"... 'by contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.'... In this worldview, Jewish success, like immigrant success, is never earned by merit, but won by attaching itself to 'whiteness.'... In a 2018 piece on anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights, the Forward’s Ari Feldman noted that 'black people identify Judaism as "a form of almost hyper-whiteness"...'... In California’s proposed mandatory class in critical race theory, for example, one original curriculum question was 'How did the Holocaust shift Jewish Americans’ position in American society?' The correct answer was: 'gained conditional whiteness.' Yes, this is the upshot of the mass murder of millions of Jews, according to CRT: it gave them a leg-up in America!... [A] recent paper in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association [argues that]... Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition... [that] renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse... [T]his kind of demonizing rhetoric could be straight from a Nazi textbook. It identifies a racial group, it attaches evil characteristics to it, it ascribes those characteristics to individuals within that group, and it sees their success as won at the direct expense of others...."
Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "The Anti-Semitism In Anti-Whiteness/Whoopi Goldberg just brought it out into the open" (Substack).
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Anti-whiteness is parasitic blather attempting to substitute accusations for achievement. To its adherents: go do something productive.
Critical Racists' Theory presumes diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry).
Ashley Rae Goldenberg claims she coined the brilliant term "Schroedinger's Whites" as a descriptor for Jews.
I suspect she's right.
Having a reputation for being smart gets you honorary whiteness in a system where the lower class is black.
In Asia it's Chinese expats that are resented but I doubt it's as white.
Hitler's problem with Jews was that they were cunning and weakened the nation, which put a negative spin on being smart.
Seems like Whoopi is right, according to the ADL. In 2017 their website defined racism as "[T]he belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person's social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics."
Now they're woke, so the current definition is: "The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people."
See: Whoopi's right!
Something to think about next time you want to consider how much weight to give to anything the ADL says.
I guess you can believe anything you want about "people of color" and even hate them, and still not be a racist unless you marginalize and/or oppress them. (But what was with the prior definition: "His or her"? How 2017 -- as if there are only two pronouns.)
Disraeli converted from a non-practicing Jew and went on to become a non-practicing Jewish Anglican. He was the frequent recipient of anti-Semitic jibes, but note that he was the Prime Minister. The important thing is that he wasn't Catholic. There was no Catholic Prime Minister in the UK until Tony Blair. Wellington was England's greatest living war hero, but when he gave (propertied) Catholics the vote, he was challenged to a duel. The religious fault line in England was Anglican/Catholic. Other religious differences were small bore. Perhaps the prejudice against Catholics in some way eased the way for Jews living there. It certainly helped Disraeli. Oft does evil mar evil....In like way, the fault line in America is Black/white. Perhaps this has eased the transition of other immigrants into their acceptance by American society.
What?
How the Jews became white? That's curious statement. Judah Benjamin was the Confederae Sec of State, and Jeff Davis' Best friend forever. And jews in the south were involved in the slave trade, owned slaves, and were considered "White" by everyone.
The 1790 Federal law limited immigration to whites, jews were included as "white". And as someone who became politically aware in the 1980s, I don't remember any Jewish Politican claim he wasn't white. Or that Jews were separate race. The usual claim was that Jews were a religion otherwise Jews were just Americans like everyone else. That certainly was the claim before and during WW2. Only Hitler thought the Jews were a "Race".
Interesting that Jews had to go through a process to "Become WHite" or are they now claiming to be a specical separate race?
All very confusing. But Sullivan clears everything up. So go read him.
In a 2018 piece on anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights, the Forward’s Ari Feldman noted that 'black people identify Judaism as "a form of almost hyper-whiteness"
I don't think this is unique to Blacks. I commented earlier that until my late teens or early 20s, I mentally clustered Jews with Germans as a single group. I'd go farther and say that I mentally grouped English, Scottish, Irish, Germans, Jews, and Scandanavians as the most archetypically "White" groups, with Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Slavs as "White" but not what immediately sprang to mind when I thought of "White," and then Arabs, Armenians, Turks, Hispanics, and Persians as maybe White, maybe not. In all honesty, though, my mental racial map, growing up half-Asian in California, probably isn't at all normal, since I also mentally cluster Blacks and Whites together. The colour lines that I grew up with were Koreans vs. other Asians vs. everyone else.
