January 25, 2023

Adapted, with permission, Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.

Internalizing Whiteness

Whenever I have to fill out a form that asks me to designate my race and ethnicity, I always experience a momentary identity crisis. I am less than 50 percent European—23andMe has me at 50.4 percent Western Asian, owing to my Iraqi Jewish heritage—but the Asian designation doesn’t feel right either. The limited options of a government questionnaire can’t sum me up, yet woke ideology insists that I check the proverbial “White” box because, it claims, my white passing skin color entitles me to the benefits of a white supremacist society. Woke ideology insists that Jews not only benefit from white domination but also are complicit in it. If you think this sounds like an extreme interpretation, consider that the largest Jewish denomination in the US, the Reform movement, describes its diversity training for Rabbis thusly: “This space is for white clergy and will serve as a white antiracist affinity space. A white antiracist affinity space is one where white people can process their emotions and deepen their understanding around race and racism, without burdening or causing additional harm to People of Color (POC).” The URJ education program was designed to help rabbis “better understand our own identities as white Jews,” “learn how to recognize the invisibility of ‘whiteness’ (including patriarchal, heteronormative, Puritan/Christian values) that have become normalized,” and “understand how to disrupt our daily acts of ‘whiteness’ (behaviors and actions we may perpetuate unknowingly as they have been adapted overtime and deemed ‘the standard’ but may or may not be useful to our efforts towards creating communities of belonging).”

This understanding of white privilege demands that Jews declare ourselves white because the power structure thinks of us that way: we took advantage of the privileges and opportunity whiteness afforded us, so now we must acknowledge and disavow those attendant privileges. By accepting the notion that Jews are white, Jews not only downplay antisemitism (“white people cannot really be victims”), they allow others to define them and impose upon them a pseudo-consciousness, and they denigrate and erase the unique qualities endowed by our heritage and the Jewish condition through the ages. It should be obvious that this self-conception of Jewish whiteness is no way to imbue fealty to Judaism and to the Jewish people in the next generation. It doesn’t take a major feat of imagination to see how this ideological trend will run roughshod over Jewish identity and pride in the future. Few young Jews are likely to feel compelled to sustain a tradition mired in the moral taint of whiteness. The former Israeli politician and writer Einat Wilf called this phenomenon—whereby society, or a specific segment of society, cajoles Jews into giving up some key aspect of their identities in order to be part of “the Community of the Good”—paying “a pound of flesh.”

Teaching Jews to Despise Israel

The Whiteness label is not the only way that wokeness saps Jewish pride. A May 2022 poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that 23 percent of Jewish millennials reported that the anti-Israel climate on their campuses had forced them to hide their Jewish identity, 46 percent said it had not, and 11 percent claimed there was no anti-Israel climate in the US. Additionally, 28 percent said the anti-Israel climate on campus and elsewhere made them rethink their own commitment to Israel, while 54 percent say it did not.

The simplistic oppression narrative has already badly battered the connection many younger Jews feel toward the Jewish state. Imagine installing that same ideological software not just in certain elite colleges, as it is now, but in K–12 education, as proponents of the current anti-Racism pedagogy demand. My children’s public school system in Montgomery County, Maryland is now teaching students to “recognize and resist systems of oppression.” Under such an ideological regime, it will no longer be enough to worry just about how Israel is being portrayed in schools. The school won’t even need to mention Israel for the students to see the country through the binary lens—they will have been conditioned to see everything that way and most assuredly Jews and Israel will not be spared. Unless we put a stop to this damaging pedagogy in schools, it will inevitably take a grim toll on how young American Jews perceive Israel and themselves as Jews.

Dissing the Argumentative Jew

Another way woke ideology hurts Jews is it distorts our culture. Woke ideology aims to end debate on social issues, particularly the argument over why different groups…differ. In the woke world view, systemic oppression is the only acceptable explanation for group differences. I simply cannot fathom why so many progressive Jews are drawn to a political sensibility that is so flagrantly at odds with the large slice of Jewish culture that questions and debates ideas, the one in which many of them surely were raised. Judaism’s entire religious tradition is structured around Makloket: arguments about ethical living.

