to the prejudice-forefront, and anti-Semitism... kind of melted away. I'm sure that it depends on where you are, but for me, growing up in Shorewood, WI, I never faced any anti-Semitism of any kind. No-one has ever in my life called me a "kike," or a "dirty Jew," or a "Christ-killer." No-one has set fire to my synagogue or even spray-painted it. The closest I have ever, ever gotten to prejudice was my step-mother's friend earnestly informing me that "Judaism is an ancient and beautiful religion!" As victimization goes, that just doesn't cut it.
And yet, in the back of my head is the firm conviction that, as a Jew, I am a member of an oppressed minority. Despite never having personally faced any oppression of any kind based on the religion of my birth, I still remember the lessons to me taught by Sunday school teacher and family stories and hundreds and hundreds of Jewish jokes about outwitting Cossacks and Nazis and country-club owners, and those lessons teach me that Jews are just as hated as Blacks or Arabs or any other group.
The problem with this, I think, is that some Jews hold onto the idea of ourselves as victims, or at very least potential victims, and so tend to think of ourselves as a minority. This is obviously true in terms of numbers (2% of the population last time I checked), and it often gives Jews a splendid sort of solidarity with oppressed peoples and makes us do things like be very involved in the Civil Rights movement. However, I think it also gives us a somewhat unrealistic idea of what oppression actually is. I don't have statistics for this, but my impression is that Jews are strongly divided on affirmative action, with some of affirmative action's strongest opponents being Jewish. I suspect that this has much to do with said people saying, "Look, my ancestors were discriminated against-- Jews are hated, too-- but we got over it through hard work. Why can't you?" The answer to which is, of course, that hatred against Jews in this country was just not as bad, historically, as hatred against Jews in other countries or hatred against other groups here. Here, Jews have not been massacred, enslaved, imprisoned, systematically raped and beaten, etc. We've had some nastiness here, definitely, but nothing as bad as we talk about.
And we do talk about it, too. As soon as any discussion of race and discrimination comes up, Jews will talk about our experiences as Jews, and how left out we feel when all the other kids have Christmas trees. In fact, in my experience (particularly this semester), Jews will talk more about our discrimination than members of other groups. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that if people have had really bad experiences in the past, they tend to want to keep that from happening again. Someone who is talking to members of other groups about his/her past experiences with discrimination is running the risk that one of the people to whom s/he is talking will have precisely the prejudices s/he is talking about, and will try to hurt him/her again just as s/he has been hurt before. If, like me, one hasn't had many bad experiences, that possibility doesn't seem that scary, so I'm pretty comfortable talking at length. If one has been hurt that way, I could see being more reluctant to speak up. My (see above re: almost friends) M is a good example of this. She and I are both queer, but I came out in a very supportive environment and time, and have never had that much trouble from it (though certainly more than I have from being Jewish). However, she's about fifteen years older than me, much more butch (there is no mistaking her on sight for a straight woman), and grew up on a rural sheep farm. I talk about being queer all the time at school-- I mention my wife in the first or second conversation, and I loved talking about things from "the queer perspective" in class when issues of sexual orientation and gender came up. She barely mentions it until you get to know her well enough to talk about families and she mentions that her son and daughter are actually the biological children of her partner from her partner's previous marriage. Now, much of this undoubtedly has to do with personality-- but she's fairly outspoken about other things. So I think a great deal of it has to do with the fact that I feel safe talking about being queer, and she doesn't. So I talk about it a lot.
The other thing K said which surprised me was how prominent Jews are at my school. I honestly hadn't noticed, although when I think about it, we're definitely much more than 2% of the school's population. I'm not sure why there are more Jews getting PsyDs in Boston than is proportionate to the general population, but there it is. And K said that some of the students who are members of other minorities-- Muslims and Latinas, to take the example of the people she'd talked to-- feel that discussions of dealing with other races/religions get hijacked by discussions of Judaism. K said that she personally feels no objection to the lack of sensitivity to Scottish people, but that it seems like a shame that people don't talk about their experiences because the discussions that are supposed to be about their experiences--
--are taken over by the experiences of people who have had much less negative ones, I said.
She agreed, and I got out of the car feeling my head spinning a little. Questioning your assumptions is odd.
thespooniest, actually) was telling me I hadn't updated my journal with anything meaningful in way too long. Which is accurate. So, therefore:Last Friday, as my (you know that stage where you know someone, but s/he's not quite a friend yet, but s/he definitely could be and probably will be when you know him/her better? She's like that.) K and I drove home from field placement, she brought up something she had been wondering about. In our class's many discussions of race, one of our classmates had frequently argued that as a Jew, he wasn't white. This puzzled her, because he certainly looks white (he doesn't even "look Jewish"), and he'd occasionally mention that he had white male privilege. So, she asked, what's going on?
