Earlier this week, The New Republic published an article I wrote about Jews and “privilege.” It was originally given the headline “The Holocaust Doesn't Discount Jewish White Privilege,” and later changed to more accurately reflect the balance in my argument to “Does the Holocaust Discount Jewish White Privilege?” In one reading, that's a succinct and accurate summary of what I was getting at: Jews descended from Holocaust victims can still benefit from whiteness in contemporary America. But it could also be read as a claim that there exists something called “Jewish White Privilege;” that is, a privilege specific to Jews.

That second interpretation is the opposite of what I think, indeed the opposite of what I’d argued in that piece and elsewhere. And I suspect that interpretation is what fueled a Twitterstorm about the piece, even prompting a certain former sitcom star to weigh in:

Other people—including some I usually agree with—had more legitimate replies. In a piece titled “‘White Privilege’ and the New Rhetoric of Anti-Semitism” in the Jewish Journal, Harold Brackman offered a thoughtful but ultimately misleading description of my article, quoting the part where I say that the descendants of Holocaust victims or survivors can still be white in America today (more on that in a moment), and skipping over the sentence that follows, where I wrote that “if you have relatives who were killed for their ‘race,’ killed because powers-that-be didn’t consider them white; if your family and culture were deeply shaped by this fact, and if you’d still be considered Other if you lived on the continent where all of that happened, then I think balking at white-privilege accusations is understandable.”

Ignoring this, Brackman concludes:

My problem is not with an application of "the white privilege" argument to Black-Jewish relations, provided it is applied intelligently, with nuance, and with a recognition that, from the Civil War until after World War II, anti-Semitism was more than a literary phenomenon: it was a real force limiting Jewish life chances in the U.S. My real problem is the recent phenomenon of the heavy-handed use of the "white privilege" bludgeon as another way to shame into silence American Jewish defenders of Israel on implicit grounds that they are guilty of "privilege" here at home—and should therefore shut up when Israelis are at risk of another genocide.

It’s true that anti-Semitism these days consists of attacks on “Jewish privilege” and often hides under the cover of anti-Zionism. What I objected to in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essay on the Israel subject was her implication that Jews secretly supported Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Specifically this passage: “There was no room for our sadness and fear to be public during the Gaza war. There was no room for us to say, ‘Hey, hold on a second, these terrorists are firing rockets at civilians!’ There was no room for us to say that it was not a national character flaw to defend one’s own citizens from attack.”) Some perhaps did, just as others perhaps secretly condemned them. Views on the Jewish state differ plenty among Jews, and there are some on all sides claiming that they’re being silenced. What I objected to wasn’t her sympathy with Israel (I consider myself a Zionist, although it sounds as if Brodesser-Akner and I may have had different ideas regarding how the state ought to have responded in Gaza), but her suggestion is that the Jews who aren’t speaking out in defense of Israel are privately more pro-Israel than they let on. This isn’t necessarily the case and risks conflating Jewishness with a particular stance regarding Israel.