My Adventure in Identity Politics

My adventure begins with a group read of two books by my congregation--first, of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and, second, of Jim Wallis' America's Original Sin.  It was Fall 2016, and my congregation was confronting the apparent disproportionate shooting of black people in America, particularly black men, by the police.

I say "apparent" since, as Wallis makes clear, we have no statistics.  We do have data on arrests, convictions and incarcerations, but not on police violence. We don't know whether the shootings of black men are what is happening disproportionately or whether we have begun disproportionately noticing the shootings of black men.  Yes, I know what we are seeing, but it takes data to go from appearances to the actuality of what is happening.

Not only are reactions by police subject to unconscious bias, but our perceptions in general are subject to bias. There is confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as supporting what we already believe. There is the availability heuristic: a mental shortcut that biases our judgment of a topic's importance based on how easily the topic comes to mind. Another common source of bias is that people's preferences influence what they believe: the so-called affect heuristic. We become convinced of the benefits of the positions we favor, while seeing only the costs of those positions we oppose.  And those are just a few examples.  Not only do we react to what's out there, we create our reality by the act of seeing. We become invested in our vision; the more we see the greater our investment. Polarization happens.

At any rate, we need data to move from story to science, and according to this October 13, 2016 article (from before the election), we're going to get it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Between the World and Me had been excerpted in The Atlantic, a magazine I take. When I heard all the buzz, I picked it up but found it a hard read, all blame and no transcendence, so I put it back down--until, lo and behold, our clergy put it first in the group read on race.

I love books, and Between the World and Me was a far easier read in book form. Moreover, it has the merit of being short. And, since it comes from the gut more than from the head, its logic is not nailed down tight.  Amidst the clichéd harangue against America's "machinery of criminal power," "club of criminal justice," and "criminal irresponsibility" were openings for thought.

Subsequently I've learned you'll be called defensive for comparing yourself to the particular identity group in question: in this case, African-Americans.  Comparisons are a no-no, for although we all have troubles, do not presume to compare yourself to them or appropriate their suffering.

I did get in some thinking, though, and here's my review of Between the World and Me, written before this post on which I'm now working.

With the Jim Wallis book I got doubly bogged down: in white privilege and identity politics. And I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates was hard!  Here's my review of America's Original Sin, which got me thinking and led me to this point.

The main theme of America's Original Sin is reconciliation between white and black Christians.

How do Jews figure in that equation? Are Jews even white? (See the timely article, "Are Jews White," Dec. 5, 2016, The Atlantic.)

In the first half of the last century, the Jewish leaders of the era advocated for authorities to remove the racial designation "Hebrew" from incoming immigrants ("Hebrew," since in those days, "Jew" was a dirty word). Jewish immigrants continued to get that label until the 1950s, when, due to the prevailing cultural and political winds, their advocates succeeded in having it removed. During World War II, erasing boundaries between European peoples and categorizing them as ethnic groups instead of races satisfied the country's need to unify and set us apart from the Nazis. In due time there was the expectation Jews would conform to their new "white" identity; if they didn't, what good would it do?  For more on how that worked, see my review of Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing.  In essence, then, the social pressures of the day pushed Jews to pass as white, even as most Jews aspired to do just that.  Who would not want to emulate the country's most successful cultural group and, furthermore, avoid persecution? (Seeing all success as suspect leads to a dead end in hope and vision.)

Don't think that you can discern whiteness by skin color alone. White isn't just a skin color but is code for a certain level of society.  For further discussion see my review of Eric Goldstein's The Price of Whiteness.

At the top of the heap in America were the WASPs: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  The struggle to erase the distinctions between them and other Europeans--Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, etc.--and end their particular power and privilege continued well into the 1960s and beyond. Before that point, college students would not have encountered beaucoup Jewish professors as they do today, since there were fixed quotas as well as restrictions on which fields they could enter. Who knew?  It was in the sixties that I started college, and how was I to know it hadn't always been that way? See my review of John Hollinger's Science, Jews, and Secular Culture.

