JEWS: NOT DIFFERENT ENOUGH

IN A COMPETITION OF DIVERSITY AND CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCE, JEWS FALL THROUGH THE PROGRESSIVE CRACKS.

Can you spot the Jew?

The sociologist Morton Weinfeld published a seminal book in 2001, Like Everyone Else… but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews, which examines how Jews are both integrated and distinct.

Like everyone else … but different.

This paradoxical title is arguably the most perfect synopsis of how the world views Jews. For thousands of years, Jews have lived among other cultures, integrating almost but not completely, succeeding, often, on uneven playing fields while holding on tenaciously to the characteristics that separate them from their neighbors.

Lionel Blue, a British rabbi and broadcaster, is attributed with taking the maxim a step further: “Jews are like everyone else — only more so,” he is alleged to have said. What he meant, I think, is that core human characteristics are perceived in Jews as exaggerated. This manifests as a projection, in which things most of us are guilty of — self-interest, clannishness, neuroticism — are projected onto Jews (and ridiculed or condemned).

As I said in my previous post, I believe that one of the major motivators for antisemites is Jewish tenaciousness in remaining a little different.

When I say a little different, this is crucial. Freud posited the concept of the “narcissism of small differences.” He suggested that minor differences are incredibly important because it is these that differentiate “us” from “them.”

For example, on the national level, most outsiders could not tell an Irish Protestant from an Irish Catholic, or a Serb from a Bosnian. But it was precisely the broad similarities that drove parties to accentuate those (sometimes imperceptible to outsiders) differences and elevate them to matters of existential identity.

The differences between Saudi Arabian Sunnis and Iranian Shiites are imperceptible to most outsiders, but golly do they ever matter to the Saudi imams and Iranian ayatollahs.

Here is where the hypocrisy of the contemporary left comes exploding into view.

Am I correct to assume that celebration of difference is one of the incontrovertible tent poles of contemporary leftist and progressive ideals? If someone is Black, gay, transgender, Muslim, or a member of pretty much any other identifiable group, the progressive response is an almost unanimous Awesome, come on in, jump on board? Is this not a dumbed-down description of intersectionality, which is absolutely the guiding premise of activism around race and diversity today? (For now, I will leave aside the tokenizing and titillating exoticism that might be partly at play here.)

Who are the only people who are not enthusiastically accepted with open arms in the progressive movement today?

Jews.

(If you have the slightest quibble with this assertion, you really need to stay tuned for my future posts. I’m sure you will. Thanks.)

I believe that it is ignorance of the Jewish experience and an almost total obliviousness about Jewish identity that permits progressives to exclude Jews from our rapturous celebration of diversity and our orgiastic jamboree of inclusion.

Most progressives know nothing of the depth and breadth of Judaism.

All they know of Jews is Larry David, Mrs. Maisel, smoked meat and the Holocaust (maybe).

They know precisely nothing about Jewish identity or peoplehood. We often hear the anti-Zionist argument that a “religion” is not deserving of a state, which is a massive intellectual self-own because, despite the profound ignorance of those who make this case, Jewishness is not “just a religion.” It is many things at once: a people, a nation, an ethnicity, and a religious tradition; a culture shaped by language, story, ritual and memory; a lineage carried through families and generations.

The conundrum of progressive anti-Zionists is that they premise their opposition on their own ignorance. They misunderstand what Jewishness is and then build an ideology on their own stupidity. More than this, there is one Jewish state and 57 countries that are Muslim (albeit from comparatively secular states to theocracies governed by Shariah law). And these inclusivity-celebrating progressives don’t seem to have a problem with that.

(Discretion may be the better part of valor here, since calling for the elimination of 57 Muslim states is more likely to get one’s head detached from one’s neck than calling for the elimination of the solitary Jewish state. But anyways.)

A whole ton of people who know pissall about Jewish heritage, peoplehood or national identity have decided that Jewishness is “just a religion” — and since most of the activists today are atheists or agnostics, some vigilantly so, that is not an identity they are willing to go to the carpet for. (Again, weirdly, Islam is an identity for which they will go to the mat and, rather than disproving my argument, this proves it. Treating one group differently from all others is the very definition of discrimination.)

Knowing bugger all about millennia of Jewish culture, many progressives have decided that comedy, deli and a focus on the darkest recent history are not enough to justify a country or, for that matter, even worth defending when haters beat up Jews.

Activists who pride themselves on being celebrants of diversity and defenders of difference draw the line at Jews. Because Jews are different … but not different enough.

Jewish difference has been the seed between the teeth of civilizations for millennia. The Jews are so much like us but they just refuse to go the extra step and give up on (what outsiders see as) those minor things that make other people hate them.

Just eat the bacon, FFS, and we won’t have to keep genociding you.

Ideas like these might be ideologically consistent coming from Archie Bunker (I date myself). But they are coming from diversity-celebrating, intersectionality-informed, bias-challenging, oppression-aware, marginalization-resisting, culturally responsive, identity-affirming, equity-advancing progressives.

Because while we drive around with bumper stickers exhorting everyone to “Celebrate diversity,” we have decided that Jews are too much like us to represent true diversity. They are not quite exotic enough to count as “racialized” but too much like us to deserve the term “equity-seeking.”

They are neither fish nor fowl. Or, to use a more apt phrase, neither fleishig nor milchig.

Today’s progressives can’t fit Jews into one of the boxes they have prescribed for “us” and “them” because Jews are both too much this and not enough that.

That is a rock and a hard place Jews have found themselves between plenty of times before.

It should also be familiar to anyone who has the vaguest familiarity with history and how ideologies with twisted ideas about Jews can morph into irrational movements that take entire civilizations down with them.

I’m sure nothing like that is happening here, of course. My progressive friends would never allow ignorance or unchecked prejudice to take hold in the unspoiled splendor of their edenic antiracist arcadia, uncontaminated as they are with dangerous ideas or toxic influences. They would never approach that forbidden tree or succumb to the ancient temptation to bite into that delicious fruit.

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