WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS FUCKING DO THIS
First of all, reacting to Neo-Nazis attacking another minority group by saying “Yeah, but what have these people done for me? Why should I care about them?” is not only morally shitty on basic human level, but also incredibly dangerous, as such reactions effectively serve to empower white supremacists. Silence and indifference to right-wing violence against a minority group equals tacit support for their actions. You cannot care about bigotry and white nationalism “some of the time” - either you care about it in all forms all the time, or you tacitly support it.
Now, I will not for one second deny that every single community outside of the black community has issues with anti-blackness. There is no disputing that fact, and the Jewish community is no exception to that rule. But, that being said, when compared to other groups throughout our history, Jews in America have had a disproportionately strong turnout when it comes to supporting civil rights efforts. For example:
In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders to found the NAACP.
Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975.
Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Southern Leadership Conference.
From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and twenty black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald.
Jewish activist and songwriter Abel Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s famous anti-racism song about the horrors of lyching.
Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, including Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two Jewish Civil Rights activists, who were murdered alongside their peer James Chaney, in a famous case that came to be known as the “Mississippi Burning” lynching.
Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was located in the RAC’s building.
More recently, there have specifically been Jewish marches with/and or in support of BLM, such as these:
Groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights have been outspoken in support for BLM.
There have been nation-wide campaigns to include BLM in our holiday celebrations, such as these:
Personally, my synagogue made a call to action in support of BLM on our two holiest days of year, and read out the name of every black person murdered by police in the past year before we recited an annual prayer regarding how we hope to be sealed in the Book of Life for the coming year, and we also had a program on ending mass incarceration as part of your Yom Kippur services.
Again, I am in no way saying that anti-blackness is not an issue within the Jewish community, because it certainly can be, and these acts do not absolve that in any way, but as a mixed-race person who has spent her entire life attending both Jewish and South Asian cultural events, I can say, unequivocallly, that racial justice has been far more prominent in my Jewish events and activities than my Desi ones by lightyears, yet I’ve never seen anybody say they’ll only care about the racism experienced by South Asians when they “speak up” as a community.
People always have this weird idea that American Jews are really conservative and “don’t do enough for social justice” even though we are basically the founders of American leftism. We are the second most liberal voting block in the United States after African-Americans and 76% of us voted against Trump.
Again, we are not perfect, and like every other non-black group, we need to hold ourselves accountable and work even harder to eradicate anti-blackness in our ranks, (especially for the sake of black Jews), but to act like the American Jewish community is some conservative monolith that doesn’t ever take any action is not only extremely factually incorrect, but also dangerous. When you believe these lies about Jewish people and single us out for being worse than other minorities, it only emboldens the white supremacists who hate us and makes them stronger, and that’s dangerous for us all.
Stop letting racism by proxy thrive and start learning about how we can all do better at supporting one another to stop white supremacy.
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