In “The Eclipse of Jewish Cultural Power,” Touro University professor Thane Rosenbaum addresses woke ideology’s specific impact of the creative Jewish persona: “It isn’t that Jews no longer occupy important positions in American culture, to say nothing of other fields. What’s disappearing from the cultural scene is the Jewish sensibility: its essential broad-mindedness, impish irreverence, openness to difference, and its skill in the art of disagreement…. Today, culture-makers fear being charged with plundering the stories of others, instead of being inspired to tell them. The new woke ground rules are ‘Stay in your lane. Do not fictionalize the experiences of people who are not you. Do not write (or speak) dialogue in their voices. Stop imagining the lives of others.” So when woke ideology silences the creative person or the gadfly, it doesn’t only undercut the free expression of ideas, it is an affront to an important dimension of Jewish identity: our essential character as a people who argue with each other and even, sometimes, with God, as the Biblical name of the Jewish people, “yisra-el,” literally denotes.

Invalidating Immigrant Jewish Narratives

In centering politically progressive narratives, some Jewish groups devalue the narratives of Jews who have come to this country from totalitarian systems such as the Former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Iran, and parts of Latin America. Woke ideology enforced in Jewish settings denigrates the lived experience of these once-oppressed populations. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings undertaken Reform Jewish movement’s trainings in “white affinity” spaces cited above, would strike many immigrant Jews as bizarre and politically extreme, reminiscent, for some, of what they experienced in totalitarian nations of their birth. Ironically, efforts at “inclusion” in the Jewish community offer the most traumatized Jews the least amount of succor. They represent, it seems, the wrong kind of diversity.

Repelling Jewish Conservatives

Jewish political conservatives who participate in mainstream Jewish life have long had to shrug off their politics, at least publicly. But woke hyper-politicization of Jewish life has made such compromises for many increasingly difficult. Jewish spaces can feel like hostile environments for Jews on the center-right, as woke ideology not only politicizes Jewish organizations, but adds a layer of judgment and moral rebuke if they don’t play nice. It has gotten so bad that even political moderates, like myself, feel alienated. A politically progressive nonprofit executive, Jared Feuer recounts the politicization of his beloved Reconstructionist synagogue when a new Rabbi, a known social justice warrior, ascended to the Bima: “The congregation must always be on the side of whomever progressive sentiment declares the oppressed. If a congregant admits they voted for a Republican, voices a divergent perspective, or speaks to concerns about this political orientation, they will be called out as an oppressor. This happened to me when I expressed disappointment about the direction of the rabbi’s d’vars and he tweeted in response: “It’s amazing how much attention the complaint of a single, straight, cis, white man can command.”

In a strangely controversial opinion piece, “Why I Keep Politics Off the Pulpit,” prominent L.A.-based Rabbi, David Wolpe laments, “[A]ll we hear all day long is politics. Can we not come to shul for something different, something deeper? I want to know what my rabbi thinks of Jacob and Rachel, not of Pence and Pelosi.” Rabbi Shai Held responded, “Demanding that politics be kept out of shul is like demanding that Torah be kept out of shul.” And therein lies the problem: some Progressive rabbis—religiously liberal but ideologically orthodox—seem to believe that their political views have been handed down to them directly from Mt. Sinai with the authority of the divine word. As Jewish life—particularly the liberal movements (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist)—has become increasingly ideological, the 25 percent of the Jewish community who vote Republican will become increasingly alienated and grow in numbers.

