White Jews & Race w/Dr. Elliot Ratzman
Clarissa talks to Dr. Elliot Ratzman, a professor in Jewish studies, race, and social justice in religion. They discuss the contemporary intersection of white Jews and race, including the questions you weren’t sure how to ask, like “What race are white Jews?”, “How should they partner with other minorities for civil rights?”, and “How does modern antisemitism come into play?” Dr. Ratzman shares the history behind these questions, the importance of self-identification, and his thoughts on Jewish ethics in regards to racial justice.
EPISODE NOTES
Organizations Mentioned
Jews for Racial & Economic Justice
Resources Mentioned
“The Past Didn't Go Anywhere” by April Rosenblum
“Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity” by Keith Kahn-Harris
“Antisemitism: Here and Now” by Deborah E. Lipstadt
“The Crisis of Zionism” by Peter Beinart
“On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice” by Jewish Voice for Peace.
Contact Info
Email Dr. Elliot Ratzman at elratzman@gmail.com
You can suggest a topic or a guest for an upcoming show by sending an email to hello@onwandering.co
You can follow Clarissa at ClarissaRMarks on Instagram and Twitter.
Visit Onwandering.co for show notes and transcripts.
Land Acknowledgement
On Wandering is recorded on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present and honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.
TRANSCRIPT
Clarissa Marks: I'm Clarissa Marks and you are listening to On Wandering I'm re-releasing the episodes I recorded last year under a different show name, and this is one of my most listened to so far. It's about Jews and race, more specifically Ashkenazi Jews; Jews of European descent who are the majority in the U S and Europe, and who have a complicated relationship with being white.
I spoke to Dr. Elliot. Ratzman, a former professor of mine who specializes in Jewish studies, race and social justice and religion. At the time he was working on a book on Jewish ethics and critical race theory. We recorded this conversation in December, 2019 and a lot has happened since then, but this conversation unpacks the history that shapes our current events on Jews, race and antisemitism today.
I'd also like to add a note that while this episode focuses on the intersection of race for Ashkenazi Jews, I want to uplift the experiences of Jews of color that are often less visible. So if you or someone, you know, identifies as a Jew of color and would like to share your story, or your point of view, let me know. My contact info is in the show notes.
So without further ado, here's my conversation with dr. Elliot Ratman.
Let’s talk a little bit about the book that you're working on. Could you tell me what the current title of the book that you're writing is?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Sure. So the working title is, "Between Precarity and Power, Reckoning with Race." The precarity means Jewish communities in modern periods have existed precariously as minorities within nations and within hostile, mostly Christian, but also Muslim countries. And the power part is that Jews in the last 67 years have also been able to maintain some degree of stability and protection in some of those states, as well as the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. Jews are both precarious in some contexts and also empowered, or middlemen between the disempowered and the colonial or governmental powers.
And then there's the Jewish reckoning with race, which is a more immediate frame of the book: Jewish thought Jewish ethics, Jewish practice, hasn't really come to grips with questions of anti-racism, and the understanding of race from a religious or ethical or even political philosophical perspective within Jewish discourse.
Clarissa Marks: Right. I am really excited that you are tackling all of those issues. How did you choose to focus the book on that collection of topics?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: I had been teaching for many years a course, called Race and Judaism. This was a framed as a general education class at Temple [University], and it involved wrestling with definitions of race, the history of race science, antisemitism in Europe, as well as Israel, Palestine questions and the history of American Jewish interactions with black freedom struggle. I thought I would write a kind of mega book on the history of all of that, or at least a kind of treatment of all of that.
And speaking with an editor a few Decembers ago, we sat down and looked at the types of papers I had been writing and projects I had been thinking about and came to the conclusion that a version of that book is very doable, but one which focuses mostly on the questions of race and Jews after 1967, the action happens in my project after roughly 1967.
After 1967, you see in Israel, in the Middle East, Israel becoming a kind of conquering nation, which is now occupying Arab territory after defeating several Arab armies in battle. And that reverberates, around the world, the perception of Jews and the perception of Israel as now a kind of player on the world stage. Amongst the far left, this switches, their assessment of Israel from being a kind of spunky, socialist country to an Imperial power hostile to the interest's of the third world.
