The top three most popular articles right now on the online Jewish magazine Tablet all deal, in one way or another, with the question of Jews and privilege. The most interesting of the three, as well as the most viral, is Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s personal essay, “I Probably Won’t Share This Essay on Twitter: Some thoughts on being Jewish in contemporary polite society,” which opens with recent tweet of hers:

Ask me about my Jewish privilege. It includes having only 5 blood relatives, since the rest were murdered. — taffyakner

Brodesser-Akner describes a sort of Jewish underground where, behind closed doors, Jews tell one another how they actually feel about Israel, anti-Semitism, and so on. She begins by mentioning an off-the-record conversation she had with an unnamed “famous screenwriter/director” who confessed to her that he was “really, really pro-Israel,” and adds further off-the-record evidence: “My DM boxes on Twitter and Facebook are filled with people like me—liberals, culture reporters, economics reporters—baffled and sad at the way the cause of Jews avoiding another attempt at our genocide has gone from a liberal one to a capital-c Conservative one.”

Articles that make assertions about secret, unquotable conversations pose certain methodological challenges. How can we be sure we’re not just getting the author’s own musings on Jewish identity? This sort of argument is especially frustrating to Jews who are not speaking out in the way she advocates, not out of fear of saying publicly what they’d only admit privately, but because they actually think the opposite. Some who insist that Jewishness is a form of privilege are Jewish themselves, an observation I could further back up with my own semi-private social-media evidence; but let’s turn instead to some of the responses to the piece from members of the American-Jewish press:

Who knows how to Storify? I sure don't; so plz read @joshnathankazis on privelege and power re http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/190070/being-jewish-polite-society ... pic.twitter.com/oGQszoedCj — elivalley

such an unhinged "definition" of #privilege, i can't even. http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/190070/being-jewish-polite-society ... — chaneldubofsky

When it comes to Israeli policy especially, it seems not just inaccurate but dangerous to suggest that the American Jews who aren’t, say, rah-rah for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in public are thus in private. It would play into stereotypes of Jews having dual loyalties, or all holding the same (far-right) views when it comes to Israel. But the largely positive response the essay is getting on Twitter suggests this dynamic is, if nothing else, one that a number of Jews can relate to.

I could kind of relate, too. There are times, offline, when I’ve held back aspects of my Jewish identity out of a fear that something would happen if I were more open. But it’s impossible for me to untangle whether this is more about anti-Jewish things people have said to me on occasion, or about the far more substantial amount of anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior I know about from family history and my own studies. Although my beef with “Jewish privilege” as a concept is less about a sense that Jews lack privilege, than that anti-Semites use the term as a way to claim that Jews control the world.