(JEWISH GROUP) The Lefts Blind Spot: Anti-Semitism

[Behind the Aegis]

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!



Babe.net describes itself as a website “for girls who don’t give a fuck.” True to form, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville they published a piece titled “We’re not going to fuck you, you Nazi losers,” by Dana Schwartz. “If you’re a 20-year-old pretending to be a Nazi, you’re not a bad boy; you’re a racist virgin so humiliated by his own sexual inadequacy and terrified at rejection that you’ll blame your feelings of weakness on some unseen Liberal Agenda,” she wrote. “First and foremost, the neo-Nazi alt-right movement is about racism. Second, it’s about sexual insecurity.”


Jezebel’s Kelly Stout did not see the essay as an act of criticism or humor by an established journalist, comedian, and young adult author. Instead, in her own essay (let that sink in), she accused Schwartz of being “a white woman who uses a tragedy to promote her brand” and that she “should be embarrassed.” Stout concludes by arguing that “the Nazis in Virginia weren’t really there to protest white women’s right to be alive. And the violence in Virginia does not cry out for a response from sassy white women who know a thing or two about virgins living in their moms’ basements.”

But here’s the catch: Schwartz is a prominent Jewish journalist and an outspoken target of white supremacist harassment. Assuming Stout is aware of the Nazi position on Jewry, and of Schwartz’s identity, it’s ambiguous whether she is arguing that whiteness cancels out Jewishness or whether she hadn’t picked up on Schwartz’s identity beyond “white woman.”

It’s certainly true that structural racism in the U.S. does not primarily target Jews, and to focus only on anti-Semitism would be myopic. But it’s a stretch to say that Jews responding in a personal way to a neo-Nazi rally are centering themselves, and it’s untenable in the context of Charlottesville to discuss white Jews simply as white people in need of etiquette instruction from fellow-progressive. While we should defend groups we’re not part of, we are also part of a group currently under attack.

Progressives in America pride themselves on being hyperaware of the persecution of minority groups of all kinds—blacks, women, LGBT people, immigrants—but they have a blind spot. The left first needs to recognize the very real, immediate threat of anti-Semitism in Trump’s America, and to acknowledge anti-Semitism as its own axis of oppression.

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[JustAnotherGen]

1. Kick and rec

From a very good friend in a Facebook convo - I've never been afraid to be Jewish in America before last Saturday. My poor grandbaby.

We need to own that.