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Jews Aren’t White, and It Shouldn’t Matter
Members of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel dance during a ceremony marking the holiday of Sigd in Jerusalem, Nov. 11, 2015. Photo: Reuters / Amir Cohen.
The progressive worldview favors moral binaries such as oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, etc. Instead of moving beyond the relevance of race, progressives claim that we need it in order to make sense of the world. In fact, the two groups that focus primarily on race are racists and progressives.
Where do Jews fit into this reductive calculus?
Jews are not racially homogeneous, but progressives don’t seem to appreciate that. Most Jews in the West are “white-passing” and well-off, so progressives throw them in with the list of oppressors. When looking at Palestinians, these uninformed progressives believe they see relatively weak, poor BIPOC people. If there is a conflict between powerful “white” people and poor brown people, the progressive worldview requires that they stand with the latter.
However, unlike American Jews who are largely of European descent, 55% of Israeli Jews are either Sephardi or Mizrahi. The former descend from Jews exiled during the Spanish Inquisition, and the latter are from North African and Middle-Eastern Jewish communities. They are not white. There are, for example, about 160,000 Black Jews living in Israel who emigrated from Ethiopia.
Jews don’t fit neatly into the overly simplistic worldview that has become gospel among progressives. In their attempt to make sense of the Mideast conflict using this reductive framework, progressives tend to ally themselves with terrorists and the most illiberal people on Earth, and denounce the only liberal democracy in the region.
If progressives support indigenous rights, they should support the State of Israel. After all, Jews are indigenous to that land, and the archeological record supports this. Hebrew was spoken and Judaism practiced on that land 1,00 years before Arabs came to the region with the Muslim conquest (i.e, colonization) of the 7th century. The only people with the same language and culture as the people living there over 2,000 years ago are Jews.
Jerusalem does not appear in the Koran, nor was it ever the capital of any Arab state. It is, however, mentioned in the Torah 700 times.
The land upon which Israel sits was a colony of empires, whose seat of power was elsewhere, such as the Ottomans and the Romans. Only the Jews ever had their seat of government in that place. When progressives deride Israel as a colonialist state, ask them what country Israel is a colony of. Israel isn’t an outpost of any other power.
Progressives do not acknowledge the more than 3,000 years of history and Jewish life on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, because it does not fit with their image of what indigenous people look like. If Palestinians are the weaker, browner people in this conflict, then they must have had their land stolen by the stronger, whiter group. Facts don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter.
This is the psychology animating the protests on college campuses and elsewhere across the country.
The fact that progressives use the whiteness of some Jews as an argument against Jewish indigeneity in Israel is especially repugnant. The only reason that white Jews exist is because Jews fled persecution in their ancestral homeland and bred with local populations in Europe. When progressives and antisemites make this argument, they are using the effects of ethnic cleansing against the actual victims of ethnic cleansing.
Some will claim that Israel is a pariah among nations because it is an apartheid state. However, this claim does not survive scrutiny. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab. Arab Israelis vote, sit as judges in Israel’s courtrooms, and as legislators in Israel’s parliament. Moreover, they have equal rights — the same rights as every Jewish citizen — and they have more freedoms than citizens of any other state in the region. For example, they can attend the Middle East’s only gay pride celebrations in Tel Aviv.
So why do progressives protest when Israel defends itself, but not when Hamas beheads homosexuals in Gaza? Why do progressives protest the accidental and unintentional killing of civilians in Gaza but not the 230,000 civilians killed during the ongoing, decade-long Syrian civil war? Why have they not protested the 150,000 civilians killed in Yemen?
The most common explanations offered for this selective outrage are that these protestors are just virtue signaling hypocrites or that they are antisemites. And sure, some of them are. But it is too easy to simply dismiss them all in this manner.
Hanlon’s Razor is a principle of critical thinking, which states that one should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. In this instance, we should not brand all these protestors as antisemites when their actions flow directly from their flawed worldview.
The more charitable and intellectually satisfying explanation is that progressives don’t protest the wholesale slaughter of civilians in places like Syria and Yemen, because those conflicts don’t have a “white-passing” participant. Those conflicts don’t fit neatly into progressives’ simplistic worldview that everything is about race and oppression.