Shutting Down Discussion of Jewish Continuity

Jews have always debated ways of surviving both the external threat of antisemitism and the internal threat of assimilation.  Of course, we have legitimate differences of opinion among ourselves about how best to strengthen and perpetuate the Jewish people. But now even the idea of Jewish survival and continuity is under attack: a woke wing of the Jewish studies professoriate and community activists want to shut down the whole Jewish continuity enterprise that, they insist, was born in patriarchal sin. In the Journal of American Jewish History, Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, and Ronit Y. Stahl argued that “a Jewish continuity paradigm…treated women and their bodies as data points in service of a particular vision of Jewish communal survival,” and that “American Jewish continuity discourse was embedded within patriarchal and misogynistic structures.” The authors asserted that “telling women who they can and should marry and when and how often they should have children is what we mean by the patriarchal and misogynistic foundations of the continuity paradigm and its apparatus.”

The supposedly ominous “apparatus” that the authors indict is not, however, a totalitarian government forcing people to adhere to some state dogma, or a coercive clergy in a ghettoized community forcing people into submission; rather, it is a set of communal and educational programs such as Birthright Israel, which takes young Jews to Israel in hopes that they’ll fall in love with the Jewish state and each other. The doyens of Brandeis and the American Jewish Committee who advance Jewish continuity never enacted forced fertility programs or put into effect mandated match-making services. In fact, the “continuity experts” that Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl rail against have never enjoyed unparalleled hegemony; multiple points of view have always been entertained at Jewish conferences and meetings and expressed in research by a vast range of scholars representing varied perspectives.

I wonder whether these scholars who argued for Jewish continuity programs are right to be alarmed that integration brings about “an enfeebled Jewish future”; or whether such integration might strengthen the Jewish community and expand its ranks; or whether the Jewish community should use scarce resources to invest in the “core” of Jewish life, or the “periphery,” or all levels equally? One would think these are important questions about which reasonable people might disagree.

These scholars and activists are making it harder for Jewish organizations to identify the policies and strategies that strengthen Jewish life—a prime example of how woke ideology makes it impossible to address real world problems and harms the very people it’s supposedly designed to help—in this case, Jews. If this trend keeps up, we won’t be able to speak openly about how best to build a Jewish future. A ban on all talk of Jewish continuity could be the next ideological straitjacket for Jewish organizations, subverting Jewishness and undermining Jewish pride.

Unchecked over time, woke ideology will impoverish Jewish life by draining it of its most compelling qualities. We may not know the full implications of this for years. I’m not suggesting every woke Jew will become a raging self-hater. Obviously, there are deeply committed Progressive Jews—rabbis and Jewish educators among them. Rather, I’m arguing that, left to its own devices, woke ideology is likely to sap Jewish pride and commitment by demanding that Jews think and behave in ways at odds with authentic and longstanding Jewish sensibilities. Ben M. Freeman put it like this: “The question ultimately is: how can we feel pride in our internal identities when society impulses an external identity upon us that does not relate to the truth of who we are?” We don’t have to go along. As Pamela Paresky put it, “We are not required to play the parts that others have written.”

I remember learning about the notion of absolute truth in high school. I went to a private non-Jewish religious school, and so when we talked about absolute truths it was always against the backdrop of beliefs regarding God and theology. The existence of God, we were told, is an absolute truth. But we were also told that an absolute truth is an inflexible reality. It’s a fact that is fixed and invariable and cannot be altered. 

And no one questioned this. Not one student pushed back because, in such a religious setting, who would dare question the existence of God as an absolute truth?

Jewish tradition, on the other hand, has always prioritized the exercise of questioning everything. It isn’t necessarily transgressive to question even the existence of God in a Jewish space, as long as the tone and intent are honorable. One might even say it’s one of the most Jewish things to do—to ask the difficult questions that push against the grain. The value is in the dialogue that comes out of these challenges.

But now, the climate of that high school classroom has entered the mainstream, yet this time the setting is not a religious classroom or community. It’s an entire country and culture. It’s the United States of America. And Jewish communities, despite their history of prioritizing questions above answers, are not immune to this new climate that discourages diversity of viewpoint and the questioning of certain ideologies.

