Gil Steinlauf is the senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. He writes:
Adapted from a Rosh Hashanah sermon delivered at Adas Israel Congregation.
This summer, I had a conversation with a young woman about her Jewish identity. She told me how she grew up in a family that was very involved in her synagogue. She went to Jewish day school. She had been to Israel multiple times. But she felt very far from her Jewishness. She simply couldn’t find the relevance of Judaism as she was making her way on her own in the world. I asked her what she did feel passionate about. She told me she has been reading and thinking a lot about racial justice. What moved her was the #BlackLivesMatter movement — how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity.
“As a white woman,” she said, “as the product of so much white privilege, it makes me all the more angry to see how other white people so blindly and carelessly feed into the racial climate of our society.” “So the fact that you are white makes this issue all the more painful, all the more personal for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.
I certainly identified with her angst. I find the reality of American racism unbearable: the legacy of slavery; the institutional discrimination that is so pervasive; the scourge of mass incarceration of black Americans, with its collateral damage on families; the ongoing blight of housing segregation; the role of law enforcement in furthering racist systems and hierarchies; all this, and so much more. My answer to her, and my answer for all American Jews during these Days of Awe, is that finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness.
In a flawed and racist society, we Jewish Americans are prospering, reaching the top echelons of privilege and power. With racism and injustice entrenched year after year, generation after generation, we must now ask ourselves: What role do we play in that injustice now that most of us live as white people in America? We must cease to consider ourselves to be part of the social construct of whiteness, despite all the white privilege that America affords us, privilege that eluded many of our parents and grandparents. Starting in this new year of 5776, we must teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.
The great blessing and promise of America to our ancestors was that it was a land of opportunity, where we are all recognized as equal, where nothing, not even the heavens, is beyond our reach. We all know that the saga of Jews in America is a stunning success story. Our success here is built on the efforts of the first generations of American Jews who struggled mightily to assimilate — to slough off the ways of the old country, to out-American the Americans. In many ways, today it’s difficult for us to appreciate how remarkable this success is.
Well into the 20th century, we Jews were barred from the whitest country clubs. We couldn’t buy houses in the whitest neighborhoods. Even today, some of us remember being called anti-Semitic names, having pennies thrown at us or being beaten up because we are Jewish. But that young woman I spoke with this summer, and most of her young adult Jewish peers today, can hardly fathom being singled out, being treated as “other,” because of their Jewishness. And the main reason why anti-Semitism is no longer mainstream in our society is because sometime in the last half century, we convinced America that we, too, are white.
All those years of singular focus on making it in America paid off! Our achievements in business, in medicine, in the arts, in government, in all circles of American life have resulted in success and security rarely known to our wandering ancestors. The history of my own synagogue in D.C., Adas Israel Congregation, mirrors the history of Jews in our country. Over a century ago, its founders dreamed of one day building what they referred to as a “great Cathedral synagogue” standing tall and proud in our nation’s capital, as powerful as the great American monuments of this city. By this spring, the president of the United States was visiting their congregation to give a speech and visit with preschool kids.
These days, the country clubs and exclusive neighborhoods are as Jewish as they are WASPy. Indeed, we Jewish people have been building a great, shining American tower, and we have just about reached the highest heavens. But in our own century, we are waking up to the fact that our astounding success in America is a Pyrrhic victory. Our own children and grandchildren, raised as white American children of privilege, have completely forgotten who built their place in society, or why their well-meaning ancestors so passionately endeavored to build it. Many no longer value their essential Jewishness in their worldviews or life plans. For most, the success built by American Jews is indistinguishable from general American white, privileged success. That young woman was right in noticing that most white Americans — Jewish, WASP or otherwise — can’t or don’t fully notice how people of color are trapped by racist structures of power. They can’t even identify how racism infuses all aspects of our lives, our choices and our expectations of themselves and others, despite good intentions.
You might think I’m not being entirely fair. Yes, most of us and our children are a part of white America now. But we know plenty of young Jewish Americans who are very proudly Jewish. Many are devoted to Israel, devoted to good causes; they fight racism and other injustices. But if we are going to take our American-ness and our Jewishness seriously, we must own all the ways that we have benefited from and continue to benefit from the worst elements of American racist culture.