Still, even today, Jewish Americans mostly seem hyper-White to me, kind of like Mormons (like Romney). Yes, both Mormons and Jews have been discriminated against in the past, but they're still super White. The exception is groups like Hasidic Jews, whom I still think of as "White," but sort of marginally so, like Persians and Arabs.
At any rate, contemporary Jews' and White Supremacists' belief that Jews somehow aren't White in the American racial taxonomy just sounds like so much nonsense to me. I mean, people used to be pretty prejudiced against the Irish, but that didn't make them non-White. I don't think the Holocaust was particularly relevant. Even leaving aside Jewish elected officials and Confederate rebels in the 19th century South, Morgenthau was a senior official in the line of succession for the Roosevelt administration, years before the Holocaust. For heaven's sake, famed segregationist White supremacist Woodrow Wilson even put Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court in 1916! Admittedly, this was not far removed from an era when Americans were happy to elect an American Indian (Charles Curtis) Vice President, so perhaps it's just that White supremacy in those days was less about promoting White supremacy and more about enforcing Black inferiority to literally everyone else. But still, it seems extremely counterintuitive to say that Jews were considered Non-White in the US, whether before or after the Holocaust.
I don't think the ideas Sullivan explores and advances should be using Whoopi Goldberg's remarks for illustration. The easiest explanation for her thinking is that for her a European regime (and some of its European allies) exterminated millions of other Europeans. None of whom came from sub-Saharan Africa. I'm not saying she's right to think about the Holocaust that way. Just saying Sullivan should skip her for purposes of his discission.
When is somebody going to write a book "How the Italians became White"? The Jews and Irish are stealing all the limelight.
Balfegor, don't forget that Sullivan grew up in a community of working class RC Irish immigrants in England before the massive immigration from former colonies and the poorest parts of the EU. It colors his examination of this fraught subject.
Look at all of the stuff popping out into the open lately.
The left really is blind to how far they have fallen in the last few months.
IF you're from another Race, its probably hard to see Jews as anything other than a subset of white. Certainly all the POC's I've known have this opinion. Its hard see the fault lines, when you're from a difference race.
The Rwandan Genocide occured because the two tribes considered each other to be completely different. yet the difference seems rather to small to White Americans. Simarly all the differences in East Asia seem rather small to white americans. but they sure as hell don't to Asians.
So maybe Blacks are justified in finding the Holocaust as a intra-white conflict, and wondering why the differences that seem small to them, resulted in such a bad result.
There has always been levels of white. That's ethnicity. Humans classify everything. Classifications are bent, twisted or demolished with the times. As Don Draper advised: Move Forward.
Romney wasn't only hyper-White. He was also, from a New England perspective, hyper-Protestant. All the ill feeling in the the Bible Belt towards Mormons was hard to understand around here. Romney wasn't Irish or Italian or Jewish or Greek or Armenian or anything else, so obviously he was a Protestant, whatever his theological views might be.
I'm also not impressed by the Jews aren't White theory that popped up in Commentary a few months back. Whatever the complexities of European history, in the American context, what else would Jews be? To say "No, Jews Aren’t White. We’re our own thing, and whatever privilege we possess is conditional" is to overlook the obvious fact that many White people aren't very privileged at all. I suppose it's a question of perspective, but that is not the usual perspective or the one most people would have.
I don't necessarily agree with this, but it seems worth quoting here:
"Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be “white”—they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity." CORNEL WEST, Race Matters
This whitey is happy to welcome Jews or anyone else to the dark side, or the white side, or whatever.
I agree with Sullivan.