For a variety of reasons explored by Hollinger, Jews had led that advance upon the ramparts of what Melissa Fay Greene calls the white Protestant power structure.  As we are all too aware, the advances of women, and more to the current point, African Americans, did not come until later, since people of color, especially African Americans and Native Americans, were not yet included with those Americans among whom unity was considered desirable.

If Jews are white--or if they have passed as white--do they need to atone?

Here's how the story goes: white privilege accrued to those admitted into the ranks of whiteness. If everyone thinks you're white, you've had certain advantages and avoided certain disadvantages, at the expense of people who were not designated as white. According to that narrative, if you were so designated, it's up to you to atone. And atonement entails having sinned.

Added to that is that standing up for the black community is what American Jews do. It's our basic historic version of social justice.  So, that's the direction in which a lot of our clergy are leading us.

But for Jews, in a sense, it's been there, done that.  This is not to knock what we did during the civil rights era.  We did good--some of us, certainly not all--and some of us paid the price, too.  This time around (at least before the election), though, it has not been dangerous, but popular. This time, we were not leading but getting on the bandwagon.  We were establishing our bona fides with white Christian groups while simultaneously declaring our membership in the "white race."

I understand that Jews want to stand up for black people, not only in general but often for our own partners or children or for ourselves--but this time around, I think the ones we were taking the most care of were ourselves. There was a certain incoherence to our actions.

Historically, Jews in America have tended to stand up for themselves vicariously by standing up for others--African Americans in particular--on the basis that if we support the inclusion of all we'll be supporting inclusion for ourselves as well.

That vicariousness is something I've turned over and over in my thinking.  Above and beyond black and white in America, Jews have long inhabited a bad-guy role in Western civilization due to the cultural dominance of Christianity.  To a certain degree it's to be expected that we would have inhabited that role: we live in the same culture and we're pickled in it like everyone else. At this point I've come to associate our vicarious self-advocacy with the vaunted "Jewish guilt" incurred from that longtime assigned role. Hence the difficulty that Jews, who also happen to be a small group, have had in standing up for ourselves more directly within American society.

If  power is the ability to make people not only listen to a cultural story but also to play the role decreed for them in that story, then, practically speaking, we Jews have had little choice in our symbolic value for the culture as a whole.  Adding atonement to the picture further complicates it.

The privilege Jews have received from being white has been ambiguous, that is, mixed, as one might expect upon reading The Atlantic article on whether or not Jews are white.  Jews have had considerable cultural success.  But, on the one hand, viewed from the political right, Jews aren't truly white but have infiltrated society by passing as such (a not uncommon view among the Protestant intellectual leadership up until the mid-twentieth century).  On the other hand, for the left, now that being white is not so good, Jews are the essence of whiteness. Jews retain their identification with capitalism and with a degree of success that can seem unfair, so are sometimes assigned a disproportionate share of guilt for their presumed white privilege.

Even if Jews are white and whiteness is something for which to atone, proclaiming one's purported whiteness in order to atone can come off like a backhand assertion of status and group membership, given Jewish racial ambiguity: I'm white and you're not. It can feel paternalistic.

This sin-and-atonement model assumes that everyone did the same thing with their skin color, that is, use it for fun and profit at the expense of people of color. Not so!  Even as it has not been right for black people to be stereotyped--so that each individual is stamped with the alleged faults of the whole--neither is it right to mark all people from another group based on supposed group characteristics.

Jews may have something to learn from the interracial experience.  I recently heard author Mat Johnson's NPR interview on his new book Loving Day.  Here also is my review of his graphic novel Incognegro, featuring courageous light-skinned interracial men who went South undercover during the Jim Crow era to spotlight the practice of lynching.

Saying that the racial designation of Jews can be ambiguous is not saying Jews are black. There are more things in heaven and earth than black and white.  Nor am I claiming we're interracial--although there are not enough ancestors to go around, and at some level we're all mixed.

Note that ethnicity is not the only issue with respect to belonging. Are you smart enough to belong? Economically secure enough? Slim enough? Sociable enough? From the right side of the tracks, the right family, the right community, the right denomination?  Who is acceptable enough? Let's say society demands we all shape up and keep in line--but let's save that extended discussion for later.

