Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews

by David L. Bernstein

I realized that these staffers were looking at an organizational problem through a binary social justice lens in which the powerful are always wrong and the powerless are always right. The blind reflex exercise, in their view, was not a call for their bosses to share power as I intended, but rather an assault on their worldview in which the oppressor class—the bosses of society—cause all social ills. The discussion got so heated that eventually I abandoned the whole exercise and, with it, a framework that was meant to give younger employees more control over their work; I allowed these young staffers to have their way. In retrospect, I now see how

organizations like the ACLU, through repeated capitulation, can be captured by young ideologues. They repeatedly complain, and the organization folds. But I later realized that these young staffers may have had a point in one respect: The Dance of the Blind Reflex was indeed an apt metaphor for what was happening in society at large, not just in organizational life. In American society, the “Tops” and “Bottoms” do in fact conspire to deprive the Bottoms of agency. Woke ideologues claim to see the system not as a dance, but rather as a fully scripted play wherein the Bottoms have little if any agency. The ideologues paradoxically play out their role as Tops, discouraging the Bottoms from exercising agency. Oshry’s solution to the problem was to generate greater awareness of system dynamics so that the dancers—Top and Bottom—could end this toxic dance. At the societal level, woke ideologues and policy-makers conspire to keep it going.

I later came to understand that—like other privileged ethnicities, such as Asian Americans—many Jews were “white adjacent.” We were expected to acknowledge our complicity in white supremacy.

But seeing that same fervor arise during what I understood as a political program confused me, until I realized that the call to be woke was, in fact, a profession of faith. To be woke was to see the light of racial domination and all that it entailed. I felt like I was witnessing a religious revival in service of a new spiritual, political and social movement.43 Woke ideology sees itself not merely as a social movement to end racism but as a complete worldview that supersedes the existing white supremacist order. The ideology has its own internal logic, its own vocabulary, its own history, philosophy, and conception of morality and law. And, like all religions, woke ideology embodies a dogma that rebukes all challenges. From what I saw, woke ideology insists that only Black people have the right to enunciate Black experiences and claims against society, and that everyone else must abide by their pronouncements. To get in the good graces of the Black activists, it seemed, everyone would have to adopt these pieties. It turns out that many Progressives were eager to be in their good graces.

Woke ideology prescribes only one voice and thus forces two choices: adopt the ideology or be part of the problem.

“It’s the harm, not the intent, that matters,” she stated a matter-of-factly. I had already run into this latest woke moral platitude about harm vs. intent. In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explain, “Some activists say that bigotry is only about impact, as they define impact. Intent is not even necessary. If a member of an identity group feels offended or oppressed by the action of another person, then…that other person is guilty of an act of bigotry.”

A colleague of mine who worked for a Jewish organization told me of the blowback he experienced in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing: “We issued a very strong public statement condemning the George Floyd murder. We said all the right things and specifically cited the role of systemic racism. But I’ve been getting incredible flack because we didn’t involve a Jew of color in the drafting of the statement.” “Apparently,” I responded, “Jewish organizations are no longer allowed to even say all the right things without a Jew of color helping them say

them.” In this new racial reckoning, white people lacked legitimacy to speak on matters of race.

Cancellation became a regular feature of social discourse. It occurs in tiny increments, in “micro-cancellations”—subtle, everyday tactics that shut people down. Micro-cancellations short-circuit authentic self-expression and result in fear-invoked self-censorship. More so than the high profile acts we hear about on the Bill Maher show, micro-cancellations—the subtle rebukes, the sneering rhetoric, the pervasive snark, the critiques not of argument but of character—generate the fetid “culture” in “cancel culture.” How did all of this censoriousness come about? In the highly emotional moment following the Floyd murder, those already advocating for a racial reckoning aggressively intervened in societal institutions. Longstanding demands for “action” were finally met. Commitments were made to do things differently. The Equity Review was set into motion. The DEI program that the CEO never wanted was placed on the calendar. The anti-racist audit was conducted. New people were hired to make sure that the organization lived up to its myriad commitments, and people in power deferred to these voices on matters of diversity. Shrill voices on social media were now unencumbered. Demands that people were fired led to people actually getting fired without so much as a hearing. This all provided a permission structure for a kind of incessant bullying by progressive activists.

So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position.

Grim’s account is exactly what I observed in the progressive Jewish world—young woke employees taking over and sidetracking the organization’s work.