I also find race and skin color obsessions as... unhelpful to the human spirit.
man ... USA academics are weird thinkers
The concept of"white" is an American invention and really has no meaning outside the American context. It was a way of dealing with a land with native, African-descended and European-descended peoples. What developed was a doctrine of racial separation and the goal of an interbred European-descended population. Anything that divided the European-descended population was suspect and the addition of an Asian-descended population was strongly resisted. The question "who is white?" has only arisen with the breakdown of this old order.
Brazil or Mexico had a very different social model with many more recognized categories.
I'm circumcised, and raised on the Bible. Half the Bible is Jewish literature. I must be at least half-Jewish.
Idiot writers, and their convenient identity pigeon holes.
They expose some aspects of “anti-whiteness” and “antiracism” as these CRT ideas have trickled down into the public consciousness, and also a deep, long-standing sense among some African-Americans that Jews in America are not usually the oppressed, but often the oppressor.
He needs to change the direction of his trickle.
Reading Prager and Telushkin, "Why The Jews?" It's about anti-Semitism. 1983.
One of the reasons for the enduring hate is resentment because Jews are better at being white than are whites. Lots of metrics.
So if whiteness is annoying, more of it is more annoying.
thank goodness [and/or the simulation] for the fearless Andrew Sullivan! His eloquent mind is shining an indispensable mirror on the ruling class and the nation's integrity.
I know this is obvious to almost everyone, but it needs to be said.
In a world where there are only Whites and Blacks, Whites are the oppressors and Blacks are the oppressed.
In a world where there are only Aryans and Jews, Aryans are the oppressors and Jews are the oppressed.
The problems of interpretation arise when there are Aryans who agree with Blacks, and Whites who agree with Jews.
"And it’s hard to forget the infamous fliers found at the University of Illinois at Chicago: “ENDING WHITE PRIVILEGE STARTS WITH ENDING JEWISH PRIVILEGE.” The fliers echoed the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and, er, David Duke:"
White people discovered what rules lead to prosperity and Jews found they could do that even better. Northeast Asians and some subcontinent groups are now doing the same. I think other explanations are an evasion that are mere excuses.
If people really mean it that they are judging by criteria other than prosperity and academic/scientific/literary success then this wouldn't come up. But the very people who rail against the primacy of those values are those who are most attached to them. It kills them that blacks are not succeeding in that way, and they can conceive of no other.
So red-headed, freckle-faced Polish Jews are white but not white-white.
Got it.
The Hungarian Jews were the smart ones. Von Neumann, Erdos, Von Karman, Wigner, Teller, even Szilard. These were the greats. Einstein was ok, but German.
This comment thread is more interesting than Sullivan's article. And I think Sullivan's writing is often, though inconsistently, quite interesting.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that Jews are anything but white. (In general, the late Yaphet Kotto being a great exception.) I think their problem for a long time was being considered foreign in whatever society they were in, no matter how deep their roots. It's not that Jews went from being considered non-white to white, but that we've become less and less the "other."
Ficta, 7:08: Thanks for that. I disagree with most of Cornel West's positions, but these days I'm finding him more interesting and admirable than I used to.
It doesn't matter to me how you or anyone else perceive Jews. As I Jew, I used to think I was above all of that sort of thing. Let the world run with it's collectivism, it's tribalism. I'm not of that mentality. Even as my dad told me as a young man, it doesn't matter what you think. The world will remind you you're a Jew.
And that's the reality. You bring up Jews in the Confederate South or as members of FDRs administration (even as FDR watched the Holocaust unfolding as a spectator). To think Hitler was the first to view Jews as a race is to simply not know the history of the Jewish people. We've been ducking for eons.
Here's the thing. In America, and in Europe before Hitler, Jews have tried to assimilate into most of the societies they lived in. Not all Jews- as there are devout religious sects who prefer to just study their religion, but most Jews. In Europe- both west and east, Russia, Australia, Central & South America, Canada, the US. I doubt if we all look the same. Even throughout Asia there were pockets of Jews. And most certainly in the Middle East- although aside from Israel, there are no longer Jews in Arab countries. There used to be, but no longer. They've been chased out.
