TJS S6E15 - Progressing Towards Anti-Semitism

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If you know the enemy and know yourself, said Sun Tzu, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. Put me in, Lord. I'm ready. I'm Rav Malik Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Season 6, Episode 15, American Antisemitism Part 6, Progressing Toward Antisemitism. On our journey to the heart of darkness, which is American antisemitism, we've returned a number of times to Jewish sociologist Earl Rabb's 1983 study of antisemitism. That's the one in which he defines what he calls commodity antisemitism. The particular power of Jew hate, which is unreflective of any sacred belief or element of identity, as he calls it. Something which would never be traded as a good on a political market. The idea, for instance, that we killed God.

You might be able to whip up the mob with that one, but you're unlikely to get far on a political campaign. Now, Rab was not unaware of the uniquely philo-Semitic nature of American history and the comparatively neutral ground Jews found when we came to the New World. But he also knew that these were exceptional and really relative differences, because his study also marks nearly a third of Americans who were willing to support an otherwise good candidate, clearly anti-Semitic. Raab labeled this as passive anti-Semitism. And you might recall he details the factors which either prevent or allow such indifferent animus, I might call it, to shift toward the active as it's done in the past. There's always the target factor, the raw susceptibility.

How negative is the general populace's attitude toward Jews? And is there an element prone to becoming actively hostile toward them? Then there's the control factor, meaning the strength or weakness of civilizing elements in society as a whole, including, of course, forces of public order, which hold violence in check, be it general or Jew-specific. Then, history being what it is, there must be a trigger. Some series of precipitating events, which would push what Rapp called the passive anti-Semitism, past a neutrality of, say, voting for a hater, into an active state of participating in that hate. Now, this might sound familiar, but Rav's motivation for analysis wasn't any sense that danger was on the horizon for the Jews.

On the contrary, in the 1980s, he, like most Jews, felt things getting safer every day. It's just that he was a sociologist and a Jew with a healthy sense of history, and therefore worried that the very security of America was lulling his community into a complete complacency, a never-wise stance for the Jews. you know people might have believed as we heard a little bit in previous episodes that in the 80s the battle against Jew hate was over at least in any meaningful sense I mean they're always going to be the kooks out there but nothing serious and Rab was aghast at the naivete of his community he chalked it up to many things the one which is relevant to our present chapter is that the vast majority of American Jews only looked right for danger that's why they tell you to look right and left before you cross the street The old European slogan, no enemies on the left, had found a rich new life as the strategy of safety and diversity developed by American Jewry, especially post-World War II.

Because Jews climbed that socioeconomic ladder right up from the 50s through the 80s. And we brought our battles for minority issues with us. So therefore, as we flourished, we felt not only personally successful, but that we were a leading element in building a more egalitarian, democratic America for everyone. Big D and little in that democratic, of course. Now, it wasn't all smooth. We've laid out enough of the story of, say, black anti-Semitism to know that. I mean, the LA Times national exit poll after the 84 election showed that 58% of Jews disapproved of Jesse Jackson as a presidential candidate, as compared to 42% of the general populace. But I can promise you this, a far higher percentage of Jews would have given Jackson their vote over Reagan in 1988 had he received the nomination.

The left lean in American Jewish life is foundational. And it's true that there have always been Jews on the right in America. And it's also true that the last few decades have added significant numbers. But even central figures in the culture war, like Ben Shapiro, or the weird messianic bromance with Trump, or even the growing cult following for the Republican Party amongst American Orthodox Jews, can't compare. The backbone of Jewish history in the United States has been defined by and definitive of the American left. This is clear from the role we played in its defining struggles, suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, and not to mention the bedrock democratic voting stance. So it's no surprise, therefore, that Jews are found at every layer of today's left-wing progressive politics, whose latest battle is anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-cis-heteropatriarchy, and, of course, anti-Zionists.

Which brings us to a delicate moment, and to my point. Before I can pick up with the haters again, and really hone in on the nature of progressive hate, you recall we left it off really in the 70s, I have a delicate and somewhat edgy task ahead. We need to talk about the Jews. This is true both because, in general, I'm striving to avoid that trap of talking about anti-Semitism without talking about the Jews, a kind of erasure which is not only ironically expressive of the very problem, but also prevents a clear analysis of what to do with it. And specifically because of the three types of American hate that we've been looking at, white, black, and progressive, it's the progressive kind, which finds its primary outlet through anti-Zionism, recall, which is the only one with significant numbers of Jewish fellow travelers.