If the primary goal of the coalition was indeed reforming the system, then coalition members should not care a whit

about what another coalition member thought about white supremacy, only what the person was willing to do to advance the criminal justice cause. I realized right then that much of the progressive coalition work had become more committed to applying ideological litmus tests than to addressing real world problems.

In the Fall of 2020, a leading figure among Jews of color told my colleagues and me that we should stop using the term “Black-Jewish relations” because the term suggests a false binary, that being Jewish means not being Black. “What should we call this work then,” I asked? “That’s for you to figure out,” she said, a common refrain from woke ideologues putting the onus back on the non-marginalized person.

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...

off but cannot hear others or make themselves heard. So, like the Tower, the current leadership would collapse. And maybe, I thought, that was precisely what they had in mind in relentlessly challenging the language. Whatever the case, I was growing weary of all the chaos, the demands for deference, the micro-cancellations. Increasingly I yearned—like the signatories of the Harper’s letter—to stand up for open and free discourse and to fight this ideological scourge, not to pretend that I supported it.

She wrote about “a small group of Black intellectuals (such as John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Kmele Foster, Chloe Valdary, Glenn Loury, and Coleman Hughes) who are leading a counter-culture against the newly hegemonic wokeness.”60

“The Jewish community right now is in a crisis of moral authority around race,” she told me. “They have lost the idea of what it means to be a Jew. And the reason is in anti-racism work—the critical race theory model—there’s no objective sense of morality. They replaced morality with power. Powerlessness has become the moral position of our time, which is evidenced by belonging to a marginalized group. And what this means is that a person who has more power, who is less marginalized, no longer has the right to a moral position in society. That right has to be ceded to a person with less power. That means that Jews, 92 percent of whom, according to the latest

Pew study, identify as white, feel that they no longer have the right to their own moral position. I totally reject that. Our job as Jews is to distinguish right from wrong.”

Now, when I think of what success would look like in restoring sanity to Jewish institutions and others, I invoke the “McWhorter Test”: would an organization be able to invite Black heterodox thinker and New York Times columnist John McWhorter to speak on issues of race and not get canceled? If and when the answer is yes, we will have made progress.

Missing from the angry chants was a vision for a better, more humane society—the very hallmark of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

I fully agreed with the message of the spoof: an equity regime would produce a drive to the bottom that wouldn’t serve anyone, especially the people on the lowest socio-economic rung. Interestingly, according to Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, one of today’s greatest living Jewish theologians, the Kendi version of equity is at odds with the Jewish tradition. He wrote in Sapir—a Jewish journal of ideas—in Spring 2021: On one hand, the Torah repeatedly warns about injustice to the poor: “You shall not pervert judgment of the poor in his cause” (Exodus 23:6)…On the other hand, one must not pursue justice through unjust means: “You shall not favor a poor man in his cause [unjustly]” (Exodus 23:3); and “you shall not do unrighteousness in judgment [or policy]” (Leviticus 19:15). The Torah is warning against twisting our basic moral code on behalf of the oppressed. We cannot compromise our principles to assert that the oppressed are just regardless of their behavior, simply because of their identity. Their race, gender, past colonial status, membership in a marginalized group, and so forth, do not a priori make their cause right and all opposition to it wrong. Where a free society ought to engage in policy debates, we instead find ourselves in the midst of quasi-religious battles between good and evil. Already in a politically fraught predicament, I did not share my impression of the Equity cartoon with the Board members. Instead, I argued that the equity concept runs counter to the tradi...

A man emboldened by my last reply then asked me skeptically: “What do you think of this idea of systemic racism?” I answered: “I think there are still places in American life with deeply embedded racism. However,” I paused, then stated slowly, “there is a difference between saying there is systemic racism in America, and saying that America is systemically racist.”

Cancel culture sounds like it would be a raucous affair. But its primary sound is silence.

I later learned that because the mainstream press refuses to cover them, liberals and moderates who are critical of Progressive ideology often end up on conservative media outlets, only to be slammed by Progressives for getting coverage where they can.

Luria’s comment was a classical expression of standpoint epistemology—the idea that knowledge is derived from one’s position in the power hierarchy.

Invalidating someone’s opinion based on their perceived place in the intersectional hierarchy—their “positionality”—is, in fact, the ideological foundation of cancel culture. Mainstream Jews, as well, have not been immune from making standpoint claims in defining antisemitism for society. Popular Jewish writer Sarah Tuttle-Singer, for example, tweeted, “Here is a complete and comprehensive list of the people who get to decide what is or isn’t anti-Semitic: 1. Jews.” They’re wrong to do so as well.