So we have typically tried to assimilate. To be good citizens. And darn if we didn't have some success. Mainly because, as a culture- some might say as a race- we stress education. And maybe there's some genetics to it, something floating around the gene pool. That might be considered a racial characteristic. But that translates into a people being productive. So what happens? This tiny minority, this odd little group of people go into society after society and excel. They tend to achieve in various fields. It can get irritating to some. Especially when they look around and see some others of their own stock not doing so well. Eventually it comes out. That frustration and the undercurrent of hate that has been handed down each generation comes out.
Jesus Killer. Money grabber. Don't you care about anything other than yourselves? I've heard all of this and much more in my life. It was pretty regular in the 60s and 70s. Disappeared for years and now I'm hearing those same things coming out of the woodwork again.
So, yeah. We're white, which is to say we're 'accepted', when it's convenient for a particular society to have us around. When we become inconvenient- and it'll happen again- we'll be seeing the same tired old bullshit coming back. We won't be white, but we won't be POC either. I'll look forward to hearing stories about FDRs administration and Disraeli again in those days. In the meantime, I keep my powder dry. No cattle cars for this generation. And yeah, if you ever wonder why Israel responds to attacks quickly and viciously, there are hundreds of years of reasons. I suspect this world prefers it's Jews soft, begging to not be hit.
I did not used to comment on this topic, but as I get older, I find I have less patience for the short view of history. As for the black community I can only say to look within. Your answer is in your own hands. Seems like you spend way too much time looking out, when you should be looking in.
Brazil or Mexico had a very different social model with many more recognized categories.
Do you really think their system was better? Under their system two brothers, with exactly the same mother and father, would have vastly different social and legal status if one was born in Spain and the other in Brazil or Mexico. That's before you get into gradations of pure blood versus native blood.
One doubts Karen Brodkin knew anything about Judah Benjamin.
Mention the name to Caren Johnson, if she responds at all it would be to blink.
Chuck Schumer's recent mushmouth rambling that only white men were on the Supreme Court before 1981 only makes sense when you realize he considered Jews to be white. The vast majority of Supreme Court justices have indeed been white Protestant men: therefore, it should be mildly surprising that three Jewish justices were on the bench from 2010-2020. That blows a gigantic hole in the core Democrat value of "diversity," and the idea that this was due to some magical Merit deserves some degree of scorn- especially considering the deleterious effects on religious freedom that haven't yet been reversed by the Trump Court.
The obnoxious liberal claims that there are "too many" whites in a variety of elite positions become even more obnoxious when you consider that Jews are very strongly over-represented out of all proportion to their abilities, and camouflage their numbers by being counted as white.
Gahrie asks "Do you really think their system was better?"
Not at all. I am just contrasting the social constructions in different societies, not saying that any one is better, let alone correct.
I am also pointing out that Judaism exists outside, and in some tension with, what I regard as the core American construct of "white" as an intermarrying European-descended population.
Gahrie asks "Do you really think their system was better?"
Not at all. I am just contrasting the social constructions in different societies, not saying that any one is better, let alone correct.
I am also pointing out that Judaism exists outside, and in some tension with, what I regard as the core American construct of "white" as an intermarrying European-descended population.
There’s hierarchical tendencies w/in everything. I’m pretty sure our black communities are just as judgy in their gradient color chart as everyone else. I suppose it’s the view from the highest rung of the ladder that counts. Myself, I’ve always thought of us all as “peoples”. All countries aren’t necessarily races- just identified as where they hail from. Even w/in the states, it’s statehood birth that I view folks as being colored w/beyond ethnicity.
Jews are a people. Not only a religion.
Our bloodlines count us as belonging to our own- our hearts and minds expand that territory. The best thing about putting us all in boxes is our ability to jump, jump, jump around.
Subotai.