People who aren’t stuck in this misguided dogma were taken aback by the way that progressives sought to contextualize the Hamas massacre of October 7. But these progressives’ callousness is not just a function of antisemitism or confirmation bias. It stems from their adherence to the misguided belief that race and power are the most salient heuristic to determine who is right in any given situation. Israel has tanks and warplanes manned by “white pilots.” Palestinians are “brown” people hurling rocks at those tanks. From the progressive perspective, that’s all that matters.
Why is this way of thinking so predominant among young people? This is where conservatives had it right all along. Academia — and even lower levels of education — have been hijacked by progressive intellectuals who do not sufficiently respect their audience or their profession. It is a misuse of the trust placed in educators to indoctrinate impressionable young people. They should be teaching students information and concepts, so that students can reach their own conclusions. Instead, progressive academics grade their captive audience on how well they can regurgitate the conclusions that have been force-fed to them.
Students are encouraged to become activists, and told that “silence is violence.” For too long, the rest of us didn’t see the harm in the hypersensitivity to microaggressions, the self-flagellation of “white fragility” and “doing the work” of renouncing their privilege, or confessing their oppression. The harm is now apparent, and it’s scary.
What is the solution?
As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant. The reason that terror apologists take down posters of children kidnapped by Hamas is because it shows the lie of their misplaced allyship. Those images create a painful cognitive dissonance that these progressives prefer to suppress. Make progressives keep tearing them down. Project them on buildings. Let those images haunt their dreams and weigh upon their conscience.
The Supreme Court recently invalidated affirmative action policies, but the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit policies designed to increase intellectual diversity on college campuses. These schools should publicly commit that they will stop hiring terror apologists, and that their employment contracts will require that professors not abuse their power by imposing their beliefs upon students. Let’s not forget that higher education in the US is a business, susceptible to the same market pressures as other businesses.
After the shocking testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT before Congress, donors are now aware of what is going on at these schools. They should continue to speak with their checkbooks. Students who value intellectual freedom on campus should divert their applications to institutions that welcome a diversity of opinions rather than the superficial diversity of complexion that these bastions of DEI have fostered.
Kenneth Blake teaches Critical Thinking and Government at a private high school in northern California.
The post Jews Aren’t White, and It Shouldn’t Matter first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Occidental College Settles Antisemitism Complaint
A general view of the US Department of Education in Washington, DC, on Dec. 1, 2020. Photo: Graeme Sloan via Reuters Connect
Occidental College in Los Angeles has agreed to “sweeping reforms” of its handling of antisemitism to settle a civil rights complaint brought by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
According to the ADL, which issued an announcement of the agreement on Tuesday, the college will refer to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism during its investigations of antisemitic conduct and add a section on antisemitism to its educational programming on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents education institutions receiving federal funds from practicing or allowing the practice of discrimination based on race, religion, and ethnic origin.
The ADL and the Brandeis Center jointly filed their complaint against Occidental College, a measure which allows for negotiating a resolution to the matter before the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) renders a ruling. The civil rights organizations charged in their claim that the college failed to correct a “pervasive and hostile environment” in which Jewish students were subject to “severe antisemitic bullying, intimidation, and physical threats” amid an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred precipitated by Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
“This agreement demonstrates Occidental College’s commitment to counter all forms of contemporary antisemitism and underscores their recognition that effectively combating antisemitism requires understanding the relationship between Jewish identity, Israel, and Zionism,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said in a statement. “We are gratified by the school’s engagement in meaningful discussions at the highest levels of the administration, and we are heartened that Occidental has committed to creating a safer environment for Jewish students. When implemented, this agreement will help ensure that Jewish students are able to learn and thrive in an environment free from antisemitic hate, discrimination, and harassment.”
ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt added, “This outcome demonstrates how the Title VI OCR process can work to effectively protect Jewish students. We are deeply grateful for the US Department of Education’s dedication and assistance in resolving this case. It is our hope that this resolution will lead to other college administrators implementing these or similar measures proactively to address antisemitism on campus.”
