Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews

by David L. Bernstein

The fact that certain people’s identities straddle boundaries doesn’t mean that the boundaries don’t exist or aren’t useful. The false dichotomy is not “Black-Jewish,” it’s the idea that Black-Jewish relations and Black Jews are mutually exclusive concepts. This concern about Black Jews struck me not so much as a legitimate gripe by a marginalized person as it did a power grab by someone trying to buck the supposed white-Jewish establishment. Was the woke preoccupation with language, I wondered, a genuine expression of support for marginalized people, or a cynical word game meant to delegitimize the system of “white supremacy”? After all, woke ideology is the practical application of postmodernism, a mode of thought that blurs boundaries as a means of tearing down power structures. Maybe woke ideologues deal in such word games not to prevent the erasure of Black Jews, but instead to disrupt a perceived white power structure. If Jewish communal leaders can’t use the term Black-Jewish relations, then we can’t do Black-Jewish relations; if we can’t do Black-Jewish relations, then we can’t perform the organization’s mission. Maybe the words weren’t the problem, but I and others like me—males in charge—were the problem, and disrupting us was the point. If everything we said in addressing social issues was constantly “problematized”—that is, if we were constantly subjected to the specious postmodern practice of finding and exaggerating problems in discourses—then eventually we w...