Now I want to raise the question of where the storied Jewish brain power is in regard to all these questions of race, identity, belonging, and atonement.  As far as I can tell, for example, none of the clergy leadership has thought to look very closely at what was coming out around the edges of the Black Lives movement (as they commonly were doing vis-à-vis the Trump campaign), nor did they consider the movement's roots in or relationship to Black Power, and the implications. Of the rabbis I know who have taken up the atonement model with its witnessing and listening--that is, being an ally in the sense of deferring to the experience of  those who are people of color and as such are deemed the only experts concerning their own experiences--none examined, through its broader application or otherwise, that model which has so recently emerged from college campuses.

Being submissive and subordinate--not having a voice--is the result of being compressed into a role in the narrative of the dominant social group.

It's not the case that societal demands require constant overt enforcement, since people internalize them.

Despite some overlap, a role in a powerful group's story never comprises the totality or essence of who the other group is.  That's true of Jews in the Christian imagination. It's true for people who have been considered black, in the white imagination.  And it's also just as true for people who have been considered white, in the black imagination.

It took power to suppress black people. And it's a power play to attempt to compress some white-looking people into a people who, to redress the historical imbalance, believe justice now consists of telling particular black people only what they want to hear, while self-righteously scolding other insufficiently subservient white-looking people.

Everyone's voice is needed.  Everyone gets feedback. There's a time to speak and a time to listen.

I spent most of my life thinking I had a deal here in America: I was supposed to "behave." I didn't know that meant squelching myself into the requisite identity.  I didn't know I was responding to powerful societal messages by passing; I thought I was just behaving, doing what I was supposed to do.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the issue was "the American Dream," and he learned at an early age it wasn't meant for him. For me it was e pluribus unum. Not until an advanced age did I zone in on my sense of precarious inclusion. Why did it take me so long? I lived in suburban surroundings that were nothing if not genteel. I wasn't being called names or getting beat up on the way home from school, but there were things nobody could talk about. My mother, mistaking her hopes for fact, told me "all that" was over and done with except from the ignorant or stupid. So, I could not read my social situation correctly. When I picked up on confusing vibes, I thought it was me.   As long as that was the case, I could not question--couldn't really see--my automatic assumptions. At the point I gained enough perspective to see them, the deal was off: the deal that meant I had to remain blind to what it means to see or even think about society's demands.


So, as I said earlier, it's complicated. Who is guilty? Who is to atone? Are they atoning for themselves, or are they being put into the role of atoning for others as well? And, if the latter, in whose story is it that they find themselves playing that guilty role?

Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Few are guilty, but all are responsible."

Assigning guilt is very close to blame.  What would it look like if we were to focus instead on taking responsibility?

The Trouble with Codewords and Keeping Your Mouth Shut

As an  American Jew, I have long wondered why there are areas related to Judaism or Jewishness that I can't talk about, or at least it feels as though they are not supposed to be talked about.  I've been wondering that for about a decade now--as long as I've been able to think about such things--although I certainly felt it long before I could think about it.  Recently my reading has inspired me to think more systematically about one particular area: that of violence toward Jews.  Before I delve into the specifics of my thinking on that subject, though, I'll go into two background areas, one from which I drew relatively more inspiration, and the other a relatively minor, but still significant, contributor to my endeavor.

Background Analysis--The Jim Crow Era

 I was inspired by a book, an older book: Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing, from 1996, which I've recently read as part of a group study.  My inspiration came from the author's examination of how it happened that that bombing, which happened in 1958, provoked or, at least, preceded change in attitudes toward civil rights in 1950s Atlanta. 

Beforehand, moderates ducked the issue, white supremacists held sway, and the old segregationist way maintained its homeostasis, in spite of the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. There may as well have been no contradiction at all between segregation and what was good and moral.  Afterward, the contradiction stood out in high relief.