As mentioned, I'm reading "Why The Jews". Prager and Telushkin describe how it goes so far back, to the Persians, Romans....
It's because, they say, Jewish religion and morals challenge others' religion and world views. I can't say I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood because we left before I had a clue. Only thing was the el ed school would take an informal count of how many wouldn't be at school for the next Jewish holiday and call it a day off if the number were above...whatever. We goyim didn't intend to be at school either, so we would raise our hands.
But. A neighbor whose son was my age...maybe eight...thought we should be exposed to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. We thought the guy in the swallowtail coat jumping around in front of all those guys with instruments was hilarious. So it was premature on the part of our neighbor, but....he didn't take us to a Tigers game.
So far, reading Prager and Telushkin on all the issues of Judaism, I keep thinking, who the hell would care enough to be annoyed?
Not Getting It. Although they seem to be anticipating Sowell's "Are The Jews Unique" in talking about the "minority middleman" as being insufficient.
In pre-Norman Conquest England they spoke of the "Saxons" and "Danes" (Vikings in today's language) as two different "races." Granted that English words have changed over a thousand years, but to them the differences between the two groups were great enough to provide a racial distinction.
In current usage "race" sometimes refers to physical ethnic differences (skin color, hair color, curly or straight hair, etc), other times to tribal affiliations.
And sometimes it is just a hustle.
[A] recent paper in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association [argues that]... Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition... [that] renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse...
Written by Donald Moss, an extremely pale White San Francisco doctor.
If Whiteness is all that, what can one say of the belief that one has escaped Whiteness?
Is that not a delusion of its own?
Long Form Andrew Sullivan > Daily Dish Andrew Sullivan.
And it’s not close. The guy is a genius when he takes the time to really think things through.
For much of the Islamic and Christian worlds, charging internet on loans was forbidden. For Jews, however, the Torah only forbit charging interest between Jews (and kinda excluded business loans from personal loans to the poor).
So, Jews could lend money at interest to anyone and remain devout. Christians and Muslims could not.
Every society needs a structure to loaning capital. In this respect, Jews could educate themselves on finances where it made no sense for Christian and Muslims to do the same. Of course, this sort of STEM education also positions people advance in other fields.
Of course, while a mortgage company allows us to live in a house we don’t fully own, we still resent, at some level, the mortgage company. If one group of people is always advancing and the people around can’t understand why, the reason defaults to evil. “They’re evil and that’s why they have all the money,” becomes the default response.
We can’t imagine that 6000 years of engraining and perpetuating a need for education might pay off in success. Then, people come to America where there is tremendous social mobility and their wealth explodes. This has happened with Jews. It’s happened with Hans, Koreans, Japanese, and other groups who have thousands of years of stressing education. We’re attributing racism to results that are created by culture.
Critical Whiteness Studies and the “Jewish Problem” (hat tip, Ace) goes into considerable, academic, depth regarding this:
Abstract: The “whiteness” of Jews has recently become a popular topic both in public debates and in academic research (Critical Whiteness Studies). Within this discourse, “whiteness” is used as a critical concept denoting those who enjoy white privilege in American and other Western societies. However, attributing “whiteness” to Jews is more than controversial, for it assimilates the most persecuted minority in European history to the dominant majority, while downgrading the significance of antisemitism. This is a necessary move in order to reaffirm and critically address the fundamental nature of the black and white divide; however, it is questionable both methodologically and politically.
Reading it will take 45 minutes out of your day, but it's worth it.
What @Temujin said.
Tom. Wrt your last sentence. Sort of. Jews, kind or mean, rich or poor, don't catch a break. So it's racism assigned to a race due to....the differences between minority and majority successes.
One thing in Sullivan's excellent piece worth correcting. Citing another article's reference to the concept of "conditional whiteness," he refers to "California’s proposed mandatory class in critical race theory."
