August 31, 2021

When I took the reins of a national umbrella group for Jewish community relations in 2016, disturbing ideological trends were afoot. The events in Ferguson, Missouri had spawned a new activist movement, Black Lives Matter, which took the country by storm. The concept of intersectionality, once relegated to gender studies programs in universities, was gaining currency in the activist community on the left, particularly on certain college campuses. 

Progressive activists began to draw the false equivalency between oppression of black people in America and Palestinians in Israel. At rallies, we saw signs stating “From Palestine to Ferguson,” which were later turned into professionally produced videos that went viral on social media. Groups against sexual violence even endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Jewish students wishing to partake in social justice causes were being asked to check their Zionism at the door. Jewish women with rainbow Jewish flags were thrown out of women’s and gay rights marches.

An ideology that many Jews thought would reduce racism and bigotry is now being weaponized against Jews and propagating antisemitism.

Fast forward five years, and we are witnessing institution after institution falling under the spell of this very ideology, from public and private schools to human service organizations to the legal and medical fields.  An ideology that many Jews thought would reduce racism and bigotry is now being weaponized against Jews and propagating antisemitism. Our primary fight is now not against individual instances of antisemitism but against the imposition of an ideology that produces them. 

Five years ago, many in the Jewish advocacy world correctly predicted that the American Jewish community was at risk of losing the left. We were especially worried that we would be at odds with a young generation of black activists, the linchpin of progressive politics. As go young social justice activists, we posited, perhaps not incorrectly, so goes the larger progressive community. We feared that over the long term these activists would turn the Democratic party into an American version of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. 

We had to engage with these activists, and fast, in order to soften their views toward American Jews and Israel. 

I wrote then, “It should come as no surprise that we have little influence on a movement we are not involved with.” I maintained, however, that Jews need not adopt the extreme ideology exhibited by some in the movement:

It will not be easy integrating the Jewish community into civil rights coalitions, some of which hold very different political sensibilities. Young activists routinely invoke phrases like “white supremacy” to describe America’s prevailing power structure, and this may sound extreme to many mainstream Jews. Rather than feeling obliged to use these terms, however, the Jewish community can develop its own social justice vocabulary and come to the table in its own voice.

I was wrong in one key respect: We could not engage these movements without fully adopting the radical ideologies they espoused. Racial justice activists demanded nothing less than complete acquiescence. Many progressive Jews were only too eager to oblige. These Jewish social justice warriors lectured the Jewish community on our supposed complicity in white supremacy; they organized study groups, like newly-trained missionaries, around “holy books” such as “White Fragility” and “How to be an Antiracist”; they put together racial justice committees in Jewish organizations and synagogues with a distinct ideological mandate; and they readily adopted new concepts of “equity” completely at odds with America’s traditional equality narrative. They came to regard America not as an imperfect union that is striving to live up to its highest ideals, but as white supremacist state, rotten to its core. They went all in.

The underlying ideology has gotten so radical, so ubiquitous and so hostile to Jewish interests, that influencing the movement from within has become virtually impossible.

Some of the more sober progressive Jewish activists, myself included, were hoping to leverage their commitment to the cause of anti-racism to influence thinking about Jews and Israel. How we have failed. The underlying ideology has gotten so radical, so ubiquitous and so hostile to Jewish interests, that influencing the movement from within has become virtually impossible. And in trying, we paradoxically give succor to the very movement that harms us.  

Indeed, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that Critical Social Justice ideology is fueling antisemitism. An ideological framework purportedly used to purge society of racism is actually fanning the flames. Its binary oppressed versus oppressor paradigm marks Jews as the oppressors. 

So let us now understand what we did not previously understand. The Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV.org) recently issued a White Paper, identifying seven ways that the imposition of this ideology spreads antisemitism:

1. The canard of Jewish privilege. Antisemites have always promoted the canard that Jews secretly control the levers of power. CSJ invites such antisemitic imagery by positing a fixed hierarchy of privilege, which legitimizes notions of “Jewish privilege.”  This portrayal of Jews represents Jews as a self-contained cabal or lobby and doesn’t take into account the innumerable differences within the Jewish community.  

2. The erasure of Jewish identity. Daphna Kaufman of Reut coined the term erasive antisemitism for the designation of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe as “white.” This racialization of Jewish identity erases Jewish identity in favor of the CSJ binary of oppressed “person of color” versus “white” oppressor. In this ideological framework, Jews are not afforded the status of a distinct people worthy of self-determination. The erasure of Jewish identity also denies antisemitism its unique quality and historicity by falsely equating it with other forms of bigotry.

3. Intersectionality and Antisemitism.  Intersectionality is the theory that various forms of discrimination interact in ways that create specific and compound problems, constituting an intersecting system of oppression. In other words, groups with “critical consciousness” have a strong incentive to agree with each other on whom to designate as oppressor and oppressed in every system. This ideological framework serves to multiply a false view of “Jewish power” in the U.S. and popularizes a perverse, binary perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
4. The Anti-Israel binary. The binary nature of CSJ ideology seeks to neatly divide human beings into either the oppressor or the oppressed categories while permitting and even encouraging violence against perceived oppressors. This binary extends to Israel, treating Palestinians as the perennial victims and Israel the perennial victimizer. It props up the most simplistic and crude notions of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
5. Marginalizing Jews in politics. While not explicitly antisemitic, CSJ has rendered and may further render many Jews politically homeless. Large majorities of Jews have historically voted for Democrats, yet the growing number of party officials, platforms and policies supporting critical race ideologies stands to alienate a significant segment of American Jewry, especially as the connections between the ideology and antisemitism become more apparent.