Occidental College’s settlement treads a path taken by other institutions of higher education against which legal action was taken to address a surge of campus antisemitism over the past year, amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
In June, Columbia University settled a civil lawsuit in which it was accused by a student of neglecting its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year.
The resolution of the case, first reported by Reuters, called for Columbia to hire a “Safe Passage Liaison” who will monitor protests and “walking escorts” who will accompany students whose safety is threatened around the campus. Other details of the settlement included “accommodations” for students whose academic lives are disrupted by protests and new security policies for controlling access to school property.
In July, New York University agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of money to settle a lawsuit brought by three students who sued the school for responding, allegedly, to antisemitic discrimination “with deliberate indifference.”
By resolving the case, NYU avoided a lengthy trial which would have revealed precisely who and which office received but failed to address numerous reports that — according to the court documents filed in November — NYU students and faculty “repeatedly abuse, malign, vilify, and threaten Jewish students with impunity” and that “death to k—es” and “gas the Jews” were chanted by pro-Hamas supporters at the school.
NYU did not merely pay money to quell the complaints of its accusers, however. Over a month after the settlement was reached it updated its Non-Discrimination and Harassment Policy (NDAH), including in it language which identified “Zionist” as a racial dog whistle that sometimes conceals the antisemitic intent of speech and other conduct that denigrates and excludes Jews. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the policy acknowledges the “coded” subtleties of antisemitic speech and its use in discriminatory conduct that targets Jewish students and faculty.
NYU went further, recognizing that Zionism is central to the identities of the world’s 15.7 million Jews, an overwhelming majority of whom believe the Jewish people were destined to return to their ancient homeland in the land of Israel after centuries of exile. “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity. Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists,” the university said.
Anti-Israel activity on college campuses has reached crisis levels in the year that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, according to a report published by the ADL in September which revealed a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena. Titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024,” the document painted a bleak picture of an American higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.
“The antisemitic, anti-Zionist vitriol we’ve witnessed on campus is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” Greenblatt said in a statement accompanying the unveiling of the organization’s research. “Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidation, and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion. Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality, or political views, and they need to start now.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Occidental College Settles Antisemitism Complaint first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Rashida Tlaib Uses Thanksgiving Message to Express Solidarity With ‘Palestine,’ Other ‘Indigenous People’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) used the holiday of Thanksgiving to “mourn” the “indigenous people” of “Palestine” and elsewhere “fighting for freedom on their own land,” portraying one of America’s most storied celebrations in a negative light.
“This Thanksgiving we mourn the Indigenous people killed by European settlers and the United States in order to steal their land,” Tlaib reposted on Instagram. “From here to Palestine, we stand in solidarity with all Indigenous people as they fight for freedom on their own land.”
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has long been an outspoken critic of Israel. The congresswoman was slow to issue a public statement acknowledging the Palestinian terror group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, and since the onslaught, she has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “apartheid.” She has also alleged that American support for Israel stems from “anti-Palestinian racism.”
US Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), another staunch critic of Israel and progressive lawmaker, also used Thanksgiving as an opportunity to take shots at America, arguing that the beloved holiday represents “stolen land and broken treaties” for Native Americans.
Lee has been on the receiving end of immense criticism over her anti-Israel rhetoric in the year following the Oct. 7 atrocities. In the weeks following the slaughter, Lee co-sponsored a resolution calling for a “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. She has similarly accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza. In a statement commemorating the anniversary of Oct. 7, Lee only wrote that she mourned “those killed one year ago and those massacred in the year since,” seemingly drawing an equivalence between Hamas’s terrorism and Israel’s defensive military operations.
“Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude and togetherness for many, but it’s also a reminder of stolen land and broken treaties for others. Today, let’s honor Native communities by committing to the fight for sovereignty, justice, and the promises this country has failed to keep,” Lee wrote.
In contrast, some other members of Congress called attention to the American hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza in their Thanksgiving statements.
“As we gather with family today, we must not forget the families who are missing their loved ones who were taken hostage by Hamas 418 days ago — including New York’s own Omer Neutra,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said. “Let us pray that by this time next year, they will be reunited safely with their families.”
