Everyday Feminism Discovers Anti-Zionism
My least favorite website, Everyday Feminism, has been dipping its toe in explicitly anti-Zionist content. A recent “win of the week” was a BDS victory and now they have published an absolute shitshow of an article called Why Zionism Is Not and Will Never Be A Part of My Jewish Identity.
For those who are lucky enough not to have read it, Everyday Feminism is a trashy clickbait website that preys on the concerns and good intentions of progressives. It publishes poorly written and hastily researched (a recent article cited a book about poverty which the author admitted to having not read) personal essays about identity politics. Its business model is rather cynical: the editors sell “personal improvement classes,” offer their services as paid speakers, and write headlines which seem perfectly calibrated to draw as many clicks as possible.
Crucially, Everyday Feminism doesn’t really take a stand on or discuss what might be called political issues or problems–it focuses more on abstract manifestation of “privilege” through various “isms” and microaggressions related to language. For example, Everyday Feminism doesn’t talk about labor; it talks about classism. It doesn’t talk about war; it talks about Islamaphobia. It doesn’t talk about missing and murdered indigenous women; it talks about an abstract and empty notion of “decolonization.” The election is not mentioned, nor, I believe, was the recent anti-LGBT law passed in North Carolina. The one issue for which EF has apparently bypassed its unwritten “no politics” is Israel/Palestine.
First, let’s walk through this article, which is an offensively stupid trash fire that reads as if it were written by David Duke.
To begin with, “Zionism” is never defined. Its first mention is linked to a dictionary.com entry but the author never explains what Zionism is, how it emerged historically, or who exactly she means by “Zionists.” To begin with, it is set up as a nebulous concept that we (us good people) must set ourselves against.
The author begins by talking about facing anti-semitism as one of the sole Jews in what sounds like a rural, working-class area. That can’t have been fun and I don’t envy her that. However, she goes on to describe her religious education and her childhood rabbi in terms that are hyperbolic, outrageous, and which are not a reflection of mainstream Jewish teachings. I have no wish to accuse this woman of lying or fabricating but I will say these stories sound obviously exaggerated. However, since I’m a good rhetorician, I will proceed as if they were true. All I can say is that she attributes direct quotations to her rabbi so they damn well better be true (or else that’s libel).
Anyway, here’s where things pick up:
I remember sitting in a room with dozens of other Jewish kids as the rabbi alternated between playing us excruciatingly graphic documentaries about the Holocaust, and Israeli propaganda cartoons.
Before playing us the Holocaust videos, our rabbi would smugly say things like, “You are all old enough to know the truth: This is what we, as Jews, can expect from the world we live in. Everyone is jealous because we are God’s chosen people. Jews have been persecuted since the beginning of time as a result of that jealousy. The Holocaust is only one example.”
Your rabbi played a room full of children graphic Holocaust documentaries and “Israeli propaganda cartoons”? Sounds legit. I know that many politically conservative Jewish organizations do teach the founding of Israel as the “happy ending” of the Holocaust; however, I have never heard of anyone participating in an experiment like this. I also know that nearly all Jews take Holocaust education very, very seriously and doubt this would happen.
The author claims the rabbi claims the reason the Holocaust happened is that “Everyone is jealous because we are God’s chosen people.” To attribute this rationale to Jewish people (or “Zionists” in general) is is outrageous, dangerous and anti-Semitic. No one thinks that. StandWithUs and AIPAC don’t think that. The idea that “chosen” means “special” or “privileged” has been used as the rationale for abusing Jews for thousands of years. This is like claiming that Jews are religiously permitted to murder Gentiles or that they eat children’s blood in matzah. It’s also flagrantly not true. “Chosen” in this sense means “singled out for extra responsibility”–that Jews have a greater obligation for piety and higher standards of behavior.
Furthermore, no one has done more work to theorize and explain the Holocaust (and the concept of genocide in general) than Jews. The greatest artists, thinkers, and historians around this subject have been Jews, many of whom were personally touched by the event. Here is an incomplete list of Jewish thinkers who have written brilliant and penetrating investigations of Nazi totalitarianism and the Holocaust: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Imre Kertesz, Aaron Applebaum, Emanuel Levinas, Anne Frank, Victor Frankl, Wilhelm Reich, Paul Celan. This is to say nothing of the Jewish lawyers, political scientists and genocide activists who brought the concept of “genocide” to the public’s attention and gave us the laws and language to address Rwanda, Bosnia, and other atrocities.
Jews do not think the Holocaust happened because “everyone is jealous of us.” Leave that strawman argument in the trash where it belongs. It’s dangerous for well-meaning people who have never met a Jew or who do not have the capacity to understand the enormity of the Holocaust to be told that this is the way things are.