Jews, I explained, have a long history of being Everyone's Favorite Group to Hate in Europe. Oh, there were certainly other groups who were treated badly, but when I went to Sunday School (I was Reform. I don't think I ever went to Saturday morning services in my entire childhood until my Bat Mitzvah, but I was sent to get a Jewish Education one day a week from the ages of about six to thirteen), the impression we got was certainly that Jews got it most and worst. We learned about pogroms, exiles and blood libel in detail-- spent an entire year studying the Holocaust. Jews, we were taught, have always struggled on against persecution, and have never really been safe anywhere. That's why Isreal is so crucial-- it's the first country that we can't get kicked out of, and so would be our safe haven if America ever turns against us.
Which is interesting because America seems, at the moment, extremely unlikely to do so. True, when the first waves of Jewish immigrants came to the country, there was a fair amount of discrimination. My grandmother told stories about want ads making it clear (usually through questions about "regular church attendance") that Jews were not wanted, and my grandfather told about hitting a man ranting on a streetcorner about how Hitler was right. There's a movie (I wish I remembered the title), sort of a precurser to "Black Like Me," about a Gentile reporter who posed as a Jew for six weeks just to see what all the discrimination was like. But even then, the persecution was just not as bad as it had been in Europe at its worst. There were, as far as I know, no massacres of American Jews. And time went on, and Jews took advantage of the educational system, and gained power and prestige and acceptance. Jews were neither a threat to the Christian majority nor sufficiently different to be scapegoats (especially as Reform and Conservative Jews shaved their beards, moved out of the Jewish neighborhoods, and, at least on the part of Reform Jews, started eating cheeseburgers and working on Saturdays and being pretty much indistinguishable from non-Jews), and other groups came to the prejudice-forefront, and anti-Semitism... kind of melted away. I'm sure that it depends on where you are, but for me, growing up in Shorewood, WI, I never faced any anti-Semitism of any kind. No-one has ever in my life called me a "kike," or a "dirty Jew," or a "Christ-killer." No-one has set fire to my synagogue or even spray-painted it. The closest I have ever, ever gotten to prejudice was my step-mother's friend earnestly informing me that "Judaism is an ancient and beautiful religion!" As victimization goes, that just doesn't cut it.
And yet, in the back of my head is the firm conviction that, as a Jew, I am a member of an oppressed minority. Despite never having personally faced any oppression of any kind based on the religion of my birth, I still remember the lessons to me taught by Sunday school teacher and family stories and hundreds and hundreds of Jewish jokes about outwitting Cossacks and Nazis and country-club owners, and those lessons teach me that Jews are just as hated as Blacks or Arabs or any other group.
The problem with this, I think, is that some Jews hold onto the idea of ourselves as victims, or at very least potential victims, and so tend to think of ourselves as a minority. This is obviously true in terms of numbers (2% of the population last time I checked), and it often gives Jews a splendid sort of solidarity with oppressed peoples and makes us do things like be very involved in the Civil Rights movement. However, I think it also gives us a somewhat unrealistic idea of what oppression actually is. I don't have statistics for this, but my impression is that Jews are strongly divided on affirmative action, with some of affirmative action's strongest opponents being Jewish. I suspect that this has much to do with said people saying, "Look, my ancestors were discriminated against-- Jews are hated, too-- but we got over it through hard work. Why can't you?" The answer to which is, of course, that hatred against Jews in this country was just not as bad, historically, as hatred against Jews in other countries or hatred against other groups here. Here, Jews have not been massacred, enslaved, imprisoned, systematically raped and beaten, etc. We've had some nastiness here, definitely, but nothing as bad as we talk about.
And we do talk about it, too. As soon as any discussion of race and discrimination comes up, Jews will talk about our experiences as Jews, and how left out we feel when all the other kids have Christmas trees. In fact, in my experience (particularly this semester), Jews will talk more about our discrimination than members of other groups. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that if people have had really bad experiences in the past, they tend to want to keep that from happening again. Someone who is talking to members of other groups about his/her past experiences with discrimination is running the risk that one of the people to whom s/he is talking will have precisely the prejudices s/he is talking about, and will try to hurt him/her again just as s/he has been hurt before. If, like me, one hasn't had many bad experiences, that possibility doesn't seem that scary, so I'm pretty comfortable talking at length. If one has been hurt that way, I could see being more reluctant to speak up. My (see above re: almost friends) M is a good example of this. She and I are both queer, but I came out in a very supportive environment and time, and have never had that much trouble from it (though certainly more than I have from being Jewish). However, she's about fifteen years older than me, much more butch (there is no mistaking her on sight for a straight woman), and grew up on a rural sheep farm. I talk about being queer all the time at school-- I mention my wife in the first or second conversation, and I loved talking about things from "the queer perspective" in class when issues of sexual orientation and gender came up. She barely mentions it until you get to know her well enough to talk about families and she mentions that her son and daughter are actually the biological children of her partner from her partner's previous marriage. Now, much of this undoubtedly has to do with personality-- but she's fairly outspoken about other things. So I think a great deal of it has to do with the fact that I feel safe talking about being queer, and she doesn't. So I talk about it a lot.