Clarissa Marks: I want to talk about some basics when it comes to thinking about race and Jews in the western world today. So, just to qualify this discussion, for the most part, I think you've mentioned this before that we're talking mostly about Ashkenazi Jews, Jews of European descent, who are the majority, in the U S and Europe. What race are Ashkenazi Jews considered now in the U.S.?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Uh, well, that's, that's an interesting question. Jews, at some point in the history of the United States, were designated on the census as, I believe Hebrew or Israelite, I can't remember. And the Jewish community lobbied and advocated to remove that designation. This is back in the nineteen-teens sometime. So Jews were always is considered white, but a distinct kind of white. And the way that that were by law considered white is that they could own property, they could not be enslaved, they were not native Americans and they were not, black people or descendants of Africans or slaves. So Jews have been white, although it's always been a tentative whiteness and in so much that their religious category was something other than Christian.
And I should also note some of the first groups of Jews that made their way to the new world were what we might today called Sephardi Jews. These are descendants of Spanish and Portuguese speaking peoples. So, the first Jews who came to United States, while recognized, not as natives or as Africans were today, what we might call people of color in so much that they were probably darker skinned and they came from Spanish speaking, Portuguese speaking areas.
So today, Ashkenazi Jews in the United States are seen by law, and obviously because the laws have, sort of remove some of this stain of non-whiteness, but also by the majority of the population as white. So Ashkenazi Jews are white except for elements of the antisemitic-right, who see Jews as a kind of chameleon people; they look white, but they're really not. They fight against white interests, they are genetically distinct and they are harmful to the real white people and their projects.
Clarissa Marks: I know the idea of race is very different in Europe and Israel, but are Ashkenazi Jews also considered white outside of the U.S.?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Yes and no. So, in Russia, up until the. Russian revolutions of the early 20th century, Jews were seen as, I think they were referred to as black in Russian language. And by black, that doesn't mean that Russians looked at their Jewish neighbors and said, "Oh, they're from Africa." It’s that blackness is a designation of otherness.
So the, the concept white isn't really let's say operating in the same way in Russia and other parts of Europe. As we would understand it. Let me put this another way. Ashkenazi Jews, even though they have like white-ish skin, right? They're not, you know, Asians, they're not, Africans they're not, let's say, super swarthy people, are still seen as a race apart. And that's because the way that race works in most of the world is different from the way that we talk about race in the United States. In Europe, Jews were seen as a group of people who are descendant did from according to their own legends and stories, a family of tribes from the Middle East and maintaining that racial purity has been part of a kind of, or let's say that family integrity has been part of Jewish culture according to their accounts.
And so they are different from we Poles, we, French people we Anglo Saxons, but then again, Anglo-Saxons the British, they look upon the Irish as a different race, a race of people who are kind of culturally inferior. To, the British and, and whose lands or colonized by the British over the centuries.
So Jews are seen as a different national group. That might be a more sensible category. And so when nation States start to assert themselves in the modern period, the groups of Jews who are waving the flag and singing the anthem are seen by their neighbors as not really Polish because they're not Catholic. They're not really a French because they're Jews, they're Semites, or seen by Hungarians is not really a Hungarian, even though Jews speak the language and serve in the armies and whatnot as much as anyone else.
Clarissa Marks: So, for most of history, Jews are perceived as a race somewhere between white and nonwhite. And for your book, you're looking at how this interacts with anti-racism as a movement starting in the 1960s. So how are Jews involved in the 1960s, American civil rights movement?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Sure. well, that's a happy story for the most part in the American Jewish memory. And also the historical record in that Jews were disproportionally supportive of black freedom struggles and, and not just the post 1955 civil rights movement, but Jews were disproportionately represented in organizations and projects around black freedom struggle going back to the turn of the century. That's this has real, sociological reasons why this is. It's not because Jews are a magical, anti-racist people, but rather that Jews, for the most part in the United States lived in cities. The newspapers they read and the kind of liberal left culture that they were part of in those cities made black freedom concerns their concern so that if you were Jewish and you would read it in New York in 1920, you would be reading Yiddish newspapers, which foregrounded the racism against black people in the South.
Clarissa Marks: Oh, wow.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: In a way that the problems of, say, Native Americans was not front page news. So, the economy of attention of Jews reading in their Jewish newspapers in the fifties was around, among other things, problems of racism. Jews also saw problems of racism as harbored jurors of their own security or insecurity, in that racism and antisemitism many saw as closely connected.