Woke ideology is a radical’s pathway to power. As we’ve seen repeatedly over the decades, woke ideology picks up steam when moderate ideologues pave the way for more extreme ideologues, and moderate illiberalism gives rise to more extreme illiberalism. Not only are such standpoint claims illiberal, they’re also divorced from reality. First, not all “marginalized” voices agree with each other. For example, Black people—like all people—are politically diverse. According to Pew Research, more than 60 percent of Black people oppose affirmative action in higher education.72 The vast majority aren’t woke. The woke notion of “making space” tends to mean platforming minority voices that reflect progressive pieties and ignoring or pillorying all the rest. Second, marginalized people—like all people—are sometimes wrong. Some impart earth-shattering truths while others spread lies and become bullies and predators themselves. Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. As a Jewish person who has experienced antisemitism, I have insight into Jew-hatred that others should listen to. But I cannot

Third, insisting that large swaths of people take a back seat to others is not a sustainable moral or political undertaking. The polling on woke ideology is clear: large majorities of all age groups, races, genders, and religions abhor it.73 By making itself so unpopular, Progressive ideology actually makes government less progressive. Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves on issues of race and racism engenders resentment, which in turn gets expressed on Election Day in the privacy of the ballot box. Finally, once you adopt someone else’s prepackaged reality, you’ve outsourced your values to a third party who may make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior down the line that you will feel compelled to defend. Numerous Jewish organizations have done just that, a subject I will return to later.

Most of its adherents are insisting CRT is the only valid way of understanding social and economic disparities, which prevents genuine dialogue that considers alternative views.

About an hour after I put it up, and scores of comments later, the page’s administrators removed it without explanation. I conjured two possible explanations: First, the administrators all felt that anyone who raised concerns about the woke “anti-racist” perspective taught to kids must be inherently racist; Ibram X. Kendi had spoken, and we must all fall in line—in which case, I despaired over the future of Jewish education. Second, the administrators had received complaints that my criticisms of DEI made the space “unsafe” for participants. This, of course, meant

that the administrators had to silence anyone with a different point of view so that others could feel safe. This is the “heckler’s veto”: a few shrill voices who protest a particular viewpoint can make spineless institutions fall in line and stifle discourse. If that was the case, I again despaired over the future of Jewish education. Our kids should be educated in a cultural sensibility that values Makhloket Leshem Shamayim: “arguments for the sake of heaven.” This sensibility welcomes—even encourages—debate among thinkers with different points of view. The Jewish penchant to question and engage in intellectual discourse is a central attribute of Jewish tradition. Why would anyone, least of all Jewish educators, try to blot it out? Don’t we want our kids to be critical thinkers and challenge the status quo?

Whether or not one calls these various occurrences—and I could cite many more—“cancel culture” is beside the point. They are evidence of a stifling, censorious and ideologically charged environment that flies in the face of the Jewish value of “arguments for the sake of heaven” and classical liberal values. They polarize our discourse and alienate many Jews from the Jewish enterprise. They make it more difficult to address problems in and out of the Jewish world and hamper the innovative spirit. “You can’t have big and bold ideas if people can’t say what they think,”81 stated Felicia Herman, Maimonides Fund COO and managing editor of Sapir. “We all need space to be tentative, to be wrong and change our minds, to wonder, to explore,” stated the signatories of the Rabbis’ Letter. Today’s muzzled discourse prevents such creativity. Even more concerning: these ideological predilections are being baked into Jewish organizational life.

In 2013, the writer Matt Bruenig coined the term “identitarian deference” (ID) to describe the concept that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals, especially on topics relevant to those individuals’ oppression.” If standpoint epistemology theorizes that marginalized people have special insight into oppression, and thus the singular authority to define that oppression for the rest of society, then identitarian deference is the expression of standpoint doctrine in the behavior of institutions. Jewish organizations—like other institutions—often defer to people with lived experience, mostly people of color with a Progressive political orientation, and young Jews whose delicate

sensibilities—conventional wisdom has it—require constant, unequivocal validation, lest they leave the Jewish fold in droves. Bruenig argues that ID has become “so pervasive and so universally accepted in the liberal discourse that most commentators don’t even seem capable of putting their finger on it. Instead, when ID generates abhorrent results, as it so often does, the liberal commentariat ends up grasping in the dark and then discussing a totally different topic.”82 “The challenge with Identitarianism,” Bruenig states, is “to figure out which oppressed voices to defer to.” Bruenig points out that based on polls or surveys alone, it’s often impossible to determine which Black/Latino/Asian American person to listen to: “Individuals in a particular oppressed group are not a monolith, and therefore necessarily disagree with one another.” Pew Research Center polls show that even among Democrats, Blacks and Latinos are less likely to describe themselves as liberal than whites. An AP/NORC poll shows that the majority of Blacks are moderate (44 percent) or conservative (27 percent), and just 26 percent identify as liberal. As a result, Bruenig argues, most organizations just cherry-pick Black voices who will give the organization the political cover they are seeking. “What you can do,” Bruenig observes, “is just figure out what you want to believe, and then find someone within the appropriate oppressed group who believes as you do. Then say that you are deferring to their voi...