“As you spend Thanksgiving with your family and friends, don’t forget the 100+ families whose loved ones are being held hostage by Iran-backed Hamas for the second holiday season in a row. It’’ been 419 days. Enough! Bring them home NOW!” US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said in a statement, referring to the 101 hostages still in captivity in Gaza.
Of the remaining hostages, seven are Americans.
The post Rashida Tlaib Uses Thanksgiving Message to Express Solidarity With ‘Palestine,’ Other ‘Indigenous People’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Antisemitism in Berlin Surges to Record Levels This Year, New Data Show
Pro-Hamas demonstrators marching in Munich, Germany. Photo: Reuters/Alexander Pohl
The number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin in just the first six months of this year surpassed the total for all of 2023 and reached the highest annual count on record, according to a new German report.
Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) on Thursday released data documenting 1,383 incidents of antisemitism in the German capital from January to June, averaging nearly eight a day.
The figure compiled by RIAS, a federally-funded body, was a significant increase from the 1,270 antisemitic outrages tallied in 2023 and the highest count for a single year since RIAS began monitoring antisemitic incidents in 2015.
Of the 1,383 incidents documented in the first half of this year in Berlin, two were cases of “extreme violence,” another 23 were attacks (six of which were against children), and 37 were targeted acts of property damage, including 21 acts involving memorials.
In the first extremely violent incident, a Jewish student in Mitte was punched several times in the face on the street and then kicked in the face after he fell to the ground in February 2024. The victim, a member of student groups working to combat antisemitism, had been doxed online as a “right-wing Zionist,” according to The Jerusalem Post.
The second incident also occurred in Mitte, this time in May, when a visibly Jewish Ukrainian was physically attacked by an unknown assailant while on the way to synagogue. The attacker yelled “Free Palestine” while assaulting the victim, and no one reportedly intervened.
RIAS also documented 28 threats, such as direct messages on social media, and 1,240 cases of abusive behavior.
“The content of antisemitism also continued to be more violent and uninhibited. Seventy-one incidents contained threats of annihilation, including graffiti that openly called for the killing of Jews,” the report noted.
In the first half of 2024, 74 antisemitic incidents were documented in educational institutions in Berlin, including 27 incidents in schools. “The nature of the incidents is alarming: Jewish or Israeli children were beaten, spat on, threatened, and treated with hostility by their classmates,” according to RIAS. “Antisemitic incidents occurred in schools in 9 of 12 Berlin districts.”
A striking 71.6 percent of all antisemitic incidents during the first half of 2024 in the German capital were related to Israel.
RIAS previously reported a major spike in antisemitic incidents across Germany since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
There have been 230 antisemitic outrages per month since Oct. 7, 2023, compared to around 50 such incidents per month before the onslaught.
“These data indicate a lasting change in the dynamics of incidents: the number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin remained at a significantly higher level in the first half of the year than in the months and years before, starting with the sharp increase following Oct. 7,” RIAS summarized.
However, many antisemitic incidents had nothing to do with Israel or its ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza.
“It can be observed that in this context the boundaries of what can be said have shifted overall and some antisemitic statements seem to be acceptable even to [normative] society,” RIAS wrote. “They range from the demonization and delegitimization of Israel, to antisemitic conspiracy myths, trivialization of the Holocaust and reversals of perpetrator and victim, to open antisemitic insults.”
The antisemitism monitoring group concluded that rates of antisemitism show no sign of letting up in Berlin: “A downward trend is not foreseeable at the time of publication of the report.”
Europe has experienced an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of last Oct. 7. In many countries, anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked to record levels.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), police registered 5,154 antisemitic incidents in Germany last year, a 95 percent increase compared to the previous year.
However, experts believe that the true number of incidents is much higher but not recorded because of reluctance on the part of the victims.
“Only 20 percent of the antisemitic crimes are reported, so the real number should be five times what we have,” Felix Klein, the German federal government’s chief official dealing with antisemitism, told The Algemeiner in an interview last year.
The post Antisemitism in Berlin Surges to Record Levels This Year, New Data Show first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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