Here are some of the highlights:

Before the bombing, Atlantans thought of their city as a bastion of moderation and modernity.  As far as they were concerned, racial hatred didn't exist, at least not here. If you said it did, you were thought to be creating division, not pointing it out.  After the bombing, Atlantans had to admit it did exist. 

In retrospect, preaching about the problem by the rabbi of The Temple was seen as having lured out the racial hatred and exposed it.

In the new view, young men committing violence out of misguided racial solidarity were not, after all, showing their mettle in defense of the system but revealing themselves as dangerous extremists.

The following excerpt from the book contains a quotation from Mayor William Hartsfield in the October 13, 1958, issue of the Atlanta Constitution:

"Looking at this terrible demolition I cannot help but realize it is the end result and payoff of a lot of rabble-rousing in the South.  Whether they like it or not, every political rabble-rouser is the godfather of these cross-burners and dynamiters who sneak about in the dark and give a bad name to the South.  It is high time that decent people in the South rise up and take charge."

...The mayor's statement was a rallying cry, an attempt to reach the vast proportion who wrongly believed that their silence on the race question was an adequate, even moral response.

Before the bombing, ordinary Atlantans could rationalize their resistance to integration, as though the words of liberalizing newspaper columnists and preachers pointed to an abstraction. They seemed to stand transfixed and paralyzed in the vain belief they could keep to their same old ways.

...(M)oderate people, people of quiet goodwill, civilized people could sidestep it all, as if the race question itself were not quite worthy of their notice, as if the subject of Negro rights was somehow slightly obscene.  

After the bombing, people couldn't linger on the sidelines.  They had to decide whether they were for or against violence as a means of perpetuating the status quo. Now they could see what the choice of anarchy entailed.  In the light of a new day, ordinary, everyday people for the first time began to stand up and speak out on these issues.

Let's say that most power structures, once in existence, strive to maintain themselves.  Once established, most power structures--all the way from Stieg Larsson's spooky fictional counterintelligence unit in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest to the beneficiaries of favoritism within ordinary families--don't call themselves out of existence and go quietly into that dark night.   And maybe the likelihood of violence goes up when that system comes under threat.  Melissa Fay Greene says that the violence at the fringes as Jim Crow came up against the pressure for civil rights served to maintain the white Protestant power structure of the day.

During the Jim Crow period in the American South, the treatment of black people both demonstrated and maintained their lesser status.  As such they existed outside the full protection of the law.  The system enjoined upon them to "stay in their place"--not that that held any guarantees.  Illogical and unpredictable events and all too predictable punitive reactions alike served to keep them in that place and maintain the system.

Other people, too--Jews and Catholics, for example--made their way as best they could in the society of the day.  They served at the pleasure, on one level protected by their white skin but also expected to kowtow to the system to keep it in place and keep their place in it.  Dependent on the system, they experienced social pressure to make obeisance to established social codes.  The conventional response was to keep one's head down and under the line of fire.  There was pressure on insiders and outsiders alike to march in time and in lockstep.  

Such is society: it gives us that without which we social animals cannot live, but at a price.  Change, too, comes at a price.

What penalty did dissenters fear? In a sense what they feared was shunning, that they, too, like people of color, would be placed outside the protection of the law and at the mercy of its self-styled defenders.  Awaiting dissenters was a string of accusations to which Jews were particularly prone, that they were radicals, communists, nigger-lovers, plotters against the Southern way of life.  They would be foreigners among us--outsiders whose designation as such would justify plucking them from the safe haven of legal protection and throwing them upon the tender mercies of vigilantes (or turning a blind eye when that happened).  Heretofore there had been numerous southerners in general and Jews in particular toeing the line and striving to fit in (although that was no guarantee).

After the bombing, though, and after some critical mass had been reached, such that right and wrong finally were illuminated,

"...there came yet another noise, one not heard much of late, one often drowned out.  It was the still quiet voice of the moderate heard once again in the Southland" (Pat Waters, Atlanta Journal, October 24, 1958, as quoted in The Temple Bombing).