Now, I'm not about to blame anti-Semitism on the Jews, although we're going to need to address the role that we play in this dance of American hate in some final episode of this series. We've got to talk talkless at some point because I've got enough feedback from people that they want to hear what I think we should do about this problem. If I'm going to tell such a long tale, send me your feedback, robmikefoyer, gmail.com. I want to know what you think should be done. So I'm not about to blame anti-Semitism on the Jews, nor am I interested in entering some shouting match about whether progressive anti-Zionist Jews are self-hating anti-Semites not going there. But the hate on the left is real. And since Jews are so overwhelmingly present in that context, you can't separate it from their presence there, be they victim, villain, or hero with what they're doing in your eyes.

Jewish activists reciting Kaddish for Islamic Jihad fighters, a blog titled The Palestinian Talmud, which features anti-Israel articles, and signs at protests which read, from Auschwitz to Palestine, my answers are crying shame. Those are part of the Jewish story, and they need to be unpacked. And for better or worse, now is the time to start. Because before we dive into a bit of the specifically American backstory, I want to put my finger on this tension. On one hand, if you've been listening to the Jewish story for a while, you know there have always been Jews, often lots of them, who opposed Zionism. And that opposition was generally principled, expressive of deep and I would say even productive machlokic, constructive conflict over the nature of Judaism, Jews, peoplehood, religion, and of course the right path to take ahead.

In fact, it's a conversation which we would do well to reopen at this point. The process, however, of re-embodiment as a nation, its land, meaning moving from Zionism to Israel, was bound up with a degree of violence and conflict, which added new urgency and angst to that more theoretical argument. And here's the thing. It also brought to fore a historic fracture in the Jewish soul. Because there's a place where we tear away from our people, and some of us, in doing so, come to hate the thing which we once were, to blame it for the pain which we feel. It's a fact that Jewish history is stained by the hate of Jews for their own people. Jews who cross the lines of conflict come to believe that indeed the Jews are the enemy, and the enemy was right, and fight with word and deed to prove us wrong.

In the Middle Ages, names like Nicholas Donin, Pablo Cristiani, or Abner Burgos come to mind. In Monodernity, of course, there's Marx and that tradition of prominent Marxists of Jewish origins, as Seymour Martin Lipset called them, who, quote, could find it in their hearts to be concerned about many national groups, but not the Jews. and you know on hearing some of the harsh critiques of the violence exercised by Zionist organizations during the early phase of the 1936 Arab Revolt many of which of course ignored or contextualized the Arab violence Labor Zionist leader Burl Katnelson asked is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with awe and admiration?

Melodrama, certainly, but it's got a staggering historical echo. So now, in fulfillment of Earl Rabe's greatest fear, opposition to Zionism has become a political commodity in America. It's become, in fact, a virtual litmus test for entry into American progressive politics. And the thin veil between the new school opposition to imperialist Israel and the old school Jew hate that Seymour Martin Lipset described has been basically completely torn. Together with it, by the way, you might notice that in America, the control factor is tearing too. And if you follow, at least in the social media, if not in the mainstream, it seems Jews are increasingly a target And all of that places progressive Jews in a precarious position one which I frankly do not envy So let talk a little bit about the backstory of how they got there Tikkun olam means fixing our broken world.

It's an ancient Jewish mission, originally conceived through the lens of human consciousness and the actions of Torah and Misfot, one that I can definitely get behind. It's always had a redemptive, in fact, messianic association. Whether it was the cosmos-completing Torah of the Arizal, foundational 16th century mystic of Sfat, the classic world vision of Jewish liturgy, which says, the takin olam b'malchut sharai, to sort of establish or fix the world under the kingship of God, or the progressive utopian dreams of liberal American Jewry at the end of 20th century. In 1971, the very same year that Seymour Martin Lipset publishes Cri de Kerr about anti-Semitism in the left in the New York Times, tikkun olam made its definitive appearance as a term on the progressive Jewish scene.