Now, this is not to say that Jews were like categorically non-racist or anti-racist, but rather there were important gatekeepers who saw that black, the status of blacks in America was a problem. And that nativism and white nationalism, what we call today, white nationalism was something that Jews were going to be, should be concerned about.
And that a triumphalist white nationalism was not good for Jews. Strangely the Irish in America, in the, in the 19th century did not feel the same way. And, rather, the Irish were more than happy to be brought into a kind of gentleman's pact of whiteness with other nativist groups. And so the Irish, for political reasons and for cultural reasons, distanced themselves from Black Freedom struggles.
Even though, in theory, the Irish, like the Jews were, have been a persecuted people and might've also forged coalitions of black workers. Well, that's like 19 and early 20th centuries. If you zoom fast forward to the 1950s, Jews are disproportionately represented in the white people, young white people that go down to March for civil rights, Jews are disproportionately a part of the donors to the civil rights movement. Jews are disproportionately the number of lawyers who are representing civil rights cases. And it's really an extraordinary moment. Now that doesn't mean that most Jews are, let's say, anti-racist or don't have a racist bone in their body. It's just that Jews, both individually, in that those individuals who went down to the South or who served as lawyers, but also institutionally took stands against, racism and in support of the civil rights movement.
It was a very extraordinary time. However, it starts going South in the late sixties. So again, early sixties, the black freedom struggle has a more pronounced radical left wing, which is now making those liberal Jews nervous, especially as those black power advocates are also critiquing the state of Israel in a kind of coalition of a gorilla, third-world movements in the late sixties. So the Black Panthers and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, take stances in favor of Palestinian gorillas and against the state of Israel. And this is the first time that American Jews are hearing such a caustic critique. And it's coming from what in the liberal Jewish imagination we're allies. So this is very important. After the six-day war black power leftist critique Israel in a way that the Jews had never heard such a critique, and this makes many Jews nervous. That doesn't buck Jewish support for say, black liberal politicians or institutional relationships with. black notables in the cities. It just means that there's a scary, far left in the black community, which Jews are now wary of. And you see that today, you see Jews, wary of Marc Lamont Hill or Black Lives Matter, program for international policy, or you see it in Jewish suspicions of black., leftists like Elon Omar or, even throwing in there, Louis Farrakhan, who is not the left, but at all, in fact, I would say he's part of a kind of weird religious-right.
But he is lauded by some anti-Israel or critical of Israel, activists as being a kind of role model. And so this is all very problematic in the Jewish mind. And the Jewish establishment connects the dots between that far left critique of Israel and black people.
Clarissa Marks: I'm thinking about the trend here in the early sixties, or even before that. American Ashkenazi Jews felt that they were white, and they had privilege, but it was in their best interest to support anti-racist, especially civil rights movements, for black Americans because, you know, getting rid of racism everywhere will ultimately help protect Jews in the States.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Yes.
Clarissa Marks: Then, Israel becomes more powerful at the same time that, black political movements, like the Black Panthers become a little more radical and suddenly the view turns so that Jews are no longer seen as another minority, a privileged minority, to support, but they are also the oppressors of people of color all over the world.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Right. Because this whole time that, say, liberal Jews and even liberal synagogues and liberal Jewish organizations have been speaking out for black civil rights interests there's also been an economic relationship between, and now when I say blacks and Jews here, I'm being very broad, right? There are black Jews, and of course there are many poor Jews, but there's always been, an economic relationship in as much as that Jews were white people and they were living in proximity to black communities. And, let me quote Tony Kushner in his great play Angels in America. There's a scene where the right-wing lawyer, Roy Cohn says to a black nurse, "my people were the first people to be able to hire your people to sweep the store on Saturdays." So that blacks see Jews as, and I don't say Jews in general, although sometimes that's true, but specific Jews as landlords. They see Jews as shop keeps who are hiring them or keeping them out of the store or running up the credit.
They see Jews as a force of economic domination in black communities, also that Jews were teachers and social workers. And as James Baldwin pointed out in an essay in the New York times, that Jews are kind of like the face of whiteness for black people in the cities, especially.
So in New York, in 1960, uh, the social worker, the lawyer, the teacher, the shopkeeper, maybe the union boss, all these people were Jewish, ethnically, and only like the police were not Jewish. They were probably Irish. So blacks saw Jews, not just as like, "Oh, look at these liberal white people helping us." They saw Jews as like the face of, of whiteness keeping them down in, the racism of the Northern cities. Complicates the story.
