Yesterday on facebook, one of my so-called facebook friends, a non-Jewish white boy I met at a Palestine rally, posted something suggesting some kind of “Jewish conspiracy” (you’ve probably heard of that thing right?) and I immediately deleted him.

On my own facebook status I said: “just deleted someone for some fucked up antijewish "jewish conspiracy” type bullshit.

really there is no room for that shit anywhere becuase there is no room for white supremacy anywhere either.“

And I realized that this could most definitely be read as me, an Ashkenazi Jew, disavowing my own whiteness, but that’s not what I meant at all.

So I kinda wanted to write a little and weed out what I meant, how white supremacy not only aided and abetted Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness (in the United States and in the transnational imaginary due to Holocaust guilt and of course Zionism), but also how this completed(?) assimilation continues to do violence upon white Jewish bodies through the ideological dependency between anti-Jewish sentiment and white supremacy. I also might want to put this into conversation with my theory that assimilation is never possible.

I unfortunately also had just woken up when this need happened and might not have the ability to articulate just what I want in this moment, so bare with me.

I have written before about Zionism as an attempted assimilation into the family of white colonial nations. Zionism and the founding of the state of Israel is a bit different than a lot of colonialisms, though, because it was a settler colonialism that claimed to need a landbase to create a legitimate nation. Until then, if anyone claimed to be part of a Jewish "nation” it would have been a stateless nation, which isn’t really recognized as legitimate in world politics (for example, Kurdish people and Palestinian people are not taken as seriously as nations that have states). Hence Zionism demanded the founding of a state, Israel, upon historic Palestinian land. This was a way to attempt assimilation, a way to combat anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe - to become the colonizers instead of the oppressed. So in this way, Zionism as articulated by Jewish people was a strategy towards the goal of assimilation.

However, Zionism did not even begin with Jewish people. It was an ideology begun by Christians in Europe who were sick of the Jews for all the reasons that racism is sick of nonwhite people. Vermin, cheats, sodomizers, seductresses - the Jewish people had to go. And what better way than displacement. Of course the humanitarian desire to place Jewish people “where they belong” in “the homeland” was such a great (and likely liberal) idea, even the original Ashkenazi Jewish Zionists didn’t think of it first (at first they were discussing places such as Madagascar and South America). It is no coincidence that historic Palestine was a desirable plot of land in the then Ottoman Empire that connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, and could connect sea to land into Central, South, and East Asia very easily. It seems to be a kind of two for one: get rid of the Jews in a way that is “supportive” or “allied to their interests” and then use them to further nonJewish European interests in the region re: trade and military. The white man knows best, after all.

After World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Sykes-Picot agreement split the Ottoman Empire with arbitrarily drawn lines into protectorates and mandates between France and Britain. The mandate of Palestine, under British governance, was then open to the manifestation of the Balfour declaration, which labeled Palestine as a Jewish national home. With the help of this declaration and the facilitation of the British, mostly Ashkenazi Jewish immigration (most fleeing Russian genocide, to be fair, but facilitated by colonizers to become colonizers) into Palestine at this time continued at this time as the third aliyah.