Back in Season 5, Episode 1, we spoke about the first Jewish catalog and the transformative effect it had on American Judaism. Among its many important pieces was an article by New Left devotee and eventual Jewish renewal leader, Arthur Waskow, entitled, How to Bring Mashiach. I mean, who wouldn't read an article that was titled that? He's riffing on a teaching from Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who says that if one's planting a tree and hears that the Messiah has come, they should finish and only then run to greet the Redeemer at the gates. He says, plant a tree somewhere as a small tikkun olam. fixing up the world, wherever the olam needs it most. Plant a tree in Vietnam in a defoliated former forest.

Plant a tree in Appalachia where the strip mines have poisoned. Plant a tree in Brooklyn where the asphalt has buried the forest. It's a call to action which perfectly expressed the desires of the young idealistic Jews reading the catalog, whose 1960s politicization had primed them to change the world in practical ways and thank God to believe it was actually possible. And Wasco did it in a language which was able to catch their imagination. At once universal, fixing the world, and yet particularly Jewish, tikkun olam. It was an expression of ethnic identity combined with global solidarity, perfectly suited to channel the already turbulent streams of identity politics emerging on the left. Now, back in season five, we spoke about the larger rising tide within American Jewry through the 70s and 80s as young, active Jews came into their own.

And they were awakened by social movements and demanded the same sort of changes within their own communities. Greater investments in education and culture, deeper social consciousness. And after the inevitable initial resistance from the old guard, Jewish communal institutions were by and large responsive to that excitement. particularly amongst the liberal denominations where little else Jewish evoked much energy at this point. Placing the idea of tikkun olam at the center of liberal Judaism actually proved to be the perfect organizing principle. Now a major driver for that shift proved to be CAGE, the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education. CAGE came around in 1976, the brainchild of Jewish counterculture types in the havurah movement that we also spoke about back in that season five episode.

Its annual conference drew hundreds of educators of all types, camps, formal, informal, etc. It was hailed as the Jewish Woodstock, which kind of says it all. And with the dawn of the 1980s, the Boomers were becoming adults and Cage had become a leader in the Jewish educational field. Its promotion of tikkun olam as a central Jewish value and one with incredible utility for creating religious school curricula brought the concept into the Jewish educational mainstream. I mean, already, by 1981, eminent scholar of Jewish education, Jonathan Wutcher, had identified tikkun olam as what he called the central tenet of American Jewish civil religion. Wutcher recognized that the idea had its previous roots in the social activism, which had really always characterized the reform movement in particular, but nonetheless, he traced a specific evolution of civil Judaism from what he called a survivalist mode to a covenantal mode.

And he saw tikkun olam as taking its place in the early 80s as the essential work of the Jewish people. Only by viewing themselves as the people of the covenant, he writes, as the effectors of tikkun olam, fixing the world, can contemporary Jews make sense of their determination to survive. Now, the importance of this articulation for everything to come, including the very torn relationship between Jews, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism, cannot be understated. Survival for survival's sake is a grim business at best, even when its demands are grossly obvious, as they tended to be for Jews in Israel, where war sadly remains a constant reality even today. But in America, survival was far from pressing in the 1980s for the Jews.

and the power of Israel's story to infuse a sense of purpose, solidarity, idealism from afar into American Jewry was breaking down as Jews in the U.S. grew more comfortable and powerful and as Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the first Intifada made it appear far less like a Jewish utopia. Now I can't tell you how many good Jews of my generation were lost because they couldn't answer the question, why survive as Jews? It's not that they had no answer. It's that the primary answer they absorbed from their education was, six million people died, so you'd better marry a Jew. That's certainly not an energizing response. And frankly, many found it vaguely racist because it was uncoupled with any emphasis on what it means to be a Jew and why that matters.

Leonard Fine was a founding editor of Moment magazine and a leading voice of progressive Jewry at this time. He put the argument this way. There's only one agenda that warrants the effort and that dignifies the pursuit of Jewish continuity. And that purpose is what it has always been, to enter into partnership with God in completing the work of creation, tikkun olam. And so it was that in the hands of the activist energetic leadership of liberal Judaism, tikkun olam became the foundation of a post-Holocaust American Jewish mission beyond survival for an enormous swath of American Jewry. A foundation, by the way, which tapped a deep well of American Jewish identity. You know, liberal political and social values have been deeply ingrained in the vast majority of American Jews for generations.

