Sedan den 7 oktober har ett nytt intresse för vithetsstudier väckts, i huvudsak från människor som famlar efter en teoretisk ram för att förstå kriget i Mellan Östern och de konfliktlinjer som står emot varandra. I en sådan analys översätts vanligtvis judar till vita och araber till offer för orientalism.
En artikel som jag vill rekommendera i frågan om judars vithet är David Schraubs intersektionella analys av judar och vithet. Artikeln är publicerad i The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies och länken finns längre ned i texten:
White Jews: An Intersectional Approach
Abstract
“Intersectionality,” a concept coined and developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how our various identities change in meaning and valence when placed in dynamic relation with one another. Instead of exploring identity traits like “race,” “gender,” “religion,” and so on in isolation, an intersectional approach asks what these various characteristics “do” to one another in combination. I suggest that an intersectional approach—asking “what does Whiteness do to Jewishness?”—can help illuminate elements of the Jewish experience that would otherwise remain obscure. The core claim is that Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. What Whiteness “does” to Jewishness is act as an accelerant for certain forms of antisemitic marginalization even as it ratifies a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community. Absent an intersectional vantage, many political projects and controversies surrounding Jewish equality will be systematically misunderstood.
The subject of this essay is, as one might expect, White Jews. By that term, I mean to evoke two different conceptions that are clearly related but distinct in important ways. First, there is the matter of particular persons who, but for their Jewishness, would be (in the American context) unambiguously White. We might simply call those persons White, or we might say they are conditionally White, off-White, functionally White, or “White but not quite.” The intersection of Jewishness and race has a long and fraught history over several dimensions; there were and remain significant questions regarding whether Jews (at least those of proximate northern European descent) should be considered “White.” Conditional Whiteness may be the most comprehensive describer: an American Jew whose grandparents immigrated from Austria might unambiguously benefit from White privilege when passing a highway patrol car, but not enjoy it in any way whatsoever when White supremacists are looking for a target to harass. Nonetheless, I do not wish to be hung up on the precise nomenclature. Suffice to say, there are many Jews whose ancestry proximately traces to European countries, whose status as White in America would be relatively uncontroversial save for whatever complications are posed by their Jewishness. For simplicity’s sake we can refer to these Jews as “White Jews.”
But, of course, not all Jews fit this description. There are Jews whose ancestry is not European: Sephardic Jews from Turkey or Latin America, Mizrahi Jews from Iraq or Tunisia, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, African American Jews, and others. Yet, in most conversations or discourses that purport to be about “Jews,” the archetypical Jew that is imagined as the subject of discussion does not look like those Jews and does not include their history. What counts as a “Jewish problem” or a “Jewish experience” or a “Jewish history” is often in fact particular and partial to the specific problems and experiences of the Jews described in the first paragraph: the White Jews. The merger of Jewishness into Whiteness places non-White Jews in a double bind—“split at the root,” to use Adrienne Rich’s evocative phrase. On the one hand, the discrete experiences, problems, or histories of non-White Jews will not be recognized as Jewish insofar as they are non-White (since Jewishness is understood as a White experience). And on the other, insofar as these experiences, problems, or histories are recognized as Jewish, then they will cease to be acknowledged as non-White (since, again, Jewishness is understood as a White experience).
Hence, the second conception meant to be evoked by “White Jews” is the vision of the Jew as White in the public imaginary. Even granting all of the qualifications present in the preceding paragraphs, the figure of the Jew is currently imagined as White—certainly in the Anglo-American world, and perhaps globally as well. The prototypical Jew is someone whose ancestors lived in Europe; if they did not remain there it is because they moved at some point to America or Israel due to some type of European oppression—Russian pogroms, the Nazi Holocaust, the Dreyfus affair, and so on. Jews who do not fit this narrative are often not acknowledged. Even where they are, their image is not the one that is initially evoked when people (very much including those in the overwhelmingly Ashkenazic and generally pale-skinned American Jewish community) talk about Jews. Put another way, “White Jews” are just “Jews”; if one is to talk about non-White Jews, a specific modifier is needed. So “White Jews” also refers to the figure of the Jew as it is currently conceptualized in the public imagination—a figure that is imposed upon the lives of all Jews, whether (individually) White or not.
The object of this essay, then, is to think about White Jews as individuals, and White Jews as a concept, and interrogate how the two constituent elements, “White” and “Jew,” interact with one another. The methodological approach is (to complete our march through the title) an intersectional one; the idea is to think about how Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. My claim is that when Jewishness—whether as a conceptual matter or as embodied in individual persons—is understood primarily as a subspecies of Whiteness, it obscures important features of Jewish experience for White and non-White Jews alike, while often accentuating or accelerating antisemitic tropes. In doing so, it perpetuates a form of antisemitic marginalization at the same time as it ratifies, even promotes, a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community.