Part and parcel to the Ashkenazi colonization of historic Palestine was the projection of anti-Semitic stereotypes onto Arab and Bedouin peoples newly colonized. The process of colonization is always dehumanizing, disenfranchising, exploitative. And in the context of settler colonialism (as opposed to franchise colonialism) ethnic cleansing through displacement and (later more blatantly) genocide. In the case of Palestine, the anti-Semitic stereotypes once used by nonJewish Europeans against European Jews (who were thought of as Semitic peoples whether or not they are now) were transferred to Palestinians as a way to legitimize their colonization and displacement. Sexual deviants, cheats, degenerates, barbaric. Jewish organizations such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) collected money from donations to purchase and expropriate land from Palestinians. This organization continues to do so today. The “lazy” Palestinian farmers were bought out of their land at very low prices, the Palestinian laborers expelled and replaced with “Jewish labor” to “make the desert bloom.” Thus giving “a land without a people to a people without a land.” Both there and not there, Palestinians were not only erased, but through Jewish land acquisition were labeled as not worthy of their land. This process was facilitated by the founding of Histadrut, the Jewish Labor Federation, by “radical” Eastern European immigrants; the Histadrut was created to “protect” Jewish (really Ashkenazi) labor through racist policies that excluded or exploited indigenous Arab (not excluding Jewish Arab) and Bedouin labor from Zionist state building and economy (it makes sense really, through the lens of settler colonialism, but it was racism and exclusion nonetheless). The Histadrut facilitated Zionist settler colonialism in many ways throughout its history using anti-Arab racism, not only through the displacement of nonJewish Palestinian labor and settlement, but through the exploitation and exclusion of Mizrahi labor from full assimilation into the Zionist economy, and thus full assimilation into “Jewishness” as defined by Zionism. In this way, white supremacy operates through “radicalism” and “protection” to not only ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their lands, but to create and maintain a racial hierarchy of Jews within the “Jewish state.”

I am not as well versed in the workings of Ashkenazi assimilation in the United States, though I should know a bit more about it. If any of you have sources I would love to hear them. The way I think of it in my head at least is similar to the assimilation of other now white European populations in the U.S. (Irish, Italian, Eastern European, etc), which operated to maintain a white majority in the changing demographics (meaning an increasing number of nonwhite people in the U.S.). There are a couple ways that Ashkenazi assimilation differed from these populations though. First of all, Holocaust guilt. The Holocaust was indeed a travesty, although not exceptional to other holocausts/genocides. And the U.S. was complicit in it both in private and government sectors, through things such as international trade and industrial investment, immigration policies at the time, and the one many people talk about most often which is “not intervening early enough” (not sure how I feel about that one but it is in the political imaginary of the situation). In this way, Ashkenazi Jews were exceptionalized through pity, shame, and guilt, which paved the way to preferential treatment and then to the gift of assimilation. This exceptionalization also operated to disavow American complicity and perpetuation of other holocausts/genocides, most obvious that of indigenous people to this land. It also didn’t hurt that Ashkenazim are European either, many with light skin, some even blonde hair blue eyed. Another way that Ashkenazi assimilation differed is because of the U.S. relationship with Israel, which has always been positive though originally not as involved as it is today. At the time of the Six-Day War, when Britain became sick of continuously going to the aid of Israel in times of crisis, the United States stepped in as a new guardian of the “Jewish state.” This shifted American politics towards Zionism, which through the Zionist conflation of “Jew” and “Israel” (which is fucked up and anti-Jewish itself), shifted the relationship of American Jewish people to American whiteness. Finally, the Soviet Jewish population fleeing to the U.S. afforded American “religious freedoms” some legitimacy and sentiment of superiority, a gift to capitalism and “democracy” during the Cold War. Religious freedom plus capitalism plus freedom of expression aided Ashkenazi/European Jewish Americans in assimilating into industries such as film, banking, and commerce. Thus, the way I see it, the Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness in the United States was politically driven by white supremacist ideologies and institutions – to keep a demographic majority, to combat Communism, to maintain a preferential relationship to Israel, and to relive Holocaust guilt not only of “The Holocaust” in Europe, but of U.S. complicity in other genocides as well.

So now that I have talked about how white supremacy operated to assimilate Ashkenazi Jewish people into whiteness, it is time for the hard part, something I have never written before but have had sitting in my head for quite some time: how white Jewish people, while accorded white privilege (here talking about specifically in the U.S. and the global imaginary I have come to know), continue to be oppressed by white supremacy through its dependency upon anti-Jewish sentiment. This is not racism. I do not experience racism. This is not a disavowal of my own whiteness. I am white. However, the assimilation into whiteness my people have gone through was/is violent, and whiteness as an exclusive and oppressive positionality is still dependent upon this anti-Jewish violence.

