Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews

by David L. Bernstein

I shared my observation that varied Progressive student groups were beginning to connect their causes. Each of them now featured a fixed sense of oppressor and oppressed. Feminist, Black, and LGBT activists were expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. During the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, signs reading “From Ferguson to Palestine” began to appear. Tweets from Palestinian activists stating “it is always the oppressed standing with the oppressed” were retweeted hundreds of thousands of times. A video produced by BLM activists likening the Black lives cause to the Palestinian cause went viral. “That’s called intersectionality,” a Georgetown University student named Max stated matter-of-factly. “And it really scares me, because there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do or say to influence the thinking of the students who buy into it.” I vaguely remembered studying “intersectionality” in graduate school: this term was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, to describe a framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.37 It was originally a legal framework that was meant to address a loophole in the law that let companies off the hook for discriminating against Black women, who were not a distinct protected class. But it soon became much more. Intersectionality holds that a person who is, for example, both Black and female