I write about racism and Jewish identity not because we are not good people. I write about this because in recognizing race as central in American Jewish identity, we cannot only more effectively use our success in this country for good purposes, but we can return truly to the essence of what being Jewish in the world really means.
Our people have been known by many names over the centuries. Once, we were called Hebrews. In Hebrew, the word is “Ivri,” which translates as “the other” or “from somewhere else.” We were also called “B’nai Yisrael,” the Children of Israel. Yisra’el literally means “struggling with God.” We are to be the ones who struggle with ultimate issues of life, of values, of justice. Through the centuries, our moments of power have been all too fleeting. Mostly, our hope has been to be tolerated. From our place at the periphery, we have responded always with the ability to critique injustice, to adopt the cause of the oppressed, to envision a better and more just world. Even in times when we participated fully in non-Jewish societies, we always knew that we stood with one foot in the mainstream, and one foot outside.
America is unique in Jewish history because the social construct of power and oppression in this society came to be based more on skin color than on religion or ethnic identity. Because of that, along with the best of American values and our own hard work, we now find ourselves as another privileged white ethnicity. Despite our only good intentions, we are — all of us — full participants and beneficiaries of the American evil known as racism.
Jews will identify as white when it is to their advantage to do so. People respond to incentives. In America today, it helps to not identify as white. The core of America (whites) is under assault from the coalition of the fringe (blacks, Muslims, latinos, homos, trannies, Jews, etc). So Jews identify as an oppressed people of color.
In the South prior to the 1960s, Jews generally identified as white to fit in better.
If immigration to America was limited to whites, Jews who wanted to immigrate would argue that they were white.
The rabbi does not mention the negative attitude of the Jewish tradition toward blacks and how blacks in Israel have similar problems to blacks in America.
From the black website The Root:
A few days into an educational trip to Israel in 1991 shortly after the mass airlift of Ethiopian Jews into the country, my jaw dropped when a Jewish official casually described the arrival of the Ethiopians as an opportunity to beef up Israel’s Olympic running team.
More than two decades later, and it appears that probably didn’t work out. Israel now seems more anxious to give its sizable black African migrant population the boot. At the moment, the focus is much less on settled-in Ethiopian Jews and more so on Sudanese, Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians fleeing war, persecution and poverty at home. And, naturally, if you’re a poor African migrant looking for work, you’re headed to Israel, a top 40 country in terms of gross domestic product and the closest, most powerful, democratic, free market economy you can find within regional distance.
But now, turn back: because if you’re a black undocumented migrant, Israel is giving you 30 days to get gone. In a bid to put a humane face on it, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is putting money where its racially charged mouth is. An estimated 45,000 Eritrean and Sudanese refugees not only get a free, no-return ticket back home (or to some “unnamed” African nation) but also get sent with $3,500 in their pocket.
…The situation in Israel also appears equally complicated and racially challenged. Plans to push African migrants out of the Holy Land had been stirring for some time as Israel built new fences and detention centers along its southern borders. Netanyahu’s government claims it’s all about keeping black migrants safe from deadly desert crossings. But the U.N. refugee agency pushed back on that, accusing Israel of “creat[ing] fear and chaos amongst asylum seekers” and dangerously teetering on the edge of an international refugee-treaty violation…
Recent #BlackLivesMatter-style protests organized by Ethiopians in Tel Aviv underscore an embarrassing undercurrent of discrimination in a society popularly viewed as Jewish but racially as majority white. And with that comes familiar white-people-prompted problems. Israeli Ethiopians face challenges similar to those of African Americans in the United States: from high unemployment to police brutality and rampant incarceration.
Some critics, like black British filmmaker Ishmahil Blagrove, charge that the Israeli prison system is 90 percent black. Others, like Forward’s Seth Frantzman, point out that Israeli Defense Forces military-prison populations are 40 percent Ethiopian, or “760 percent higher than their proportion in society.” Israel, always in a state of war, mandates compulsory military service from its citizens.
There’s been a troubled history of Israel’s policies toward African migrants, including the treatment of once wildly embraced Ethiopian Jews who arrived by Operation Solomon in the early ’90s fleeing anti-Jewish persecution. Worries mount for Israel as its Jewish majority sweats a fast-growing non-Jewish Arab population and the presence of nearly 100,000 non-Jewish African migrants challenging the stability of the country’s relatively tiny population of 9 million.