There were those who spoke up, finally, and there was the flood of financial contributions, despite that The Temple was insured. And there were the well-wishers.  In this instance, then, that congregation of Jews was not shunned or cut off, but instead was sheltered within the circle of big downtown houses of worship, as one of them, and given soothing reassurance and comfort. In the meantime, segregationist leaders, who, as Melissa Fay Greene puts it, had been sanctioning resistance and violence out of one side of their mouths, had to scramble to deplore such acts out of the other side of their mouths, allowing liberal leaders to seize the moral high ground. 

As liberal columnist Ralph McGill wrote (Atlanta Constitution, October 13, 1958; quoted in The Temple Bombing),

Let us face the facts.  This is a harvest.  It is the crop of things sown. 
It is the harvest of defiance of courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many southern politicians....
It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it.  
To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple....
But let it be understood when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take the law into their own hands....
....
This, too, is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion.  Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field.  It is an old, old story.  It is one repeated over and over again in history.  When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.

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Background Analysis--Krugman versus Charen on Republican Presidential Politics

On December 14, 2015, my local newspaper reprinted a matched set of editorials--one left-leaning and one right-leaning--that reminded me of what I'd just been reading in The Temple Bombing.

The first was by Paul Krugman, and the second by Mona Charen.  The topic was the ubiquitous Donald Trump and his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.

Krugman holds that mainstream Republican effort to exploit the racist and xenophobic fears and prejudice of their right-wing base, while simultaneously tamping down reaction and maintaining at least a semblance of control, has heretofore been conducted through innuendo and codewords.  Donald Trump has merely said out loud what the party establishment has been whispering.  Trump has ripped away the veil.

So along comes Donald Trump, saying bluntly the things establishment candidates try to convey in coded, deniable hints, and sounding as if he really means them. And he shoots to the top of the polls. Shocking, yes, but hardly surprising.

If Trump has destroyed Republican establishment camouflage, Charen and others are at pains to restore it.  The problem, they insist, is Trump, who is putting them in a bad light, and not the underlying pattern his words have highlighted.

This week, while we were still burying our dead from San Bernardino, every Republican — rather than explaining why President Obama's refusal to fight the war on terror has led to this moment — instead had to condemn Donald Trump's mindless proposal to keep every single Muslim out of the United States until further notice. Again, he's the perfect bogeyman.

It’s not just that what he says demands condemnation. It’s that it seems to give credence to the Democrats’ narrative.

But can what has once been seen be unseen?  Like the other way of seeing a reversible image, you cannot unknow that it is there.

The Charen article also tries to cover up that conservatives, too, have public intellectuals and elites who are shaping their view--Charen herself, for instance.  Republicans would like to have us think that conservatives somehow maintain a special degree of independence from such forces in order that they might "think for themselves."

Trump, of course, has nothing to offer except personality    — even if its charm eludes me. But his emphasis on “getting the best people” is exactly wrong. That’s the progressive idea — that the best people know better how to run your life than you do. That’s what we’ve had under Obama.

As during the Jim Crow era, there are vested interests in maintaining the illusion of a simpler world, one in which we knew who were the good guys and who were the bad, and one in which the good guys were people "like us."  In this connection see Mike Luckovich's August, 26, 2015, cartoon of  Trump wearing a "Make America White Again" cap.

Whatever your political leanings, my focus here is still on the question of how whatever is right in front of our noses can be, for all intents and purposes, invisible, and in how we maintain that blindness, thus denying responsibility for consequences, adopting, in other words, a "hear no evil, see no evil" posture, even as we sustain the animosity-generating illusion. And, further, I'm interested in how such illusions can collapse, as Paul Krugman claims is happening under Trump's spoken-out-loud hate speech--and as happened in my hometown after The Temple bombing.

----------------------------

Codewords and Silence on the Subject of Violence Against Jews

At present we're in an era where many people consider violence against Jews understandable--dare I even say justifiable?--because of Israel, or so it is said.  I explored that narrative in a previous post.  Internationally, terrorism against Jews gets little attention unless in the context of terrorism against others.