The other thing K said which surprised me was how prominent Jews are at my school. I honestly hadn't noticed, although when I think about it, we're definitely much more than 2% of the school's population. I'm not sure why there are more Jews getting PsyDs in Boston than is proportionate to the general population, but there it is. And K said that some of the students who are members of other minorities-- Muslims and Latinas, to take the example of the people she'd talked to-- feel that discussions of dealing with other races/religions get hijacked by discussions of Judaism. K said that she personally feels no objection to the lack of sensitivity to Scottish people, but that it seems like a shame that people don't talk about their experiences because the discussions that are supposed to be about their experiences--
--are taken over by the experiences of people who have had much less negative ones, I said.
She agreed, and I got out of the car feeling my head spinning a little. Questioning your assumptions is odd.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 05:01 pm (UTC)It wasn't that long ago in this country that McCarthy went on and on about the "Communists," when what he and everyone else actually meant was "Jews," and this country responded by putting crosses on everything that didn't move and words like "In God We Trust" in the pledge and on the money and adding "faith in Jesus Christ" to state and city charters across the country that are only now just being removed, and not without a fight. And all it would take is one charismatic leader to get up and say "The reason we're at war, the reason things like September 11th happen, the reason you can't afford to buy a house and the reason you have no health insurance, is because of Israel, and those goddammed Jews who take our money to keep themselves safe while they eat the blood of little Palestinian babies!" There were plenty of people saying exactly that throughout 2002, quite a lot of them on street corners in my own fucking neighborhood. The poet laureate of New Jersey, that year, wrote a poem about how all the Jews knew about the hijackings, which is why none of them were in the towers. My synagogue was defaced the weekend The Passion came out. The Passion came out, and people called it "accurate." My Jewish friends have left France by the dozens, because they got tired of being beaten up in the streets and having their synagogues burned. And neither you, nor I, am allowed to go to more than a dozen countries in the Middle East because we are Jewish. Quite a number of those countries are our allies, and hold more than a little political sway here.
Are we systematically raped in this country? No. Were Black people being put in camps and raped, tortured, and murdered anywhere in the "civilized" world within the lifetimes of anyone alive to remember while this and every other country stood by and did NOTHING? No. Were we? Fuck yes.
The reason Jews talk about it so much is because, well, it was pretty fucking bad, and it happened extremely recently, and all the reasons it happened? Are still there. The blood libel is still around. The blood libel is still around IN THIS COUNTRY. You can't wear a Star of David in Germany, or Poland, or even France these days. And this country looks a lot like Germany in the twenties, minus only the massive economic depression and the crazy charismatic leader.
To sum up, do Jews right now have a harder time getting a mortgage than Black people? No. But discrimination, and forced "otherness," historically precedes mass murder for Jews in ways that it does and has not for Blacks and Latinos. So yes, we're a little touchy about it. I don't think that's inappropriate.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 06:48 pm (UTC)I'm not talking about the 50s. I'm not talking about France. I'm not saying that I should forget history, and I do think I should be aware that these things can happen but they have not happened to me. And so I really have no business complaining about them when questions of prejudice come up. I can discuss them as a form of prejudice which affects people, the same way I can discuss any form of prejudice happening to anyone, but they're not my experience.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 07:30 pm (UTC)For example: Jane lives in a bad neighborhood. Jane has never been mugged, but her next door neighbor has been mugged, and her friend who came to visit her has been mugged, and her roommate has been mugged. Jane is now afraid of being mugged, and lives her life accordingly. Are you suggesting that the mugging of people in her neighborhood has no effect on her experience because she herself has not been mugged? Because I don't think you would.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 07:39 pm (UTC)I mean, I don't consider myself guilty for the actions of American slaveowners. That would be ridiculous. But do I benefit from the racial hierarchy of this society (which was at least partly created by slavery)? Sure I do. I think that means that I do have a significant responsibility.