Critical Whiteness Studies and the “Jewish Problem”
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.
Interesting introductory quotes:
"Ken and Barbie, those non-biodegradable plastic icons of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, invented by Jewish entrepreneurs..." (Karen Brodkin)
[...] it is the tale of how the Jews, now seen as the ultimate victims of inhumanity, an inhumanity to be answered by the multicultural, are now excluded from the multicultural as too successful, too white, and too Jewish." (Sander L. Gilman)
Intriguing(from pages 87/88)
and the reason for doing so. Why should there be such debates? Furthermore, why does this topic seem to be so popular, and what are its stakes? The "whiteness" of Jews can be approached from two fundamentally opposing points of view, which entail two different meanings of whiteness. And even though the two meanings are linked, their respective usages are very different. The first usage is descriptive or interpretative, whereas the second is critical (these two are summarized with a special emphasis on the first, but not sufficiently distinguished from each other, by Green 2016b).
Another "interesting perspective":
From the first perspective, the question posed is whether Jews are still considered part of the nation, particularly in the American context, in a time when, under the Trump presidency, the Alt-Right has gained significant influence. Is there any risk that antisemitic voices and actions will become legitimate yet again? Can Jews be singled out by antisemitic movements once again as "aliens" corrupting white America? In this perspective, questioning the whiteness of Jews would amount to questioning their integration into U.S. society, while reaffirming it would mean to resist white supremacist antisemitism.
The second view, which is now more important for our purposes, tries to establish that Jews, at least Ashkenazi Jews, constituting the majority of American Jewry, are unquestionably white, as they enjoy a stable place in the white majority. However, it is precisely this stable attribution of "whiteness" that poses a problem, for it reflects an intention to demonstrate that Jews, in spite of their former status as an ethnic and religious minority, have come to occupy powerful and dominant positions in society. For sure, when talk about Jewish whiteness is meant to establish that Jews are part of the oppressive majority, it is a more or less overtly critical way to address the role of Jews, which can be considered a new way of posing the "Jewish problem". For if Jews are white in this sense, they are attributed all the privileges the white majority can enjoy, and are thereby excluded from the multicultural space of other, supposedly dominated, ethnic groups. From this perspective, it is the case that a once oppressed minority has gained acceptance in majority culture and society and thus become part of the dominant and oppressive majority.
Critical scholars should never go full-retard:
As is clear from the hint given here, this kind of image of Jewish whiteness is often further reinforced by the conception of "intersectionality," which posits the interconnected nature of all dominated positions and which thereby links Israel to Jewish whiteness and domination: a firm, if imaginary, relationship is established between the state of Israel and the supposedly dominant role of "white Jews" in the U.S. In this kind of discourse, the U.S. represents an empire of "interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy" (Green 2016a). Thus, Jews can be presented as white dominators in the Middle East, colonizing the autochthonous non-white Arab population. By analogy, the color line is introduced into conflicts which have nothing to do neither with the American race relations, nor with a European type of colonialism.
That is also pretty interesting...
Interestingly enough, this view has equally been echoed and perpetuated recently for example by voices at a national gathering of "Jews of color," reported on sympathetically by the Forward (Gabriel 2016). The participants at this meeting, or at least the majority voices, expressed the intention of tracing the color line even inside the Jewish community, by separating the Ashkenazi Jews, those of "European extraction," from all the others. Ashkenazim are white, therefore privileged, whereas Sephardic and Mizrahi "Jews of color" are oppressed both in the U.S. and Israel, suffering essentially the same lot as the Palestinians. The assertion is not only that the division between white and non-white should be relevant in the interpretation of privilege and domination universally; but more importantly, that these phenomena should be conceived exclusively in terms of color. The antisemitic phenomenon, under its various forms appearing in human history, is completely excluded by this imaginary division of Jewry, as, according to the participants, "anti-Jewish oppression itself replicated an Ashkenazi view of anti-Semitism", and as "our prevailing concept of anti-Semitism is a European construct" (Gabriel 2016). Therefore, by extension, Israel is equated with this kind of Euro-American whiteness:
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