ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Anti-Semitism In Anti-Whiteness. Whoopi Goldberg just brought it out into the open:
Whoopi’s gaffe helps explain why the mainstream media now describes young black men assaulting Jews and Asians as expressing … “white supremacy”! This is what the WaPo op-ed page, referring to growing Latino support for Trump, called “multiracial whiteness.” If they are non-white and bigots, they miraculously become white. And notice how bigotry is exclusively ascribed to a single “race”: whites. Without whites, we’d have no racism at all.
This is not the only way critical theorists distinguish anti-Semitism from racism. “Whiteness,” disproportionately including Jewishness, is wrapped up in systems of oppression, especially capitalism, and defined by control of money and power. Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility that “white supremacy” exists in mainstream America by noting how many “white people” there were in various positions of power in 2017:
Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world). US Congress: 90 percent white. US governors: 96 percent white. Top military advisers: 100 percent white. President and vice president: 100 percent white. US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white. Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white. People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white. People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white. People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white. People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white.
She goes on to emphasize Hollywood’s influence, in particular. Now just put the word “Jewish” where the word “white” is, and her list reads a bit differently, doesn’t it: “People who decide which books we read: 90 percent Jewish. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent Jewish.” It’s an assertion that one race hoards power, controls the media, and directs the culture, a race so powerful it permeates everything. Sound a little familiar?
In her 1998 book, “How Jews Became White Folks,” Karen Brodkin argued that, as America diversified racially, a form of Jewish whiteness emerged “by contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.” (Just like Asians today!) In this worldview, Jewish success, like immigrant success, is never earned by merit, but won by attaching itself to “whiteness.” And so Jewish and Asian success is viewed as both rigged and zero-sum — taking away from the achievements of black Americans — when, of course, it’s non-zero-sum, and takes away nothing.
In a 2018 piece on anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights, the Forward’s Ari Feldman noted that “black people identify Judaism as ‘a form of almost hyper-whiteness,’ according to Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center … in that regard, Griffith said, the attacks may be an extension of animosity toward white people in general, who drive gentrification in Brooklyn.” Ressentiment is a powerful force, and anti-Semitism is often bound up in it.
In California’s proposed mandatory class in critical race theory, for example, one original curriculum question was “How did the Holocaust shift Jewish Americans’ position in American society?” The correct answer was: “gained conditional whiteness.” Yes, this is the upshot of the mass murder of millions of Jews, according to CRT: it gave them a leg-up in America! There are times when parochialism truly blinds.