These days when people list the various forms of hatred that must be eradicated, they include racism, sexism, anti-Asian bias, homophobia, and transphobia but too often they leave antisemitism off the list. Why is that? One reason is that many people view Jews as wealthy whites with “privilege.”
The very failure to acknowledge antisemitism as a persistent problem in urgent need of attention is a itself an indication of just how widespread and accepted the world’s oldest hatred is. Furthermore, labeling Jews monolithically as “privileged whites” is reductive and, often, flat-out wrong. Sociologists estimate that more than 20% of American Jews are persons of color. The percentage in Israel is much higher, taking into account the millions of Jews who come from places like Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, India, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco. Moreover, it is entirely possible for someone to enjoy “privilege” and at the same time be a victim of antisemitism. Hundreds of thousands of highly assimilated, wealthy Jews in places like Germany, France, Hungary, and Austria were murdered by the Nazis.
There might be another more obvious reason for this routine failure to include antisemitism on the list of prejudices that must be eradicated. As Deborah Lipstadt writes in her recent book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, “anyone who minimizes [the] intent or impact [of acts of antisemitism] is either willfully ignorant of history or antisemitic himself.”
We cannot allow the fight against injustice and xenophobia to become a zero-sum game. As the blogger and activist Hen Mazzig, an Israeli descendent of Jews from North Africa and Iraq and founder of the #JewishPrivilege movement which shares stories of how individuals have been affected by antisemitism, wrote in a post in his widely read Instagram account: “Fighting antisemitism does not take away from any other social movement.”
We can and should expect our friends and all people of good conscience to be anti-racists, feminists, supporters of full rights and inclusion for LGBTQ+ persons and, at the same time and with equal passion and commitment, we can and should expect that our allies will join us in calling out and decrying antisemitism whenever and wherever they see it.
— Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback
