I got into a fight with a friend once about whether or not I was a white girl. He had a point in claiming that I had to be: my skin is what people politely call porcelain, and my family hails from a typical mélange of northeastern European countries—Russia and Poland, Ireland, England. “I move through the world like a white girl, “ I told him. “I get all of the privileges accorded to them. But I’m not white, actually. What I am is Jewish.” I think about it often, because it was a rare kind of fight: a useful one. It forced both of us to clarify positions that were not, in fact, contradictory but ultimately complemented one another. He wanted me to remember that everyone who sees me sees me as white. And I needed to remind myself and him that precisely because this is true I have to be on my guard, always, against getting comfortable with the power that whiteness accords me—both because it is violent power, always being exercised at someone else’s expense, and because though I have it now, it may not always be mine to keep. If the recent election has demonstrated anything, it is how tempting it is for marginalized groups to cozy up to people in power, even when those people pose them a specific threat. My white female friends and I were saddened but not surprised to hear that we were in the minority among our demographic: only 47% of us had voted for Hillary Clinton, with the lion’s share of the remainder going to a man who had been caught bragging on tape about sexual assault. The women who voted for Trump had aligned themselves with an abuser in the hope that this would keep them from being abused; they had bought into the lie that if they acted like they were not women, they might not be treated like women, either. So I should not have been surprised when Jewish groups like AIPAC failed to denounce Donald Trump’s selection of Steve Bannon as an advisor, a man with clear ties to extremists who label themselves “alt-right” to avoid their proper name of neo-Nazis. It was an attempt to align themselves with an abuser in order to avoid being abused, to make nice with the men in power in the hope that they could be flattered and charmed into forgetting their hatred of us. It was the product of the racism that is the inheritance of every American but which, for Jews specifically, is compounded by a lifetime of being told to see the future of the our people and ancestral homeland as endangered by the continued existence of the Arab world. And it was a move undergirded by the deep-seated fear that has drilled into post-Holocaust Jewish heads from day one: that we are and always have been a persecuted people. That we must be concerned, first and foremost, with how we will save ourselves. Like most Jews of my generation, I was raised in a Holocaust-heavy curriculum that started with Number the Stars in the third grade and culminated in a full year of religious school dedicated to the topic in eighth. I find our communal obsession with this history both understandable and exhaustingly, upsettingly macabre—I get why we do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish we would stop. I’ve always been able to accept it, though, as long as Jews could also look past the history of our own suffering and oppression to see that we are surrounded every day by suffering and oppression—that we understand “never again” not as a warning against future danger, but a rallying cry to present work. And so it has been particularly devastating, in a time where every day brings devastating news, to watch the legacy of the Holocaust used as a justification to support a regime so deeply, violently, obviously, proudly racist that it seems likely to encourage Holocaust-style and scale atrocity. To witness conservative, pro-Israel American Jewry react to Donald Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon with the complicity of silence is to understand viscerally that having endured your own suffering does not make you compassionate. It just makes you scared. I have never related to the idea of the Jews as a chosen people, perhaps because I was born into an interfaith family—my mother converted eventually, but not until I was twelve. Instead what I have always loved about the religion is that it has allowed me to choose it: that it asks us to choose it in action and deed, minute and mundane, every single day, just as much as in faith and prayer on the holy ones. I was born white but I try to choose to be Jewish: to believe that it is my work to help put a broken world back together, and that if being vulnerable teaches me anything, it is that it is my particular work to stand in solidarity with those even more vulnerable than I. And at a moment when I need my faith and my tradition most of all, it is gutting to know that so much of our community is abandoning its core value of the justice, justice, we have been commanded to pursue. If I believe we were chosen for anything, it is not adulation or exemption but instead the holy action of work—that since such a good teaching has been given to us, it is our sacred duty to live by its principles, instead of being governed by our animal fears. We are in a precarious position now, the Jewish people, in which many of us can turn towards our whiteness and the history of selfishness and exploitation that the label entails; we can try to get close to people in power who know to be vicious, and live on the prayer that they don’t turn their viciousness onto us when they are done with other victims. We can call ourselves chosen, and use it as an excuse to choose ourselves. Or we can choose to turn towards our Jewish history, and remember that we, too, have been othered and oppressed, and that what this means is that it is our work as a people to do everything in power to make sure it doesn’t happen to us but also to anyone else ever, ever again.