What does it take to be white? What does whiteness mean besides a skin color? Who is or can be white? Whiteness as performativity draws upon citational utterances of power and privilege built up through the establishment of power structures. Through the liberal narrative of democracy, whiteness is participation in politics, government, policing, capitalism. Because government and capitalism and surveillance were built from the building blocks of white supremacy – settler and franchise colonialism, slavery, segregation, xenophobia – whiteness holds power and privilege within structures of power and within subjectivities. As constructed against its Others, white is not criminalized, is not pathologized, is not excluded, is not tokenized, is not fetishized, is not essentialized. White is not suspect. It is not even noticeable. White is normative, it is normal. Whiteness means good citizen, means calls the police, goes to the polls, combats crime, flies the American flag. Whiteness means being the boss, giving to charity, philanthropizing, playing fair. Whiteness means calling for war but not fighting it. Whiteness means English language knowers and teachers. Whiteness holds power and maintains the epistemologies that hold up power. This state is white.

Whitness is areligious, and through the lens of Christian hegemony, is a Protestant normative areligiosity. This kind of operates alongside atheism or agnosticism or secularism, but always through the lens of a Christian hegemony. This Christian hegemony is never acknowledged, and the bases of the secularism this state depends upon is the rejection of state Christianity specifically, not of an unspecificied religiousness. Because the secular state accords white people power, this areligiosity saturates the construct of whiteness. Thus, a Protestant ghost possesses whiteness just as whiteness is areligious, never quite fitting into the non-Christian-normative-areligious white body, as much as it tries. A symptom of how Christian hegemonic areligiousity has saturated whiteness, and thus assimilation into whiteness, is the ascendance of Hanukkah in American Jewish practice. Hanukkah, once a minor holiday, has become the one big holiday in the year, and why? Because it falls during the Christmas season, so that little Jewish children get visits from Hanukkah Harry when little Christian children are visited by Santa. This is not to say that Hanukkah is not a religious holiday, or that it is not or shouldn’t be important or celebrated. It is simply that the ascendance of Hanukkah has a direct correlation to the assimilation of Ashkenazi Americans into whiteness. Growing up I barely knew of the really really really important holidays – Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Passover – although I knew they existed. Likewise most non-Jewish people will know what Hanukkah is, but not the religiously important holidays. Of course, this example also shows how capitalism and consumerism are implicated in the assimilation into whiteness, as well – the ability to consume in the right ways and at the right times for the right purposes, and the ability to work to do so. Thus, Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness coincides with Christian hegemony, and therefore does anti-Jewish violence against those assimilable. (Likewise, but differently, anti-Catholic sentiment operates under the Protestant normative areligiosity specifically against Italian and Irish people’s assimilation into whiteness, and of course fuses with racism and xenophobia against Chican@/Latin@ Catholic populations.)

Another way that assimilation is violent against Ashkenazim is in its assimilation into conservatism. There is an extensive radical legacy of resistance in Ashkenazi/Yiddish genealogies. From uprisings and armed resistance during European anti-Semitism to Ashkenazi participation in the overthrow of capitalism in Russia, European Jewish history has very strong strands of radicalism. This is not to erase the conservatism and general fucked-upness of many other Jewish folks during those times; for goodness sake, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann were Ashkenazi as well. However, I believe that the desire and the action of assimilation requires the operation of white supremacy through Ashkenazi bodies, through acts such as colonization and exploitation. Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness involves the cooptation of radical histories of resistance and solidarity, morphing them into racist radicalisms and liberalisms (such as Histadrut, kibbutzim, Liberal Zionism and the two state solution, oppression of Mizrahi “racists,” gentrification). Now, from the Ashkenazi Left who are racist against Mizrahim (and pretty much everyone else through the perpetuation of white epistemologies), to the Ashkenazi Right who are blatantly racist against Palestinians and other people of color in the U.S. and Israel, and to the Ashkenazi complicity in U.S. foreign policy (imperialism) and domestic policing (colonialism), we can see how assimilation into whiteness means assimilating into a racist order that uses its power to decide who is most oppressed and how to save them by flipping the liberal/conservative coin. It is really all a bunch of bullshit and does no justice to the legacies of resistance our ancestors have fought.