What I was reading in The Temple Bombing on the Jim Crow era in 1950s Atlanta made me think of this current situation vis-à-vis Jews.  In the present day, there's this relative silence when violence or injustice against Jews occurs--except perhaps among Jews, and I'm one of those who has begun speaking out; once I had noticed this pattern, words seemed preferable to befuddled disbelief. Anyway, when Jews come to harm, people mostly shake their heads and avert their eyes.  As Melissa Fay Greene writes on the subject of race relations in the Jim Crow South, it's as though it would be slightly obscene to mention Jews, much less speak up for them.

In 2014, swastikas were painted on the Jewish fraternity house at Emory University. The response was officially supportive, but the student newspaper's report included a complaint (not shared elsewhere) that the incident had received a disproportionate amount of attention.   I wondered whether the complainer's real issue was that it had received any attention at all.

The issue here is not competition over victimization.  I am wondering about the seeming imposition of silence on the subject of violence toward Jews or denigration of them.

In another incident, five years ago now, I was online with friends from a liberal Methodist church I'd been attending with my husband as news broke on the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.   At the time, there had been ongoing criticism of the graphically violent Republican campaign language such as Sarah Palin's placing a target over the Congresswoman's district.  "Words matter" had been a constant refrain.  Then it came out that Giffords was Jewish, and, suddenly, silence ensued on the subject of words mattering. It seems her attacker had to be viewed as completely crazy, his actions thus rendered meaningless.

The Emory swastika was "classic" antisemitism, in other words, a Nazi-style slur.  I thought maybe that was why it required attention.  But ordinarily, violence against Jews is not considered big news here in the U.S..  By that I mean it doesn't seem to make the national news.  For instance, we all saw those Westboro Baptist Church signs denigrating gays, but broadcasting the Jew-hating posters they were also brandishing did not happen and seemed to be a no-no.

Most antisemitic acts if aired at all seem to be buried in the local news.  Unless such incidents are reported in a Jewish news source or posted online, I'd not be likely to hear of them at all.

We in this country--including Jews--would like to deny that there is antisemitism here, or so it seems. Conventional ideas are that Jews are liked here, safe here; in fact, as one sometimes hears, Jews are "privileged." We assume others have taken their place on the receiving end of hate.  Yet, although thankfully rare, most religious violence in this country occurs against Jews.  Most hate crimes in America are racial, but when it comes to religious violence Jews are the most common target.

It's confusing, and one reason may be that, Anti-Defamation League or no, anti-Judaism is so thoroughly interwoven with the culture.  Sometimes it's hard to tell when anti-Jewish attitudes end and ordinary church begins, given negative preaching and scriptural passages read free of accompanying educational material.  One small example to give an idea of what I'm talking about is the passage about hiding behind locked doors "for fear of the Jews" (John 20:19), read around Easter time. (I mention that one, having had occasion to waggle a finger quietly to signal it's too late; I'm already inside.)  I'm not talking about egregious antisemitism but about ordinary church.  I hypothesize that the overlap between anti-Jewish attitudes and normative values enhances an attitude of denial.

In some leftist circles here, including some liberal Christian and Unitarian circles, the idea that the U.S. has been too receptive to Jews is conducive to what I call Holocaust, not denial, but minimization.  It happened, but it's over, so the story goes, and Jews are using guilt over the Holocaust to deflect condemnation of Israel.

Israel!  People do talk about Israel; in the public square we are allowed to talk and argue about Israel.

Beyond that, the veil of silence falls and we enter the arena of innuendo.  Jews in France are murdered.  They aren't Israeli, but somehow, for more and more people, the subject of Israel makes the violence make sense, makes it reasonable, makes it, if not exactly okay, something they can understand and to which they could, under some circumstances, even subscribe.  The fact it happens to other Jews (Israelis being used as though synonymous with Jews) may be unfortunate but is understandable.  And, since understandable, not a big story, not news.  Not a subject of concern.

With Israel as the cover story, those telling that story have their excuses: "It's Israel.  We're just criticizing Israel.  Israel causes antisemitism."

But rationalizing, even tolerating violence, then using words to camouflage it--that's plausible deniability.