Given the rise of culture wars and increasingly militant identity politics in the U.S., it’s not surprising that the idea of absolute truth, long a component of religion, is being deployed as a way to control not just the dominant narrative but also the actual behaviors and words of people. If you want to know how to control people, look no further than the history of religion around the world. The Spanish Inquisition, spanning nearly 400 years, might be the most powerful (if extreme) example how religion can be mobilized to gain power and control and squash any kind of dissent or difference. Create a religion, harness its potential power over people, and you now have complete control because no one has the courage to push back. But given the Jewish tradition of honoring debate for the sake of debate, it’s concerning that some Jewish communities have embraced the new absolute truth delivered in the form of “woke” ideologies.

In their most extreme iterations, movements and ideologies can start to sound a lot like religions. David Bernstein, in his new book “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews,” addresses this issue and others. In Bernstein’s words, what is commonly known as “woke ideology” purports “to have the absolute truth about why there’s disparity in the world,” and this is where the problem begins.

American culture has become increasingly less religious. We are more secular these days, perhaps the result of too much cynicism and too little faith. Or perhaps it’s because we have been disappointed by organized religion. But try as we might, we are mostly incapable of abandoning paths that lead to dogma and ideology. We crave it. We long for the ease of reading from a script that someone else has written, a script that confirms our moral standing when we read from it. Classical liberalism, which values equality and civil liberties, may have filled this longing for a while. Think about political liberals, who in recent American history have been on the forefront of battles for civil rights, who have waged relentless wars against discrimination and fought for equality. What used to be seen as religious or moral ideals became liberal ideas. The perk was that one didn’t need to be religious to embrace these values. And for a while, it was enough. 

But history shows us that there will always be extremists who rise up to convince us not only that their way is better, but also that their way is the only way.

Why is this a problem? Because, as Bernstein points out, claiming directly or indirectly to have the absolute truth about something implies that there is no room for conversation; it “overrides the need for societal debate” about some of the most urgent matters of our time. While “woke ideology,” or “successor ideology” as Wesley Yang calls it, may claim to be a “successor to liberalism,” the truth is that in the “name of justice” it has hijacked liberalism for its own political agenda. Bernstein writes: “The problem I identify in this book arises because woke ideology crowds out all alternative explanations and theoretical frameworks, thereby establishing itself as the one and only explanation for society’s problems. In so doing, it shuts down liberal discourse and empowers radical voices.”

One problem is that many of today’s progressives believe they know the answer—not one of the answers, but the answer. They have not one shred of doubt when it comes to their reading of justice and equality. I refer often to a novel by American Jewish novelist E.L. Doctorow called “City of God” (2000) in discussions about this topic. It isn’t Doctorow’s most famous novel, but I think it may be his most important for one reason in particular, which connects directly to the problems addressed in Bernstein’s book. In the story, one character, a Reconstructionist rabbi, reflects on the importance of doubt in culture, society and religion, calling it the “great civilizer.” Doubt forces inquiry and analysis. It compels us to seek answers, to engage in a process that we hope will lead us to truth. In the case of Doctorow’s fictional rabbi, doubt is what directs us to a more profound understanding of who or what God is; it reveals to us a deeper knowledge of the nature of religion and theology. Theological uncertainty, then, is the answer rather than the question.

It was a concept that clearly captivated Doctorow, who wrote about it again, using the same phrase, in “Reporting the Universe” four years later:

In the course of my own life I have observed that the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers of whatever stamp, religious or religious statist, have done the murdering.

But when we talk about the importance of doubt, it’s not just about religion and theology. Doubt is not important only to religious discussions and inquiries. Doubt, the “great civilizer,” is a necessary component of all authentic ideological discourse. Even scientific inquiry—and science, remember, is in part about uncovering indisputable facts—must contain an element of doubt. Without doubt there are no questions. A hypothesis is just a hypothesis until it is proven. And even when it is proven, it doesn’t always mean that an indisputable fact has been uncovered. When one proposes an explanation for a phenomenon, it must be tested. If the proposed explanation of the phenomenon is confirmed, we have an answer. But what happens if we change a sample size or the environment in which the test was done? What happens if we examine the results differently? Perhaps we arrive at a different explanation, another answer. Without doubt, skepticism, and questions even about what we believe to be true, there is no scientific advancement.

