Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews

by David L. Bernstein

The Reut Group—an Israeli think tank that closely monitors and analyzes ideological trends in the US—popularized the term “erasive anti-Semitism” in March 2021, referring to “a de-facto undermining of the Jewish narrative of self-determination.” According to Reut, erasive anti-Semitism negates the rights of Jews—individually or collectively—to define their identity, experience, and vulnerability. Reut regards it as largely an “unintended consequence of contemporary progressive discourse,” and argues that current Progressive discourse distorts the historic and lived experience of Jews, who are “cast uniformly as powerful white oppressors.” Unlike other forms of discrimination, according to Reut, this strain of woke ideology does not single out Jews. Rather, it indiscriminately lumps them within the dominant majority. This effectively erases the Jewish voice in defining Jewish identity. Reut points out: “There is a marginal fringe that purposefully advances anti-Jewish and anti-Israel agendas utilizing its tenets and continues to amass influence on the left.”103 In a powerful article in Sapir in Spring 2021, Pamela Paresky wrote, “Race is the locus of power in the critical social justice worldview, which holds that the dominant group—white people—will, when it serves their interests, conditionally invite minority groups into ‘whiteness.’” According to this paradigm, light-skinned Jews can benefit from whiteness by shedding Jewish ethnic markers and are thus granted “conditio...

those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to.”

In a January 2021 episode of the TV program The View, Whoopi Goldberg stated that the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged her, arguing that the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Goldberg replied, “But these are two white groups of people.”

While there’s no reason to believe that Goldberg harbors ill will toward Jewish people, this sordid affair demonstrates how the whiteness/people of color binary can be turned into an anti-Jewish canard.

But here’s the thing about ideology: it continually outdoes itself and spawns more radical claims.

This was by no means the first time “Jewish privilege” popped up in the public square: it had been circulating in the cultural ether for several years by the time #JewishPrivilege appeared. In April 2016, a debate erupted in the Stanford University Senate over a resolution condemning antisemitism. The controversy revolved around comments made by a student senator who denied it was antisemitic to claim Jews control the media, banks, etc. Lost in the outcry was a supposedly less blatant canard offered up by other students that “some stressed the importance of understanding the intersection of ‘white power’ and ‘Jewish power’ before voting on the resolution,” reported the Stanford Review.109 In other words, it was not ok to use the rightwing, white supremacist idiom naming specific institutions that Jews supposedly control, but it was ok to use the progressive idiom

making strikingly similar claims. One can see how a slight change in language allows antisemites to say roughly the same thing.

Mazzig and others may have successfully stemmed the tide on Twitter in that one instance, but the connection between “Jewish” and “privilege” is nevertheless etched into the neural pathways of the public mind and will remain so as long as the idea of linking identity to privilege holds cultural currency.

The term “Jewish privilege” implies that just by being Jewish (as opposed to being perceived as white) one obtains certain benefits in a white supremacist society. This is both absurd and outrageous, not to mention dangerous to Jews.

Discrimination that produces equity, Kendi assures us, is anti-racist.

Moreover, according to noted Black economist at Brown University, Glenn Loury—in a May 2021 discussion with Bari Weiss titled “Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism Collide”—the notion of equity can generate resentment against successful groups. Loury stated that “One consequence of a fixation on group disparities understood to be the necessary consequence of oppression or racism is that the groups that do well will come under suspicion. Their success will be thought to be the flip side of the disadvantage of the groups that do poorly. If African Americans are underrepresented in this or that venue because of systemic racism, and Jews are let’s say overrepresented in those very same venues, how can it be otherwise but that the over-representation of the Jews is somehow the bitter fruit, the necessary consequence of that very system of oppression that excludes African Americans?…. That de-legitimation of the success of groups that do well is very very dangerous. It strikes me that it does fuel resentment and envy and a kind of antipathy that can easily express itself in violence.”

Conventional concepts of merit are under attack by some Critical Legal Scholars, Critical Race Theorists, and radical feminists. These critics contend that “merit” is only a social construct designed to maintain the power of dominant groups. This Article challenges the reductionist view that merit has no meaning except as a tool for those in power to perpetuate the existing social order. The authors observe that certain traditionally oppressed groups, most notably Jews and Asian Americans, are disproportionately represented in some desirable economic and educational positions. They have in that sense “succeeded” beyond the