Moving along, the author begins to become conscious of the idea of racial oppression:
As I grew older and began to build close friendships with kids of color – kids who were also treated like shit at school by students and teachers alike – it became clear to me what navigating the deepest dredges of oppression actually looked like.
Although things were pretty uncomfortable for me growing up in a culturally Christian town, as a person with white privilege, I could usually slide under the radar and avoid (at least) the most violent of scrutiny.
Congrats on realizing you were white. Anyway, I don’t disagree with this. As a light-skinned American Jew, I would never consider myself as “oppressed” as the Black people who live in my neighborhood. However, it sets up an paradigm that is not true for all Jews across time. The Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons camps were stateless. The Mizrahi Jews living in the Arab world were NEVER citizens of the countries they lived and were frequently subjected to discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and pogroms. Jews in the Soviet Union were murdered, imprisoned and chased out en masse. Many of these people ended up in Israel. They didn’t decide to move there because they thought it would be fun; they were forced by material circumstances beyond their control. It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim that your experience of being a white, American Jew is the norm. Anyone who actually talks to Jews instead of being a snotty dickhead about them will realize that the communities that are the most Zionistic tend to be the ones that live in precarity: Jews from Arab countries, the former Soviet Union, or Central and South America.
One day, in my pre-teen naiveté, I suggested to one of the rabbis at temple that since brown folks also seemed to be really abhorred by the world, maybe they, too, should be allowed to seek refuge and safety in Israel. His answer would begin the unraveling of a story that shifted my perspective forever. He looked down at me intently and said, “If they are not Jewish, they are of no concern to us.” In true Zionist fashion, he went on the usual tirade about “the unique and specific plight Jewish people have faced throughout history,” driving home the importance of spending our energies looking out for ourselves and each other before anybody else.
Everyone should be allowed to live in Israel, a country the size of New Jersey? You sound like you were kind of a dumb kid. Anyway, this is another example of attributing a monstrous quote to this rabbi who supposedly represents a “true Zionist.” No one believes this. This is an outrageous cartoon of what even the most right-wing Zionist believes. It’s also something that anti-semites used to smear and harass Jews. You will find this same shit spouted on neo-Nazi websites.
Like the author’s assertion about the Holocaust, it also just isn’t true. Jews were disproportionately represented in the American Civil Rights Movement and the fight to end South African Apartheid. Jewish anti-racism has a long and well-documented history.
As I got older, though, I learned that some of my (non-Jewish) friends also came from families with histories of displacement and mass genocide (Western expansion, the Trail of Tears, slavery and Jim Crow, to name a few). And yet nobody ever advocated for them to have a national homeland in order to ensure their safety.
No one but the Jews has ever advocated for national liberation/emancipation? Congrats on your knowledge of history and politics.
As a nation founded by mostly European settlers (Ashkenazi Jews), racism against Jews of color in Israel is also rampant. Discrimination against Arab Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews can be seen through Israel’s institutional policies, media portrayals, educational systems, immigration laws, housing and resource accessibility, and so on.
It is definitely clear that there is colorism in Israeli society and that certain groups have failed to assimilate. However, the author fails to mention that the group that is perhaps the most poorly-assimilated right now is Soviet Jews, who are the most recent batch of immigrants and who struggle to learn the language. They are also European and white.
The author also fails to mention that these “Jews of color,” particularly Mizrahi Jews, make up about 50 percent of Israel’s population and that they are strongly Zionistic. They have kept Likud in power and tend to be supportive of military solutions. The divide she speaks of between the “white settler Europeans” and the “Jews of color” is not as clear as she thinks it is, especially considering the number of “white settler Europeans” who came as refugees.
Zionism discourages Jews from participating in or identifying with broader global resistance movements and instead advocates for a focus on exclusive, insular protection at the expense of non-Jewish lives.
Again, which Zionists? Jews are still overrepresented in left-wing causes, including labor, women’s and LGBT rights, and anti-racism. They have been instrumental in two major anti-racist struggles since Israel’s founding: the American Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against South African Apartheid. In the US, Jews support liberal, leftist, and progressive political candidates at higher rates than the general population. At the same time, most Jews feel a connection to Israel and a feeling of good will towards it. They want Israel to survive as a Jewish state. Furthermore, most Jews do not support BDS. The majority of anti-Zionists would say that this makes them “Zionist.” How do you explain this contradiction? Where is your evidence of the Jewish people’s dying soul, other than a feeling you have about it?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a political problem. It is not a generic struggle between good and evil. “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” are not labels you can slap on to aggrandize yourself and aggrieve others. That Everyday Feminism avoids politics but chooses to take a stand on this issue should tell us something about how the conflict is singled out and depoliticized in the name of a generic idea of “anti-imperialism.” This does not help anyone. It only abstracts the issue further. I demand better. I demand more. I demand people who actually think about and understand this issue as a material, political reality and not people who think having an opinion about it makes them cool.