A lack of doubt, replaced by a fixed certainty, is one of the most telling features of the twenty-first century. But nowhere is it more pronounced than in the woke ideology that Bernstein identifies as having taken root in American culture. His book gives us a glimpse into what happens to cultures that replace doubt and the inclination to question and debate (as we do in the Jewish tradition) with adamant certainty.

It goes without saying (and Bernstein points this out) that such an impulse is completely anti-Jewish—this insistence that there is no room for questioning or skepticism, this doggedness when it comes to the “woke” belief that people can only be divided into two categories: oppressor or oppressed. When did people become so simple, so unable to appreciate nuance and gray areas? The ability to function in complexity is one of the traits that make us human. When did we stop being human? More importantly, given that this impulse has taken hold in some Jewish communities, when did Jews stop being Jews?

While the absence of doubt in progressive and woke ideologies is a strong undercurrent of Bernstein’s book, the most important thread is how this phenomenon damages Jewish communities, “undercuts free discourse” and ultimately “foments antisemitism.” 

While the absence of doubt in progressive and woke ideologies is a strong undercurrent of Bernstein’s book, the most important thread is how this phenomenon damages Jewish communities, “undercuts free discourse” and ultimately “foments antisemitism.” It has taken deep root in many of our cherished progressive and liberal institutions (including the ACLU, according to Bernstein), and it’s impossible to avoid. “It insinuates itself into institutions and changes their values and culture, often without ever firing a shot, mostly because those who oppose the ideology never bother to resist.” 

Bernstein traces the rise of woke ideology and its infiltration into American Jewish spaces from the beginning. It’s a quick and engaging read because he grounds his argument in personal stories and carefully shows us the progression of woke ideologies. None of this happened over night. It happened right in front of our eyes. Even those of us who have already heeded the alarm when it comes to the danger of these ideas may not realize that they didn’t begin with the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Bernstein shows us that they were there all along, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, percolating on college campuses and popping up in political spaces. In the late 1990s they would emerge in corporate spaces as well. But most of us weren’t paying attention.

One early example that Bernstein describes is when he was accepted into Leadership Washington, “a cohort of business, government and nonprofit leaders who spent a year studying regional challenges and thinking through how to address them,” in 1998. He writes:

There were about forty of us in the program. Three days were devoted to “Multiculturalism”—what today would be called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or “DEI.” I was excited. Multicultural programs were right up my alley. I soon realized, however, this was a totally different approach to diversity. John Butler—the program chair and the head of a Catholic high school in Washington—opened the program, stating that “racism equals prejudice plus power.” I had never heard that formulation before. “I think racism is hatred toward other races, and don’t think power, whatever that is, has anything to do with it,” I told Butler after the meeting. “You can disagree all you want but that’s what racism is,” he said. I wondered who gave him the final word on the matter. Such insistence on being right was hard for me to stomach; this was a demand for acquiescence. 

It wasn’t Butler’s opinion that Bernstein found so offensive. It was his insistence that there was no room for competing opinions, no space for dialogue or debate, that was unconscionable. Flash forward years later, and Bernstein shows us that organizations including the ACLU have also devolved into a similar acquiescence. And it’s that “very slouch to ideological acquiescence” that Bernstein fears is transpiring in the Jewish world today, “much of which is also abandoning its core principles.” His wording here is prescient and precise, and the allusion to William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” is purposeful. Will the center hold? Will things fall apart? If “ideological acquiescence” is the beast toward which we’ve been slouching, how can we stop this path to catastrophe? 

