Godheval

As a person of color, I am necessarily engaged in the global dialogue about race and racism, and I even consider myself someone with some original thoughts to contribute to that discussion.  However, being a person of color I am sometimes let “off the hook”, when it comes to my own prejudices.  I’ve even heard things like “black people can’t be racist” – with which I disagree.  I would say instead that racism on the part of disempowered minority groups lacks the potency of that exercised by the majority.  In the United States, this means that racism by “white people” is the most significant and devastating form of racism with far-reaching sociopolitical consequences, while racism by people of color is mostly a personal moral dilemma.

That being said, I find myself wrestling with an emergent new prejudice, one that like most prejudices is easy to reinforce, but not so easy to eliminate.  As you can guess from the title of this post, that prejudice is towards Jewish people.  I am writing this to the general public in hopes of starting a candid discussion on the matter.

As a sensible person, I do not believe that Jewish people as a whole, or on any inherent level are – well, anything bad – but I have started to develop little inklings, little annoyances that I’ve come to associate with Jewish people.  Upon checking myself, I’ve resolved that my problem is not necessarily with Jewish people but with Jewish culture, as it were.  Going deeper, I resolve that my problem is actually with certain memes within Jewish culture, and not the culture as a whole.

So I would like to discuss some of these perceived memes, in hopes of better understanding them, and perhaps not allowing them to color my perceptions of Jewish people.  Note that I say “perceived memes”, as I recognize that these things may not be characteristics of Jewish culture, but just how things look to me from the outside.

1) Extreme Ethnocentricism – Jewish ethnocentrism seems to reach the point of perceived ethnic superiority, including thoughts of being a “chosen people”.  Solidarity for the sake of preserving one’s culture or heritage makes sense, but Jewish ethnocentrism seems to take on a self-righteous bent.

2) Anti-Semitism – To my knowledge, this is the only term for prejudice against a specific group of people, all other forms of prejudice categorized under the general “isms”.  If that weren’t enough, there’s the matter of this term being used at countless turns, where Jewish people, their culture, or the state of Israel are criticized – a “politics of Anti-Semitism” if you will.  Other minority groups are called hypersensitive for referring to their experiences with prejudice, but Jews seem to get endless sympathy in cases of so-called Anti-Semitism.

3) Zionism – To be frank, I do not think that the state of Israel should have come into being at all.  It was an initiative started far earlier than the gross atrocities of the Holocaust, which only placed an exclamation point at the end of every justification for creating a Jewish state.  If it had to be created, then perhaps out of fairness, it should’ve been carved out of Nazi Germany.  That it was created in Palestine – a place which had nothing to do with World War II – only highlights the fact that it was based on pre-existent Jewish claims to the land.  Zionism seems to run strong amongst Jewish people, which as a consequence often means disregarding the lives of Palestinians.  Now that Israel does exist and is not likely to go anywhere, I concede that peace will necessarily include a safe and prosperous Jewish state.  Still, Zionism seems to prioritize the prosperity of the Jewish state over all else.

4) White Privilege/Minority Victimization Duality – Jewish people have the unique advantage of being able to (in most cases) claim white privilege, while at the same time being able to count themselves as an aggrieved minority.  I do not begrudge them the latter, because the more people in the fight against prejudice the better, but far too often have I seen it where white privilege is the default position, with claims to victimization brought to bear against situations of “Anti-Semitism”.  Along with this comes the idea that the Holocaust was the foremost example of human cruelty the world has ever seen, and having overcome it, Jews set the example by which others should follow, in “getting over” their own hardships.

These four perceived memes are the most prominent in my thinking, and will hopefully serve as a good start to the conversation – that is, if anyone is willing to have it.  My intentions in writing this essay are not – I emphasize, NOT – to lend any legitimacy or support for real Anti-Semitism.  On the contrary, I am putting my thoughts on display here in hopes of deconstructing and eliminating prejudice through understanding.

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