Placing Jews and Intersectionalists in Conversation
There could not be a more pressing time for a renewed and reinvigorated analysis of the contemporary operations of antisemitism. The growth of White nationalist and neo-Nazi sentiment has put the issue of antisemitism back on the American radar screen in an unprecedented way. Yet there is a consistent worry felt among many Jews—progressive Jews included—that left-wing critics deprioritize the fight against antisemitism, viewing it as a marginal issue, a distraction from more immediate concerns, or a fight that (but for a few stray cranks) has already been won. This fear is exacerbated by a noticeable lacuna surrounding antisemitism in progressive scholarship about contemporary issues of discrimination, oppression, and identity-based marginalization. Vigorous theoretical accounts of how antisemitism currently manifests in Western societies lag behind the excellent work focused on other oppressions. And though in theory intersectionality has much to offer Jews as an analytical tool for untangling some of these questions, in practice intersectional theorists have largely ignored the Jewish case. While intersectional approaches to Jewish difference are not unheard of, they are exceedingly rare. Reviewing the literature on intersectionality in 2016, Marla Brettschneider found virtually no mention of Jews as a subject of inquiry. What’s worse, the main exceptions are reactionary—authors who make sure to include “Jewish fundamentalists” alongside Christian or Muslim peers, or who emphasize (Orthodox) Jewish opposition to same-sex marriage as part of broader discussion of antigay religious practices while eliding the fact that Jews are disproportionately proponents of marriage equality.
Meanwhile, “intersectionality” has also become a term of significant discussion within the popular Jewish press, much of it negative. It has taken the blame for promoting the marginalization of Jewish—particularly Zionist or Zionist-identified Jewish—persons in progressive coalitions, and is held ideologically responsible for acts of antisemitic exclusion in left-wing spaces that are supposed to be the locus of resistance to emergent racism and antisemitism.
While I understand where this critique comes from, I do not share it. Intersectionality is a tremendously powerful analytical tool that, when deployed properly, does far more to undermine these exclusionary practices than it does to warrant them. Yet the theoretical gap in intersectionality analyses largely overlooking the Jews is not fully accidental. Specifically, the association of Jews with power as an antisemitic trope functions to classify Jews not just as “White,” but as exemplifying or embodying Whiteness. Insofar as Jewishness is not understood as existing as a materially distinct category from Whiteness, the failure to consider Jews as a case of a marginalized identity is not intuitively felt as an absence.
Discourses about power (control, dominance), as well as discourses about hegemony (omnipresence, invisibility), can center both an intersectional analysis of the Jewish case as well as a meta-argument as to why Jewishness is often left untheorized in intersectional work. At one level, both power and hegemony are critical elements in exploring what Whiteness does as a social category. More than just a phenotype, Whiteness is a facilitator of social power and status, yet it is typically rendered unmarked. Consequently, the privileges and opportunities afforded to persons racialized as White are often not recognized as such—they are woven into the basic operating assumptions of society, such that their beneficiaries do not even perceive their existence. An important goal of much antiracism discourse is thus to unsettle the presumption of Whiteness as a neutral, objective vantage point and instead reveal or uncover the ways in which it provides specific and substantive power to those racialized as White.
For Jews, however, these concepts have a different social valence. Antisemitism frequently manifests as a concern over putative Jewish hyperpower. Whereas White individuals are often seen as an unmarked category (“just” individuals), Jewishness is very much a marked identity—and the markers quite frequently center around beliefs about Jewish power, domination, or social control. The Whiteness frame by design is meant to draw attention to these attributes, revealing things that otherwise go unseen or unspoken. But when it operates on the Jewish case—where these attributes are not unmarked but instead are exceptionally visible and salient—its cultural impact can be quite different. Instead of unsettling and particularizing a hitherto “neutral” identity, it can promote, even accelerate, deeply antisemitic tropes.
An intersectional approach—showing how Whiteness and Jewishness change in valance when conjoined together—can illuminate facets of antisemitism and oppression that otherwise might remain obscure. It allows us to see how an understanding of “White Jews” cannot be grasped simply by placing “Whiteness” and “Jewishness” side by side. The union of “White” and “Jew” is more than the sum of its parts. And indeed, since the “White Jew” is in part an imagined identity projected on all Jews (regardless of how they racially identify or—were they not Jewish—would be identified), the interrelation of Jews and Whiteness has impacts that extend well beyond those who, assessed individually, would be considered “White Jews.”
Ultimately, the goal of this essay is in large part one of reconciliation. By demonstrating the utility of an intersectional lens in illuminating otherwise hard-to-articulate forms of antisemitic exclusion, I hope that I can model the inclusion of Jewish issues in the intersectional canon, encourage more Jewish writers to view intersectionality as an important tool, encourage more non-Jewish writers to view Jewish issues as significant components of intersectional work, and dissipate some of the Jewish skepticism and anxiety that is currently associated with intersectionality’s importance in contemporary social activism.[…]
Catrin Lundström 