It’s common these days for well-meaning people to read a book or two about which they become passionate and then quickly become an “authority” on the matter. But Bernstein is not such a person. He is extremely well-equipped and more entitled to speak about this issue than most people writing about it. His work in the leadership of American Jewish Committee (AJC), the David Project, an organization dedicated to educating and training Jewish college and high school students to advocate for Israel, and Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) among other positions gives him special insight into how woke ideologies have been growing in Jewish spaces for many years now.

Woke ideology “alienates from Jewish institutions many Jews with divergent political attitudes, by treating their views as bigotry or by otherwise insisting that their politics are beyond the pale. 

Some may wonder why the inclusion of woke ideologies in Jewish spaces is such a bad thing. Isn’t it just another perspective, one that deserves a seat at the table of Jewish opinions? But it’s a moot question given that this perspective disallows the possibility of others. Beyond that, it “short-circuits the deliberative process in Jewish organizations by making it impossible to discuss sensitive topics: among other issues, woke ideology makes identifying problems and solutions to declining Jewish affiliation more difficult, by insisting that such efforts are prejudicial and misogynistic.” Woke ideology “alienates from Jewish institutions many Jews with divergent political attitudes, by treating their views as bigotry or by otherwise insisting that their politics are beyond the pale. And woke ideology inflames both anti-Israelism and antisemitism by spreading dogma that empowers extremists and antisemites.”

In other words, woke ideology makes Jewish spaces less Jewish and less safe. And, Bernstein argues, “if we remain where we are today … we will enable more and more hostility toward Jews.” 

For Bernstein, debating “for the sake of heaven, which is central to [his] identity as a Jew, is worth protecting and nurturing.” He sees this tradition as “being threatened by people who think they have all the answers. For woke ideologues, all debate over social issues is over and everyone should fall in line with the prescribed dogma. And … that dogma begets ever more extreme forms of dogma.” Many of the tenets of woke ideology are “irrational,” and the more we defer to them, “the more extreme and more dangerous those beliefs become over time.” It’s not unlike religious extremism. Those who embrace these ideologies are not as secular as they claim to be.

In the fall of 2016 at a meeting of BLM and Black Jews, Bernstein witnessed the religion of woke ideology for himself: “At the end of the meeting, one of the organizers drew the Black participants into a circle. She preached, ‘I was blind but now I am Woke.’ The participants repeated the chant and loudly proclaimed AMEN.” Bernstein admits to always having been “moved by the spiritual fervor of the Black church. Through gospels, hymns, and professions of faith, churchgoers experience a deep, authentic connection to the divine spirit that I could not access.” But this moment was different for him, and was prescient in many ways. Seeing the very same “fervor” emerge during what was billed as a political program “confused” him, “until [he] realized that the call to be woke was, in fact, a profession of faith.” Bernstein concludes: “I felt like I was witnessing a religious revival in service of a new spiritual, political and social movement”—a new absolute truth.

Those who see these ideologies as simply part of a social movement to fight and end racism may mean well, but they are wrong, and it’s a mistake that will have troubling consequences for everyone, but especially Jewish communities. It’s a movement that “has its own internal logic, its own vocabulary, its own history, philosophy, and conception of morality and law. And, like all religions, woke ideology embodies a dogma that rebukes all challenges.”

In Judaism and Jewish life, challenges must not be rebuked. They must be welcomed. Ideologies that demand our complete acquiescence are not social justice. 

In Judaism and Jewish life, challenges must not be rebuked. They must be welcomed. Ideologies that demand our complete acquiescence are not social justice. They are designed to divide and conquer, to dismantle the very structure of dialogue and debate that has played a part in keeping the Jewish community intact for centuries. We know that white supremacy is a problem for Jews. Never would we consider allowing it into our institutions and synagogues. But pretending that this is the only source of antisemitism is a farce. As Bernstein says, “those concerned about the resurgence of antisemitism today largely fail to understand and name the animating ideology, one that most assuredly inflames left-wing antisemitism.” 

Are we willing to name it, or will we continue to acquiesce? 

For an excerpt from the book, click here.