6. Jews and Equity. CSJ ideology insists that the only reason there is disparity among racial and ethnic groups is white supremacy. If white supremacy is responsible for some people being held down, then it is also responsible for others being propped up. In this framework, Jews and other economically successful minorities are deemed complicit in or adjacent to white supremacy. 

7. CSJ undermines Enlightenment principles. Jews have long thrived in societies undergirded by Enlightenment principles of rationalism, reason, logic and debate. CSJ is inherently anti-Enlightenment. It serves to delegitimize these principles as manifestations of “white supremacy,” stifle debate and curtail academic freedom. Unmoored from its Enlightenment values, society will become more totalitarian and hostile to Jews. 

We discuss these ideas in greater detail in the White Paper and recommend a series of strategies for opposing it. It’s time for the Jewish community to correct course. 

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David Bernstein is the Founder of Jewish Institute for Liberal Value (JILV.org). Follow him on Twitter @DavidLBernstein. 

A new host of “Jeopardy,” Mike Richards, has been pressured into resigning because he made an inappropriate joke about “Jewish noses” seven years ago. In a time when offensive jokes or comments made even decades ago can cause someone to lose their job, it shouldn’t be surprising that a comment with blatant antisemitic overtones caused such an uproar.

But the question is why there isn’t a similar outcry over an Oregon university president and the Washington, D.C. historian who have made similar remarks. If jokes that call attention to noses in a way that belittles Jews are wrong for Richards, then they should be wrong for everyone else too.

Richards was the newly-crowned host of “Jeopardy” for just a few days when it was revealed that in a podcast seven years ago, he made a comment about a woman’s nose, and then added, “Ixnay on the ose-nay—she’s not an ew-Jay.”

Richards also made offensive comments about women and Haitians, but according to the Washington Post, it was when the Anti-Defamation League publicly called for an investigation—because of the “Jewish noses” remark—that Richards realized he had no choice but to step down.

That’s good news. Too often in recent years, individuals who have publicly made antisemitic remarks have not suffered any consequences.

But there should not be a double standard when it comes to people who make insulting remarks about “Jewish noses.”

But there should not be a double standard when it comes to people who make insulting remarks about “Jewish noses.” It shouldn’t be that some people get away with it, while others are forced to resign.

Dr. Miles K. Davis, for example, is the president of Linfield University in Oregon. An English professor at the university, Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, has filed a lawsuit because Davis fired him after Pollack-Pelzner complained about antisemitic remarks that Davis made to him.

When Pollack-Pelzner first complained, Davis denied he made the remarks—but then he admitted in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education that he had indeed “made a comment about the size of Jewish noses.”

Then there’s the case of Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, a staff historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She tweeted in 2019: “At a talk today, asked about my personal background. I confessed that I’m not Jewish, but with a Hebrew first name, German last name, and my nose and hair, I ‘pass.’”

Does anybody really think that such remarks are funny? How would we respond to such jokes about other ethnic groups’ alleged physical features? 

The truth is that while it is generally accepted as inappropriate to make derogatory comments about the physical features of a racial or ethnic group, when it comes to jokes about Jewish features there is often a double standard.

It’s troubling that there was such an outcry about Richards’ comments, while nobody seems concerned about Davis or Erbelding. Is it because Richards is well-known, and Davis and Erbelding are not? Notoriety shouldn’t be the criteria for how we respond to bigotry.

In fact, one could argue that the Erbelding case is even more severe because the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is funded by the federal government. In other words, American taxpayers are paying the salary of a historian who makes “jokes” about “Jewish noses.” Whatever Erbelding’s intentions, casual comments like this are an embarrassment to the museum and undermine the good work that it does.

Nobody should underestimate the danger of the “Jewish nose” stereotype. The idea that there is a distinctive “Jewish nose” is one of the oldest anti-Jewish myths around. Jew-haters came up with this idea in the 12th century CE as a way to single out Jews for contempt.

In Nazi Germany, government propagandists often invoked the “Jewish nose” stereotype. A notorious 1940 Nazi film called “The Eternal Jew,” for example, claimed to expose the “real” Jew, focusing repeatedly on “Jewish faces,” zooming in on their noses to make Jews seem repulsive.

Similar images appeared frequently in the Hitler regime’s news media, cultural publications and children’s books. “Der Giftpilz,” an anti-Jewish children’s book published by Julius Streicher (who was also the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer), featured a section called “How To Tell A Jew.” It depicted a seventh grade boys’ class in which “Karl Schulz, a small lad in the front row,” stepped up to the chalkboard and proclaimed: “One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose. The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six. We call it the ‘Jewish six.’”

Perpetuating stereotypes such as the “Jewish nose” is not just offensive. It’s also dangerous. Prof. Jonathan Kaplan of the University of Technology-Sydney has pointed out that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Robert Bowers, invoked classic anti-Jewish stereotypes in his online ravings. “How we speak about and depict others in the media and social discourse perpetuates long-held stereotypes and ultimately emboldens hate-filled individuals,” Kaplan wrote.

Those who spread anti-Jewish slurs need to realize that there will be consequences for their offensive actions. Mike Richards of “Jeopardy” now realizes it. But our outrage has to be consistent, and must apply to everyone who perpetuates such ugly stereotypes, not just celebrities.

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Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press. He is based in Philadelphia.