Just as, around the turn of the twentieth century, the racial pseudoscience of the day gave the disenfranchising of Jews its scientific gloss, the cover story of Israel disguises the focus on Jews as being a social justice issue about Israel.  The effect is arguably a narrative in which Jews are, for some people, back in their place as "the other," and without a word of it spoken. 

I'm arguing that there is a purposeful silence on the issue of violence toward or denigration of Jews, analogous to the silence Melissa Fay Greene says prevailed regarding race relations in the Jim Crow South.

If that's the case, we would expect energy expended to maintain the silence, that is, to keep the lid on, as Paul Krugman delineated regarding Republican political strategy.  And there are such efforts.

First may come an accusation of over-sensitivity, "Jewish paranoia," or the like; to say, in other words, "You're exaggerating" or "You're just imagining things," and thus to deflect comment--a dynamic similar to telling black people that voicing their concerns amounts to "playing the race card." "It's all your problem," in other words.

If deflection fails, one might hear ever-bolder condemnation of Israel, with any effort to widen the outlook portrayed as an opportunistic diversion from the matter at hand, Israel.

Continued failure to fall into line can result in the charge of a blatant deficit of empathy for Palestinians.

Then may come the accusation of conflating Jews with Israel, all the while the accuser is doing just that: the best defense is a good offense in which one accuse the other party of doing what you yourself are doing.

And the volume increases.  At all costs, keep the focus on Israel and off of the accuser.  Distraction is the name of the game, and, loud though it may be, it functions to maintain the silence.

This is the system maintaining itself.

Melissa Fay Greene also wrote that the dynamic of silence and tolerating violence at the fringes of society served the prevailing white Protestant power structure.  Does the silence regarding Jews, and the pattern of looking the other way and rationalizing violence against them, have a corresponding function?  What "power structure" would that serve?

Here are two columns from 2010 that say, no, the traditional power structure is not seeking to maintain itself.  Both articles appeared on the heels of the appointment of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving a Court devoid of Protestants.  Max Fisher wonders whether Jews are the new WASPs.  And Noah Feldman goes so far as to hypothesize that WASPs are phasing themselves out.

Is that what has happened?  Do groups willingly divest themselves of power?  That's not the picture we would expect to see.

In a mainline liberal Protestant Sunday school class, after the last two appointees gave us the Court we have now, a friend made what was for me a memorable slip of her tongue: she referred to a Supreme Court without any Christians.  She was neither magnanimous nor pleased.

Those two articles from 2010 allude to something else that has transpired over the last sixty or seventy years, something other than the emergence of the state of Israel yet something that has emerged during the same time frame: economic competition for the positions that Protestants could previously take for granted.  Prior to that time, the universities and professions and the airwaves and the ranks of public intellectuals--and the Supreme Court--weren't full of Jews as they are at present.

We should not underestimate the impact of economic competition.

Lastly, Paul Krugman in his column pointed to the political aims of silence. According to him in his discussion of Republican presidential politics, Trump's playing openly on fears and prejudices is confounding the Republican establishment's plausible deniability. Trump outed the dynamic of targeting immigrants, people of color, and Muslims in particular as "other," as common enemy.

Correspondingly, the political aim regarding Jews could be to use them as the common enemy.  When times are difficult, there's nothing like a common enemy to build your base and rally people to your cause.  Moreover, this has been a traditional role for Jews, and, in fact, one in particular that can't be said out loud.  A cover story is needed.


As it used to be rationalized, violence against "Negroes" was understandable or to be expected.  It was "normal."  You might say the story implied they required special measures.  What else could you expect?  For a very long time such special measures weren't news, either.

But can violence be targeted exclusively toward those you may not like or approve of?  Is hate divisible?  Or, might the earlier quotation apply again in the present day?

"...It is an old, old story.  It is one repeated over and over again in history.  When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."

Talking about what can't be talked about isn't easy, but I decided it's worth trying. I don't want it to be said, "...they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out..."

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Readers have reported difficulty with commenting on my blog. You should be able to leave a comment if you log in via Google.  But in any case, copy your comment before trying to post it, so whatever happens it won't be lost.