doesn’t reflect the preferred consensus, and lift up that monolithic voice as both standard bearer and moral authority on all matters relating to race. The impulse to defer to Progressive voices among people of color follows the pattern of another trend on the contemporary Jewish scene. The theory goes that if American Jewish life is to survive, the Jewish community needs to understand the “target audience”—young Jews—and design Jewish life around their social and political preferences. I don’t altogether disagree with this mode of thinking: demographic and market research have their place in constructing experiences for younger Jews and other segments of the population. The...

Moreover, young people in general are not nearly as progressive as people think.—according to one poll, Gen Z—born mid-90s to 2010 or so—–is less likely to support cancel culture than all other age groups.

Yet Jewish organizations have largely essentialized the voices of young Jews, just as they have Jews of color. They then use this slice of the younger demographic to design programming for all with a decided Progressive political bent.

optimism. If politics is downstream from culture, as the old saying goes, then institutional change is far, far downstream from politics.

First, an act of identitarian deference, such as hiring a new DEI coordinator or team, and giving them total autonomous control over the organization’s DEI efforts. Second, one or a series of mandatory DEI trainings that prescribe the one true way to understand race and racism in American society. These DEI programs can serve a ritualistic purpose—not unlike a Bar or Bat Mitzvah—of inscribing members into the fold. No one objects—no one is allowed to object—so everyone must be on board. Third, in all its public pronouncements and programming, the organization adheres to the one acceptable point of view on matters of race, racism, and social disparities. This third indicator is particularly conspicuous in Jewish public policy organizations with a tradition of debating controversial issues; they cease debating and pretend there’s only one legitimate viewpoint and that the issues are settled in the public or Jewish mind, when, in fact, there isn’t, and they aren’t.

But many more, like Emily Curtis, a Biden voter, simply expressed disagreement, finding it “deeply worrying that the school system is using terms such as white supremacy and systemic racism,” which, she fears, “will trickle through to the classroom, dividing children into racial groups and teaching them that their race decides their fate.”

The organization must not simultaneously argue for a fixed hierarchy of privilege in society with whites at the top, while it fights antisemitism that emanates from malevolent activists who insist that Jews are white and at the very pinnacle of power, oppressing other minorities. The ADL seems to have entirely missed the obvious connection between the spread of illiberal ideology on the left and the growth of a new variant of Progressive antisemitism that insists that Jews are all-powerful and oppressive.

Insisting that there is a fixed relationship between “identity and bias and power” legitimizes and encourages bad actors to assert a relationship between Jewish identity and power—a classical antisemitic trope. Well-meaning though they may be, such assertions coming from ADL professionals inevitably fuel notions of Jewish power and privilege. Unless and until the ADL stops insisting on a rigid hierarchy of privilege and power, the organization will be fighting on both sides of the war on antisemitism.

Like the participants in the forums on school boards, ADL educational programs, and the Reform movement’s white affinity groups, today’s Jewish students are hearing only one side of the issues. They are taught to dismiss millions of Americans who look at the issues differently, without so much as wondering where the differers get their ideas. Jewish organizations hitherto known for their openness to varied points of view, disputatiousness, and commitment to critical thinking, have taken the leap of faith into identitarian deference. They’ve ended the debate. The only thing left to do is share the good news with an ever-growing percentage of their minions (and minyans). They don’t realize that they’ve signed up for an ideology that is guaranteed to foment antisemitism. Ironically, Jewish woke adherents are complicit—not in white supremacy, but in unilaterally disarming the Jewish community in the fight against antisemitism and sapping the community’s resolve.