Many even had a vague sense of a correlation between their Judaism and their liberalism. Or as Fame famously put it, politics is our religion, liberalism is the preferred domination. But now that correlation between Judaism and liberalism had been given a name. A name with a pedigree deep enough to provide Jewish legitimacy and a focus sharp enough to offer real educational and social organizing power. Now in theory, tikkun olam exists in perfect harmony with Zionism as a vision of the Jewish future. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, whose story we told back in season 4, was the leading advocate in the Orthodox world who strove to unite the two. He said, to restore the credibility of redemption, there must be an incredible outburst of life and redeeming work in the world.

The state of Israel shifts the balance of Jewish activity and concern to the secular enterprise of society building, social justice, and human politics. The revelation of Israel is a call to secularity. The religious enterprise must focus on the mundane. In other words, the whole purpose of our sacred return is to fix the world in which we actually live. But, to the great sorrow of many, Rabbi Yitzch Greenberg was situated on the margin with this one as usual. Tiguan Olam, as a driving force, belonged to the children of the 60s. And they leaned left without even thinking about it. Furthermore, being who they were, their politics were sharply on that side of the spectrum. There was a political component to this Jewish social revolution, though initially it was far smaller than the general educational piece, because anything other than enthusiastic support for Israel lay so far outside the communal mainstream in the 70s and 80s that it basically was beyond the pale.

But, as you know if you've been listening, that did not last. Soon enough, the Jews will discover that the constellation of ideas and even organizations which served as the birthing ground of tikkun olam to take its place as the heart of American Jewish civil religion is strikingly resonant to the combination of forces that managed to unite the American and global left around anti-Zionism, which means it's flirting also with that lurking anti-Semitism. The phrase in Hebrew literally means there is no choice. And despite its seeming banality, it expresses an essential aspect of Israeli culture. It's a somewhat fatalistic sentiment which was foundational to Zionism. I have no other land because the exile is going to kill us all.

And that morphed swiftly into the back-against-the-wall military ethos which is so core to Israeli psychology even today. It's a stance which definitely needs some significant healing by this point. But in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur surprise attack, there were very few Jews who felt that it was anything other than simply true And some of those few were a small group of intellectuals academics rabbis on the East Coast of America who came of age through the anti-Vietnam struggle. Their social political vision caused them to look at the situation in the Middle East in a profoundly different light than that of their peers. And in 1973, when peace now wasn't even yet an idea, it won't be formed for another five years, these activists came together to create an organization they called Breyra.

There is a choice. They didn't call it Yesh Breyra, but you get my point. And began to advocate a radically different position than that of American Jewish leadership of their day. They called, first of all, for Israel to speak with the PLO, something which was outrageously beyond the pale, for the immediate dismantlement of the very few settlements which existed in 73, and push for what today we would call a two-state solution. To say that these stances were edgy is a gross understatement. As one founding mother expressed it, in the wake of Israel's narrow survival, quote, criticizing it was like criticizing your mother. And that was a good Jewish boy speaking. But this was about way more than politics.

Breira's advocating a fundamentally different vision of the Jewish future, not just a radical take on Israeli policy. Because its small membership overlapped heavily with the new activism pushing tikkun olam to the center of liberal Jewish vision. Their essential message was that the future of the Jews lay in the diaspora, and that its purpose was tikkun olam, fixing the whole world, and that Israel wasn't the sole sacred vessel for Jewish communal national life, if it was sacred at all. Now the response to Brewer was predictably strident, as was the outcome. Commentary magazine accused them of fostering, quote, an attitude of enmity toward Israel. Americans for a safe Israel published multiple pieces saying they actually favored a one-state solution, Palestine.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, our advocate of tikkun olam, and passionate Bremer Mamre, not to mention poster child of the new left, proved to be the perfect target for the accusations that this was really the radical left co-opting Judaism. A different 1971 article he'd written was suddenly reprinted everywhere you could see in the Jewish world. The piece asserted, quote, we, the whole Jewish people, have been commanded by our tradition to preach the destruction of America. Brera's first and only national convention in 77 was actually picketed by the JDL, the Jewish Defense League. They were out there chanting, death to Brera, and Jewish blood is on your hands as people entered. One does wonder if they saw the sort of contradiction between the two.

