Comments on: Not Just a Right-Wing Smear Tactic

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:59:32 +0000

Here is an article I wrote for Racialicious on how assimilation has affected me personally. On a more general level, though, Jews have given up a lot in order to preserve other aspects of Jewishness. (See The Price of Whiteness and perhaps Coming Out Jewish.) One of the first and most serious things we've given up is the right to express concern about antisemitism. We can talk about the Holocaust, at times, only because it's located clearly in the past. Consider Mearsheimer and Walt. Most Jews think their work is antisemitic. (I do as well, though what I'm saying here isn't based on more than that most Jews do. You don't have to agree.) Yet all I saw in newspapers were editorials written by Jews who began by saying that they weren't antisemites. On Jewish blogs I read, what I saw was "It's not my style to call anyone antisemitic." Jews who speak out against antisemitism --I can only think of Foxman and Dershowitz as Jews who do so regularly-- are quickly labeled shrill neurotics. And they're labeled as using heavy-handed smear tactics. It's a way of excluding Jews from debate when they disagree with others over what constitutes antisemitism. (And it's a tactic we, as anti-racists would never accept so readily with, say, an Al Sharpton.) So, historically, what Jews have done is we've channelled concern about antisemitism into other, often more general, social justice movements with the hope that it would eventually pay off for us. A lot of what we've done in those social justice movements was and is great -- the problem is that we're still, by and large, afraid to address antisemitism. When we do, we rarely take a radical stance, even though many of us are otherwise radicals. I think Rosenblum is aware of this and has made a tactical choice in response to the situation -and I don't want to criticize her for that, just to open up a somewhat different conversation- but she plays into that assimilationist history.

By: Cole Krawitz

Cole Krawitz — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:22:26 +0000

Hey Matt, thanks for the comment. I’m not sure I’m following you though. I’m not clear on what you mean by an assimilationist strategy, but I’d love to know.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:30:07 +0000

“Not *just* a right-wing smear tactic”? I can’t help but compare that kind of attitude to this, which is more typical of anti-racist rhetoric when it isn’t about antisemitism. ‘Using the term “race card” as a pejorative is almost always meant to promulgate the big lie that takes hold everywhere from the workplace to the classroom: that black men and women commonly use race as a bludgeon and an excuse, and that they will always blame failures or disagreements on racism…’ But when it comes to Jews, even the most radical of anti-racist Jews are willing to allow that some or many Jews play the race card time and again. The argument is blunted to “but some of us aren’t like those other Jews.”

I agree with you that Rosenblum’s pamphlet is overall great (and I’m really grateful for the workshop at Bluestickings, which I attended), but my disagreement with her is from the other direction. I agree, for instance, that her essentializing Jews as radicals will ultimately be unhelpful. But rather than viewing it as a version of the “chosen people myth” (and you seem to me too quick to condemn the notion of the chosen people without engaging with the ways that most Jews understand chosenness), I’d note that Jews have too often sublimated concern with antisemitism into more general social movements (socialism, civil rights, the examples are undeniable) as an assimilationist strategy.