Is woke ideology inherently antisemitic? You may be surprised to know that I don’t think it is. There is nothing inherently antisemitic about, for example, linking identity to privilege. But there is plenty of dogma in doing so when, for example, proponents insist that being white and male automatically bestows advantage in every context while being Black and female likewise automatically confers disadvantage. Sometimes, those immutable characteristics are, as claimed, advantages or disadvantages. Sometimes, however, a supposed disadvantage can become an advantage, and vice versa. Often, in life’s varied circumstances, such identities make little difference whatsoever. It’s both dogmatic and dangerous to insist that identity is a proxy for oppression and privilege, and to bully others into acquiescence, thereby creating an opportunity for more radical actors—the haters, who are always looking for an excuse —to make a more radical claim linking Jewish identity to privilege. Moreover, Jews fare better in open, liberal environments, and less well in closed, illiberal environments. According to the writer Dara Horn, “Since ancient times, in every place they have

ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds.”96 A society that begins to make it harder for people to express their beliefs is an ominous indicator that the society could turn on its Jews. There is nothing inherent about illiberalism spawning antisemitism, but there is—given Jewish history—something inevitable about it. Linking identity to privilege doesn’t automatically lead to linking Jewish identity to “Jewish privilege,” but that is where such linkages invariably end up: Jewish privilege is a mere half-step from white privilege. British-born writer Andrew Sullivan similarly points out that vilifying “whiteness” leads to vilifying Jews. “If you replace the word ‘whiteness’ with ‘Jewishness,’” Sullivan says, “this kind of demonizing rhetoric could be straight from a Nazi textbook. It identifies a racial group, it attaches evil characteristics to it, it ascribes those characteristics to individuals within that group, and it sees their success as won at the direct expense of others. The logic of anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism blur, over time, into the same thing.”97 Bishop Talbert Swan, a prominent Christian religious figure and a local NAACP President, tweeted on May 2022, “Whiteness is an unrelenting, demonic force of e...

already does. The disparagement of whites doesn’t have to lead to the disparagement of Jews, but Sullivan is nevertheless correct that this connection has begun to be made and will likely continue in the future. There is a reason people make such connections so readily. Even when antisemitism is pushed to the margins of society—held in check by seemingly sturdy guardrails of public discourse—it’s never far from public view. For thousands of years, the same conspiracy theories, the same disdain, and the same impulse to scapegoat has coursed through Western and non-Western societies alike. Deborah Lipstadt states, “[T]hough its outer form may evolve over time, its essence remains the same. It’s not unlike a stubborn infection. Medication may alleviate the symptoms, but the infection itself lies dormant and may reemerge at an opportune moment in a new incarnation.”98 And when the guardrails of public discourse begin to wobble, when the terms of discussion change and create an opening—a permission structure—antisemitism can come back with a roar. In the name of “justice,” woke ideology provides just such a permission structure by legitimizing portrayals of peop...

I have studied media coverage of that ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict: December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018. Up until recently, media coverage—both news and opinion—unfolded in a predictable pattern: the stories and editorials acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when this latest round occurred—even in the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt and was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. The social media was even worse. “If you’ve been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial, “When Wokeness Comes for Israel,” in May 2021. “It certainly makes for worse Instagram posts. ‘Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED,’ one viral Instagram post reads. ‘There is no “fighting,” there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid.’”

What changed in this latest round? Certainly not the conditions on the ground in the Middle East. A close look at nearly every bout of fighting reveals that Hamas’ leadership needed a violent escalation to stay in power in the face of an increasingly disgruntled Gaza population and civil service. What changed was the ideological environment in the US—namely, the ascendance of woke ideology. “What’s new,” states Ungar-Sargon, “is the ubiquity of such (woke) discourse in mainstream American media. In the past, we didn’t see ‘Israel’s Colonialist Project’ in Washington Post headlines, nor did MSNBC insist that ‘The latest Israel-Palestine crisis isn’t a “real estate dispute.” It’s ethnic cleansing.’” Ungar-Sargon continues, “Wokeness is a poor enough lens for understanding our own problems here in the U.S. Its distortions are even worse when it comes to the Middle East.”

“White supremacy” applied to the Israel-Palestinian conflict? Where have I heard that term before? Oppressor v. Oppressed is always the default orientation of the woke left, whose ideologues equate power with depravity and powerlessness with virtue. Through this bifurcated lens, the “weak” Palestinians are the perennial victims, and the “strong” Israelis are the perennial victimizers, with no room anywhere for nuance of any kind. Some woke Progressives go further and see successful Jews as oppressors of other minorities and even of poor whites, shading into rightwing antisemitism of the type generated by the KKK. Thus does an ideology that consists of simplistic thinking lend itself to simplistic thinking about Jews and Israel.