Today’s presidential announcement by Rand Paul—a polarizing figure because of his father’s track record of anti-Semitism and his own record of Mideast Isolationism (which he is trying to live down)—brought out from the wood work the usual Israel and Jew haters. The Internet teems with it, but there are of course limits about what can be said on network or cable television.
Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball pushed the edge of the envelope by lauding (Rand) Paul for “having the guts to take on” the “neo-cons and the piggish money behind them right now.” Of course to Matthews, support for Israel is the crux of sin of “neo-cons”guilty of “running right-wing ads on our network. They’re front groups — they’re hawkish, right-wing front groups.” What about “piggish money”? Matthews tries to immunize himself from the embarrassing implication of his choice of words by saying that “piggish money is the terms we used in the 1960s for hawks.” Does Matthews know that “Hoggenheimer” was once a favorite stage name for cruelly satirizing Jewish characters? Of course, everybody knows what Matthews really means to do: smear Jews whose politics he doesn’t like without using the word “Jew.”
Then there’s Phoebe Maltz Bovy in a piece in the New Republic entitled, “The Holocaust Doesn’t Discount Jewish White Privilege Today?” (the question mark was added as an afterthought) that berates Taffy Brodesser-Akner, writing in the Tablet, for defending Holocaust survivors and their families against charges that they are guilty of “white privilege.” According to Bovy—who condemns conservative Jews for allegedly using Holocaust guilt to protect Benjamin Netanyahu: “It’s entirely possible for a Jew whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust to benefit from certain aspects of (for lack of a better term) white privilege. That the Nazis wouldn’t have considered you white doesn’t mean that store clerks, taxi drivers, prospective employers, and others in the contemporary United States won’t accord you the unearned advantages white people, Jewish and otherwise, enjoy. That your ancestors were victims of genocide in a different place and at a different time doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the victimizing caste in your own society, any more than having had impoverished forbears means that you can’t have been born into money. (Not, to be clear, that all Jews are!)”
To some degree, this argument is a sociological truism that doesn’t get us very far. Of course, contemporary Jews who never experienced the poverty of Clifford Odets’ characters during the 1930s are in a “privileged” position vis-à-vis African Americans or at least those still enmired in the underclass. But it doesn’t apply very well, at least in terms of my experience, to the Survivor families. Maybe my own experience is atypical (and I admit there are some prominent exceptions), but Holocaust survivors I know arrived in the U.S. with nothing or nearly nothing and without the benefits of extended family networks (their extended families were extinct) or good American connections. Their children, too, grew up in families of modest means before their parents made it, to a lesser or greater degree. Today may be another matter, but their family chronicles are of the “rags to riches” variety rather than that of members of a “victimizing caste.”
Historically—that is going further back—the white privilege argument has been used to argue that American Jews have always enjoyed an unfair advantage over African Americans. I know this because my down Ph.D. thesis, a “deep history” of Black-Jewish relations before 1900, has sometimes been cited to show how “white privilege” benefited successive waves of Jewish immigrants compared to the African Americans, slave and free, who were already here. I don’t use the term “white privilege,” and still prefer to use the straight out term “racism” against African Americans for the accumulation of socio-economic and ethnic privilege that disadvantaged blacks compared to whites including Jews (though there were heated debates up through the 1920s about whether Jews were “really white”). But I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
My problem is not with an application of “the white privilege” argument to Black-Jewish relations, provided it is applied intelligently, with nuance, and with a recognition that, from the Civil War until after World War II, anti-Semitism was more than a literary phenomenon: it was a real force limiting Jewish life chances in the U.S. My real problem is the recent phenomenon of the heavy-handed use of the “white privilege” bludgeon as another way to shame into silence American Jewish defenders of Israel on implicit grounds that they are guilty of “privilege” here at home—and should therefore shut up when Israelis are at risk of another genocide.
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