Clarissa Marks: How is this affecting civil rights movements today, both, you know, like Black Lives Matter or the Women's March and then also Jewish leftist groups or Jews who want to be more involved in fighting the good fight. How is this manifesting itself?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: So all this came to be, I think this is kind of my take on this, is that Jews were white. So they enjoyed the privileges of whiteness in America. That is, if you are not an Orthodox Jew, as the majority of American Jews are not Orthodox. You, you just looked like, to your neighbors, a white person. So you can get a line of credit from the bank. You can own a business. There is no discrimination in housing or employment or in education. And so Jews benefited from whiteness, but at the same time, they have a very sharp memory of being discriminated by Nazi-ism, by antisemitism, by nativism.
And so Jews are both privileged, in so much as they're white, they don't experience the headwinds that other communities of color experience, and then they become successful middle and upper middle peoples, professional peoples. However, they have a memory of being, oppressed of being something other than white, of being a minority in Christian America.
And that keeps the Jewish community on its toes. It keeps it liberal, keeps it hostile to forces of reaction. So the Jew confronts the black, I'm being very sort of like Weberian here, the Jew confronts the black and says, "we too are oppressed. The Klan hates us and wants to drive us out of America too." However, the black person says the Jewish person, "well, but you're doing pretty well for yourself. Right? Nobody's coming in attacking you like they attack us. Nobody's keeping you out of schools. Nobody's keeping you out of the unions. Nobody’s exploiting your community. In fact, some of the people exporting our community are people from your community."
So this dynamic is very complicated because Jews who don't see themselves as white in the way that white nationalists see themselves as white, try to cast themselves as not quite white, not black, certainly, but as people who are also besieged by nativism and nationalism. And those other communities say, "what are you talking about? You all are a wealthy community. You are all are white. And frankly, from what I hear, you guys were also exploiters of my people." Well, this gums up relationships when, and I'll give you very concrete examples, when Jewish, well meaning, but kind of a, not so nuanced Jewish kids at a college want to become part of multicultural groups or coalitions.
And so a Hillel group might come to a coalition or a multicultural center and say, "hey, we're Jews and we're part of the multiculture. In other words, we're not just part of the main culture, we are minorities too." And the students of color or their organizations say, "no, you can't be part of our groups. You have a well-funded Hillel. And/or, You're white people. Judaism is a religion. And so you're just white people who have a different religion. And so, you can't be part of our coalition." And what we're seeing in the last, really since 2002 or so, is that college campuses are turning away Jewish students because of a perceived real, or not real or perceived support of the state of Israel, no matter how critical or how ambivalent, or how maybe a nonpolitical that, that support is.
So Jews who want to be part of multiracial coalitions are shut out, not just because they're white people, but also that they are perceived as being, supportive, of the state of Israel, and thus oppressors of Palestinians who are peoples of color.
Clarissa Marks: So, what would you say to someone, you know, who says, "okay, well, why do they need to be part of the multi-cultural organization? Why do they need to be recognized as a minority by a university? White Jews are doing pretty well." What would you say in response to that?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Sure. Well, I think this is part of some of what my book is trying to get to. Jews, sometimes, don't need to be part of those coalitions and should, be humble in interacting with them and understand that 18, 19, 20-year-olds who only know Jews as wealthy, oppressors are not going to understand why a Jewish group wants to come to them and play in their playground. But there are other cases where- I was teaching in Wisconsin last year and in Wisconsin, there's very few people of color. There are few African Americans near Green Bay, Wisconsin, let's say, and so the Jewish students did feel like they were kind of besieged by a kind of, not oppressive, but dominating Christianity, and did feel like a minority. And so Jewish students were welcomed more easily into the fold of being a minority in those schools than let's say UCLA, where Jews are a very big part of the LA population and dominate the representations on the faculty and the administration. In other schools, that's not the case.
So a Jewish student in Iowa or Wisconsin might be welcomed, and it might be appropriate for them to go to the multicultural centers and the organizations of color and try to be good coalition partners. It maybe, does not make sense if at Brandeis or UCLA or Harvard that Jews need to be part of these coalitions. Jews are a part of the power structures in those settings where they're not so much in Wisconsin or Iowa or Minnesota.