What he (and the other article) refers to is in fact California's now by law Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. It is a framework meant to guide the imposition of ethnic studies courses and ethnic studies concepts throughout the k-12 curriculum. It is not one limited course on critical race theory, though CRT is the heart and soul of the entire framework. And it is not simply proposed. It is now the law of the land. Its concept of "conditional whiteness" is applied, among other places, in one lesson on Jews. Since "whiteness" throughout the Framework is in essence the central source of oppression, Jews are made "conditional" oppressors. The lesson obscures what this means, but it's clear enough. Why "conditional"? Because you have to be white-looking (Ashkenazi, I guess), and a larger dose of Melanin will redeem you of the taint. But make no mistake, the bogus terminology enshrines an ages old anti-Semitic myth, that Jews are a hidden power (conditional if you like), only seemingly marginalized but in fact in charge. And this in a framework that pretends it has purged itself of the truly awful anti-Semitic stuff in the earlier versions.
“Hitler's problem with Jews was that they were cunning and weakened the nation, which put a negative spin on being smart.”
Which is why we got their best and brightest. In alternate histories one frequent question is what if Hitler had gotten nuclear weapons. The first point is that that didn’t have the infrastructure for more than one, and even that was problematic. And if they had built the infrastructure to enhance uranium, we would have bombed it. But as important, their really smart nuclear physicists were almost all Jewish, and as a result, fled their country to ours, where they forced the core of our Manhattan Project.
Wait, what? Hating white people is anti-semitic? I guess we'll have to do something about that. Maybe the Jews could be granted honorary Blackness? I'm afraid they're going to have to knock off the "acting white", though.
"I think their problem for a long time was being considered foreign in whatever society they were in, no matter how deep their roots."
It was frequently the case in European nations during the last 500 years or so, that the nobility were socially alienated from the populace, and felt no kinship with them. They formed alliances and marriages with the nobility of other nations, not with the natives of their own. It was commonplace for the urbanized Jews to manage the exploitation of the native commoners for these nobles, extracting money from the peasants who lived on the land. The Jewish authorities were allowed to administer their own laws within the Jewish community, maintaining the separation between Jews and the native population. When relations between nobles and the native populace improved, typically by the ascent to the throne of native rulers, they often expelled the Jews en masse, regarding them as a parasitic element. This had the further advantage of eliminating the large debts that the nobles often owed them.
After posting my comment on the California Ethnic Studies Framework's concept of "conditional whiteness," as applied to the Jews, I went back to look at what Temujin said, which overlaps with my point a good bit, I think. For instance:
"So, yeah. We're white, which is to say we're 'accepted', when it's convenient for a particular society to have us around. When we become inconvenient- and it'll happen again- we'll be seeing the same tired old bullshit coming back."
This is pretty exactly what the CA ES Framework conveys by its bizarre notion of Jews gaining "conditional whiteness." It is, they make clear, the white-skinned who get this, but also the "assimilated" Jews who are nice enough to blend in with the other oppressive white people. But the logic of the Framework is that this means they, too, are conditionally oppressors, and as such it implies (but won't put it that way) not in a secure place as oppressors. The first to go, come the revolution, I suppose. Like Temujin, I used to think I was above all that. Starting with the rise of leftwing variants of Jew hatred in Ameridca, I began to change my view. (In America one cannot really take the rightwing KKK types all that seriously anymore.) Now, I understand full well why my mother was president of the local chapter of Haddasah in the late 40s early 50s, and why we had those little blue tins to help BUY (yes buy, not steal) land in Israel. An insurance policy that one increasingly realizes may need to be used one of these days.
@Jupiter Your history is a little off (expulsions took place long before the 18th century) as well as the idea that the expulsions were the result of an improvement of the relationship between nobles and the native populations. More often nobles used the Jews as a target and a scapegoat for the dissatisfaction and anger the native populations had towards their rulers. You are correct as far as the expulsions benefiting the nobles as a quick and easy way to eliminate their debts; especially if they had borrowed funds to finance wars, lost the conflicts, and were unable to repay.
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