The Jews, The Jews, The Jews
On Kanye, intersectional hate, the slipperiness of identity, and the stakes in the upcoming midterm elections.
I am a white-presenting, cisgender, heterosexual man. I’m also Jewish. My grandmother fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and arrived—after a circuitous, months-long journey—in Los Angeles, where my father was born in 1956. I was born in Venice Beach roughly twenty-five years later, just a few miles from the 405 Freeway, where yesterday, you might have seen this:
I’ve generally resisted writing or talking much about antisemitism, because it seemed to me that what most American Jews face—as largely white-presenting folks—pales in comparison to the virulence of anti-Black and -brown racism. Or homophobia. Or transphobia. Or Islamophobia. And that’s not to speak of sexism! What’s more, I can count on one hand (maybe two) the number of times that my Jewishness has made me feel unsafe, and in almost all of those instances, I had made a choice to reveal that I was a Jew, which isn’t a luxury shared by folks whose marginalized identities are more transparent.
All of that being said, the photo of the 405 is chilling. And the particular way in which antisemitism is articulated here speaks to so much that is rotten in our moment, and, at the same time, typical of how, at the root of white supremacy, there exists a strategy of division, intended to pit marginalized people against each other. So what’s happening here? Let’s take a look.
KANYE IS RIGHT ABOUT THE JEWS.
What’s most striking to me is the absence of a dog-whistle. As hard-right candidates inch ever closer to saying “the quiet part out loud,” their rhetoric is nevertheless coded almost all of the time. In the frequent refrain, “they want to replace you,” that initial third-person plural pronoun is doing a huge amount of work, driving a wedge between “them” and “us,” stoking fear of Black and brown people, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people all at once, while carving out plausible deniability. But interestingly, that seems increasingly not to be the case when it comes to antisemitism. From Charlottesville to the 405, we’re hearing more explicit talk of “The Jews.”
I wonder if on some level this has to do precisely with the fact that a lot of us do present as white, and thus pose, I guess, in the mind of a terrified white supremacist, a greater threat. Black and brown people will always be, well, Black and brown. And yet Jews are shapeshifters. They look like you and me, but beware, they are all around us, running the CDC, Hollywood, and your local bagel store.
And then there’s the use of Kanye. Kanye is a useful totem for white supremacists for a number of reasons. His Blackness, in their twisted view, creates a forcefield, insulating them from criticism. You might call this “woke white supremacy,” in which aspects of identity politics (“believe Black people”) and standpoint epistemology (“listen to the most marginalized person in the room”) are cynically and ham-fistedly cherry-picked to serve abhorrent ends. (To be clear, Kanye, with a net worth somewhere around 2 billion dollars, is the opposite of marginalized.)
The whole situation is sad and scary. And when I look at that photograph, I feel less safe, particularly when I imagine a version of 2024 in which the GOP, which is increasingly unapologetic about its ties to nativist and white supremacist elements, retakes complete control of the government.
So I want to conclude with two appeals. The first is to vote, and to get everyone you know to vote. Yes, you can donate to candidates, but dollars are a middle-man to buy enthusiasm, and if you can create enthusiasm directly, I suggest you do that. (Or both!) One of my favorite GOTV strategies is Vote Forward, which has a great track record of improving turnout by targeting likely voters in critical elections with handwritten letters, written by you! I just adopted twenty voters in Georgia, and will be writing them non-partisan letters about why I vote later today. But you do you. There are so many ways to get involved.
And before I move onto my final appeal, one more thing about the midterms. There are, as my friend Judd Greenstein wrote on Twitter yesterday, ample reasons to be cynical about voting. But it cannot be overstated how dire the stakes are in this election: one party is actively and openly setting the table to manipulate the 2024 election by taking control—now—of various local and statewide offices. The secretaries of state, state legislatures, and local election boards that are up for election in 2022 will, thanks to laws passed in a number of battleground states, have outsize power to overturn the will of the voters in 2024. This is not a test. This is not a test. This is not a test.
But the good news is this: if young people turn out, we have a good shot at keeping democracy alive, and more.
Here’s the second and more complicated appeal, which in some ways is an expansion of what I wrote last week about my concert in St. Louis. Thinking about my Jewishness brings up the slipperiness of identity. Elements of the far right say I’m not white. Elements of the left insist that I am. Whatever. The point is that all of our identities are profoundly complex. There’s so much in each of us that is unseen, and so much in each of us that is conflicted.
If we revisit the work of Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, the Black, queer, feminist organization credited with coining the term “identity politics,” it becomes clear that certain elements of the Left have misapprehended their message, which was about building coalition across difference, often through the identification of shared material interests. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argues persuasively in his essential new book, Elite Capture, identity politics has been coopted by elites to offer the veneer of change while maintaining the economic status quo, thus ensuring that the condition of marginalized people remains essentially the same. (Stay tuned for a longer piece devoted to Táíwò’s work.)
One of the effects of this phenomenon—some might argue that it’s a feature rather than a bug—is an increasing degree of tribalism within progressive communities, in which, at worst, competing factions become subsumed in the articulation of hierarchies of oppression, rather than finding strength in their intersection. In my view, it is incumbent upon all of us to constantly seek out those points of intersection in each other—at the human or spiritual level, whether or not politics is on our mind—and to continue to make overtures to those who belong in our coalition, but who’ve drifted away because they haven’t seen themselves reflected in our vision of community.
This is really good. Thank you. While I was down in Humboldt doing High Holiday services, there was a lot of fear around an episode of anti-jewish leafletting that had just happened (similar to one a couple of years ago here in Portland and probably off of the same website). Coming from Portland, where I have gotten to hear "Jews will not replace us!" up close and personally on a number of occasions, it seemed pretty tame. But the fear wasn't- not for those folks. Bigotries of all sorts are now out from under their rocks and everyone NOT right-wing, white, cis, x-tian, straight really ought to be banding together in mutual support and defence.
That is pretty shocking. Echos of Nazi Germany and the centuries of anti-semitism. Thanks for your cogent comments.