So, eventually, squeezed between its own anti-Israel fringe on the left and the fearful Zionists on the right, where one side bordered on disloyalty and another on irrationality, as one of the founding members put it, there was no way Bera could last. And by 1977, pressure from the mainstream had basically forced its collapse. Nonetheless, when you look around today at J Street and other American Jewish organizations to its left, like If Not Now and Jewish Voices for Peace, it proved to be the avant-garde of American progressive Judaism and not just an outlier. A key piece to understand here is the idea of a competing vision. That what was being offered wasn't simply a critique. It was a whole approach that would allow American Jews to accept life and diaspora as an a priori, not as a second best de facto, and which could give an excitingly Jewish-rooted universalist aspiring purpose to Jewish survival.

One which fit the liberal culture of American Jewry like a glove. So it wasn't going to go away. And in fact, only two years after Barrera collapsed, 1979, one of its co-founders, Rabbi Gerald Sirota, stood up at the National havurahh Conference and presented what he called the New Jewish Agenda. As director of the Hillel at Rutgers University, Sirota had become increasingly alarmed at what he called the tragically truncated Jewish identity of his students. Young Jews were dropping out left and right, or at best relegating Judaism to what he called an insignificant part of his life, and Sarota had no doubt about the cause. For them, he said, Judaism is an artifact whose primary demand is negative, do not intermarry, rather than a positive command for perfecting the world.

The message my students are receiving from the organized Jewish community threatens the survival of Jewish values. He saw post-war Judaism as consumed by bourgeois materialism, survivalism, and memorializing the Holocaust, and as far as Zionism, he said it was simply being presented as a narrow, ethnocentric political agenda which amounted to one thing, security for Israel above all else. The new Jewish agenda, as he called it, centered tikkun olam as a banner for Jewish revival, declaring, quote, that authentic Jewishness can only be complete with serious and consistent attention to tikkun olam, what he defined as the just ordering of human relationships and the physical spiritual world, something which I got no argument with.

The new Jewish agenda became a force in progressive Judaism for over a decade, promoting an understanding, as it called it, of Jewish wholeness, which denies distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish issues. And its focus was on fighting what progressive labeled the false dichotomy between Jewish issues and other concerns, between particularism and universalism. Now, we could argue about whether that's a false dichotomy or not, but that's certainly a fundamental tension between the particular and the universal, one which I was taught is the key to redemption, and one which unquestionably underlies the relationship between American Jewry and the Jewish national state. As the 80s turned to the 90s, and the Lebanon War was followed first by the Intifada, and then by the Oslo process, the role of Israel in American Jewish identity became progressively more complex, pun definitely intended.

And as it did, the anti-Zionist voices, which had once been at the fringe of the tikkun olam movement, began to creep ever closer to its center. As founding Brewer member Michael Paley conceded in an interview 40 years later at Brewer and at New Jewish Agenda, there were many haters of Israel. Nonetheless, lo alman Yisrael, God never abandons Israel to its own devices. The power of progressive Jewish culture was far from spent, even when the new Jewish agenda closed its doors in 1992. By this point, tikkun olam was the well-established civil religion of progressive Judaism. But I'm starting to have a sense it's overtaking my present story about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. So I have to actually just wrap this section up with one last important personality.

Because in the 90s, academic, mental health professional, and left-wing political activist, Michael Lerner, soon to be Rabbi Michael Lerner, took up the cause of tikkun olam when he founded Tikkun, a political and cultural journal. Every issue carried on its cover a definition of Tikkun, to mend, repair, and transform the world. And his founding editorial statement made the mission clear. Judaism as a religion is irrevocably committed to the side of the oppressed, said Lerner, infused with the message that, quote, the world needs to be and can be transformed, that history is not meaningless, but aimed at liberation. Now, that's an idea that I think we could all get behind. However, according to Lerner, it led inevitably toward a progressive political and social agenda on the American left.

Now, that being said, Lerner was far too intelligent and far too much of a Jew to deify the left. He criticized its historical tendency to do what he called forced Jews into a false universalism. His vision was Jewish universalism. I said was, but it still is. It's also no coincidence that one of Lerner's earliest books was actually entitled Socialism of Fools, Antisemitism on the Left. In general, it's a brief manifesto for Jewish progressives, But it also offers an important sketch of Jewish history, which exposes how Jews, always feared by ruling powers as challengers, were allowed to acquire just enough wealth and authority to make them targets for the oppressed. That may sound familiar. He also warns Jewish progressives there that they need to check their own internalized anti-Semitism and learn how to distinguish criticism of Israel from hateful anti-Zionism.