Now comes the tricky part. I have gotten into trouble for talking about this before. Let me be clear that white supremacy operates through Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness to disavow anti-Jewish sentiment. Since I got white privilege that must mean I don’t experience white supremacy as oppression, right? This part is on non-Jewish white (usually) boys against Israel, whether they are “in” the “Palestine movement” or are blatantly buying into “Jewish conspiracy” bullshit about controlling the economy. Let me again be crystal crystal clear. The Palestine movement is NOT AN ANTI-JEWISH MOVEMENT. To conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish sentiment is to buy into the Zionist conflation of “Israel” with “Jewish.” That in and of itself is anti-Jewish: not all Jewish people are Israeli, not all Jewish people believe in Israeli colonization, and there were Jewish people before the state of Israel was founded and there will still be Jewish people after apartheid is smashed. Anti-Zionism does not at its core call for the expulsion of Jewish people from the land that is now called Israel; instead, it calls for decolonization and the return and self-determination of Palestinian people. I wholeheartedly recognize and honor that. That does not mean that non-Jewish white people don’t use the act of criticizing or challenging Zionism as a stage for their own white supremacist, anti-Jewish sentiment. The funneling of anti-Jewish white supremacy through anti-Zionism or anti-Israel relies upon the completed(?) Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness to disavow any oppressive tendencies. This type of white supremacy operates through the maintenance of Jewish (usually Ashkenazi) stereotypes like my nonexistent big nose and fat bank account, and the claim to Jewish conspiracies (Jews run the economy, Jews run Hollywood, Jews are ruining Christmas and thus Christianity, Jews made up the Holocaust, Jews control the U.S. government through Israel). But it’s okay because Jewish (read Ashkenazi) people are white now, so it isn’t really oppressive, right? Let me also say that I have never experienced anti-Jewish oppression from non-white people in the movement, only American, often bourgeois, straight cis white boys, who have the world on their shoulders, using radical language and tactics to perpetuate age-old anti-Jewish white supremacy.

And finally, how Ashkenazi assimilation into whiteness has created within our own community a denial of the existence of anti-Jewish oppression. Scripted as the desire to be “good allies” and to “not exceptionalize” Jewishness, the palimpsest of whiteness over an erased anti-Jewishness is written as privilege politics and white guilt. Barely decipherable, yet perpetually there, this anti-Jewish oppression colonizes and recolonizes the Ashkenazi mind to ignore, rationalize, dilute, and abject the anti-Jewish sentiment we still experience. Moreover, this disavowal of anti-Jewish oppression is racist against non-white and/or non-Ashkenazi Jewish people who experience racism and anti-Jewish oppression by claiming that all Jews don’t experience racism and should be good white allies. Thus, Ashkenazi supremacy and white supremacy operate together to erase anti-Jewish sentiment within our communities and movements while reducing Jewishness into Ashkenaziness and ignoring our own standing in a racialized Jewish hierarchy. Because, as argued above, white supremacy is all wrapped up in anti-Jewish oppression, the disavowal and denial of the experience of oppression by Ashkenazim makes us complicit in the maintenance of white supremacy. Instead, while recognizing the ways we are white and benefit from whiteness, we should be picking apart the workings of white supremacy, including the tool of anti-Jewish oppression.

This has been a very long and hard blog for me to write. I didn’t get to the “assimilation is never possible” part though the sentiment is in there. I welcome any comments or criticisms from my friends and comrades who have a lens of anti-racism and anti-Zionism. I also welcome any well intentioned questions regarding some of the theories I have left unexplained, or some of the history I have used. I realize I cited no sources, but all of this work is only possible because of the plethora of works I have read and the very hard and arduous discussions I have had with friends and comrades throughout the last couple of years. So while all of this just now came from my head, I don’t really remember and can’t really pick out what came from where. I feel shitty about that but I don’t really know what else to do about it besides spend hours and hours trying to find sources. Yeah, and I hope it made some sense too.

Please reblog!