Well, that was 1992. It's been a lot of water under the bridge since. So I'll just end with a couple quotes that Lerner wrote only a few years ago in 2019. They'll serve as a frame. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. The first was in response to a declaration by presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, who insisted, quote, fighting anti-Semitism is at the heart of the left's struggle against oppression. Perhaps wishful thinking, and as Lerner said, we hope to see more progressive take this stand in their public talks, explaining precisely why fighting anti-Semitism is at the heart of the left's struggle against oppression, even though, as we'll touch in a moment, it seems that actually anti-Semitism appears at the heart of the left's struggle against oppression, not fighting it.

When we at Tikkun, he says, have made this point, we've often been dismissed as Zionists. Notice, just insisting that you have to fight anti-Semitism has made his fellow progressives label him a Zionist, which is, of course, a bad word in their mouth. And therefore, as he says, in the eyes of increasing numbers of young progressives, illegitimate. The second piece from the article, which I'm happy to share with you, robmikeforter, gmail.com, send me an email. The second is a critique of an article by a young, self-described gay left-wing Jew who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times expressing his fears that, quote, a growing section of progressives are, in fact, legitimating anti-Semitism. Lerner heard him.

He far from unaware of what going on around him But he took the opportunity nonetheless to call this young man out for not acknowledging quote the ethically outrageous behavior of Israelis Now listen far be it for me especially today, to ignore the truth of this characterization of a significant part of our society. Nonetheless, he ends it with the following statement. After the Knesset passed the resolution in 2018, declaring that Israel was a state for Jews, which is kind of what I always thought it was, rather than a state equally committed to the well-being of all its citizens of any religious or ethnic identity, meaning a progressive utopia, we recognize how this kind of blind, arrogant nationalist chauvinism has contributed to left-wing anti-Semitism.

I'm sorry, did you just blame the victim? The state of Israel came into being in response to the persecution of the Jews. And the fact that we'd like to keep it as a haven for the Jews is actually contributing to that hate, he says. so I'll just let that statement stand as a testimony to how difficult it is even for a learned Jew who's committed his entire life to a positive vision for the Jewish people to hold the line between anti-Zionism and Jew hate back to our primary topic have you noticed ever this historical love affair between the far left and crazy theoretical constructs I mean, it goes way beyond Marxism. We tasted a bit of this last episode. Remember that coalition of power, which coalesced specifically in the Zionism is racism resolution of the UN, but it was between the new left, American black separatists, and the global anti-colonial struggle?

Much of its theoretical structure, the language, conceptual framework, which united such disparate groups and allowed them to develop a mass appeal, was provided by the Soviets. literally sat down in academia to crank out a framework which would allow these groups to articulate their vision to the world, with the anti-Semitism thrown in free of charge, of course. Well, there's a new generation of this coalition, which has arisen in our day. And it took that foundation and added to it their education, provided by people like Marcuse, Angela Davis, and Edward Said, with a good dose of Foucault and Derrida thrown in there, just to give the critique some destructive power. We're seeing the intellectual and social results around the world today as intersectionality, queer theory, post-colonial critiques, basically the deconstruction of everything.

That's a discussion which really deserves its own time. Right now, I'm trying to wrench myself back into the task at hand. We're tracing the evolution of American anti-Semitism, and specifically right now in the progressive realm. So I'll simply suffice with a warning. Just remember, a world that takes centuries to build can be destroyed in far less time. And that destruction offers a seductive and even addictive pleasure. Last but not least, by definition, deconstruction can't build anything. For present purposes, just know that every college activist eventually has to grow up. And when it comes to the new left of the 60s and 70s, they faced a particularly challenging economic environment in America at the time.

So they were even forced to get jobs. Many joined the university faculties where they passed on their anti-Zionist stance with its underlying topography, as Lipset called it, of anti-Semitism often unrecognized and perhaps even unintentional. They also developed many of those theoretical constructs driving the progressive movement today. One of those elements, which is relevant to our story, might be called the theory of whiteness. This idea, which we've discussed, that successive waves of European ethnic immigrants to America quickly acculturated becoming white Americans. Consciously or not, it's a perspective which reduces American history and sociology to an almost exclusive issue of racial identity, a black and white approach, if there as or was one.

We also discussed that, like I said, back in season three, how the Jews seemed to jump on that suburban whiteness bandwagon post-World War II. And we spoke a couple of episodes ago about African-American novelist James Baldwin's 1972 assertion that the powerless, by definition, can never be racist. That was his literary approach. But at the same time as he was writing it, there was a young scholar named Patricia Biddle Padva, who had already coined an academic version. R equals P plus P. Racism equals prejudice plus power. Now, these need to be understood together. In our story, that any attack on Jews, who are rapidly constructed as both powerful and even white, any attack on them is an actual punching up.

it's an attack on power which is not only by definition not racist, it might actually be an important anti-racist act and that's because another crucial theoretical underpinning to the rise of progressive Jew hate is that post-modern desire to reduce everything to a power struggle and to construct all relationships as a binary oh irony of ironies, between the victim and the perpetrator Once again, if you have power, you are an oppressor. And moral rectitude exists only on the side of the powerless, who are definitionally not racist. And when they seek to exercise power, are only doing justice. There's so much more in this intellectual brew. But for the sake of the story, I'm going to add one more element.

In 1989, scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectional feminism. It was part of her attempt to try and understand how each layer of a person's identity, when peeled back, helps expose how and when they experience power and oppression. It's an interesting analytical framework. I mean, Crenshaw came to this through her focus on the feminist movement and how it seemed to be concerned with women, but in its concern for women in general, he ignored the profoundly different experiences of, say, black versus white women. Intersectionality was, from its outset, conceived as what we call a critical discipline, meaning it rejects any real divide between the scholar and the activist, and it sees the purpose of inquiry as what's called critical praxis.

You've got to take it to the streets. And Crenshaw particularly targeted what she called the trickle-down approach to social justice. This idea that a fight against hate for one, in this case feminism, will ultimately trickle down to benefit all, the poor people of culture. You know, that's the opposite of that slogan we discuss, that hate against one is hate against all. The progressive left, which she helped to build, insists on a very different model. Rather, intersectionality demands, in principle, that activists champion every left-wing cause, because they all overlap. And the significance of this theory, to our story of American anti-Semitism, is how it works to mobilize activism. Because like I said, intersectionality makes solidarity with the oppressed a prerequisite of all social consciousness.

You can't just be a feminist or just an anti-racist. You have to stand against all oppression because all oppression has the same source, power. And if you ignore where that power is directed toward others, it makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution. As Crenshaw writes, when one discourse fails to acknowledge the significance of the other, the power relations each attempts to challenge are strengthened. In simple terms, either you're with me or you're against me. And the person with the most layers of oppression, anti-colonial color gender, demands the greatest solidarity. Because the oppressed may be diverse, but power is fairly homogenous even when it goes under different names. Now this has two consequences.

One is on campus, and we will discuss it. But it's how you end up with a situation that individual groups, the Latino students group, the African American students group, the Asian students group, the queer group, etc., each individually are brought together in a unified struggle. the other piece is that like I said the oppressed are diverse but power is fairly homogenous even when it goes under other names history has shown that once people begin to conceive of power as a single unit or an oppressive force which stands behind multiple forms of expression whose tentacles stretch across the world denying the rights and freedoms of others some portion of those people are going to start to rant about the Rothschilds the elders of Zion and the international Jew and that's the chapter which I guess lays ahead because I feel like I'm out of time the emergence of the boycott divestment and sanctions movement BDS the Israel apartheid week that begins to spread across American campuses the link drawn from Ferguson to Gaza but for right now I don't know about you but my brain is full So that's a story that's going to have to wait.

Before I sign off, I want to thank some folks. I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money. Make this show happen. Keep it free, widely available. I want to call on you to join them right now. Go to my website. That's jewishstory.co. You can click on a button in the upper right-hand corner to make a per-podcast support. Or you can send me an email. RobMikeFoyer at gmail.com. Find me on Facebook. Happy to share with you the information on how you can dedicate a show. I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com. They're building a center for global transcendence in the heart of the Judean Mountains. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for throwing the doors of the Beit Midrash open as wide as possible.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.