Clarissa Marks: Yeah. So it's based on the context of the very specific situation of where Jews are and how much power do they have in that situation?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Right. And also to be conscious that Jews do enjoy white privilege, but they also don't have other sorts of privileges. So the way I would break it down was Jews no longer, although they did at one point, no longer have a problem of, let's say, getting access to capital opening businesses, living in certain neighborhoods, coming to certain schools and not being harassed, getting admitted to college, getting a job at a law firm or, becoming a doctor and getting a job at a hospital. So that kind of economic discrimination and marginalization, while it happened in patches to Jews during the, American experience no longer really, there's no really headwinds for Jews on that.
There are and have been very powerful headwinds for, let's say, African Americans living in certain neighborhoods, getting access to certain public schools, getting access to capital. It's more kids and to let's say, Muslim Americans who are still looked upon with suspicion and surveillance by law enforcement. White Jews no longer have to worry about that. What Jews do have to worry about is that they do have this overwhelming memory of being a targeted group, targeted by the Klan, targeted by white supremacists and the last few years, and maybe this is why this book hopes to be part of this conversation, in the last few years, there have been very visible and tragic attacks on Jewish institutions, on Jewish people in the United States in a way that we have not seen, in you know, maybe a hundred years in the United States. And that's produced a consciousness this amongst Jews that, "hey, the white nationalist hate us and they're gunning for us." However, Jews also enjoy the protection of the state. So many synagogues have a police person assigned to a synagogue at high holidays. While Jews are comfortable with that, African-Americans would not be. That the relationship with the police and blacks is different than to Jews. All this has produced a kind of new consciousness of Jewish vulnerability.
The, X factor here is Israel because as American Jews, haven't been very much involved with Israeli politics in the ways they were 40 years ago, the politics of Israel starts to complicate the perception that Jews are a besieged minority. From the perspective of Israel, Jews are the oppressors, the oppresses of Palestinians, the Israeli state was a collaborator with apartheid, South Africa. And so all these old and current complications make the relationship between contemporary, especially young Jews and Jewish activists, fraught when faith with other coalitions of people of color who are very conscious of Israel status as a juggernaut, power in the world.
Clarissa Marks: Do you think that this is different for different generations of Jews in the U.S., and generations of activists in general, do you think that, you know, baby boomers are approaching being part of multicultural, anti-racist movements differently than millennials are?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Yeah, absolutely. I think, not to say, "okay, boomer" to like the previous sixties generation, but Jewish activists really did not, as, as they say, check their privilege when they were working with black coalitions. So some of the tensions that emerge in black, white coalitions in the sixties had to do with the fact that Jewish activists, were not very conscious of the power dynamics between blacks and whites in those groups. Jews often because of our cultures, that the way that we have developed a Jewish kind of culture in the Northeast, came to kind of dominate those groups and, kind of short-changed spreading out the leadership capabilities. This is also true on a gender access too. So men, as they dominated with her voices and their insistence and their opinions, dominated women's voices. So, also Jewish activists came to dominate people of color in those coalitions. So that was one of the reasons why the white-black coalition started falling apart. Today's multiracial coalition, the millennial activists, I should name some groups like JFREJ, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, like Bend the Arc, like If Not Now, like the Never Again is Enough effort from the summer, they have worked with and have been very sensitive to the concerns of indigenous group. When I say indigenous groups, I mean like organizations that are made up and compose an advocate for the rights of undocumented or immigrant groups that are composed of an advocate for the interests of African-Americans.
So rather than take the lead and call the shots, these Jewish coalitional efforts, have been very happy to take a kind of backseat and listen to those other organizations and what they want rather than dominating the conversation. Now that dominating the conversation, isn't so much about being Jewish so much as being white. White people like saying, "I know what we should be doing and here's what we should be doing." So yeah, absolutely millennials organize much better. There is also, there are some problems still, but Jewish left and liberal organizations today are a lot more sensitive.
Clarissa Marks: So there's been a recent surge in antisemitic activity and a rise in violence against Jews from white nationalist groups. How has this changed the way that Jews are approaching activism and their relationship with non-Jewish anti-racist groups?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: One new factor besides the upsurge in white, and its very explicit white nationalists and antisemitism, is that young Jews are much more conscious of the internal diversity of Jews themselves.
So there's the non-Ashkenazi Jews, whether they are Jews of color or whether, in so much as that they are of African descent or Asian descent, or Mizrahi Jews: Jews, whose grandparents came from the Middle East to, settle either in Israel or the U.S., that Jews of Color have also now taken their own voice and amplified it in these spaces.
And so many young Jewish organizations are very conscious of the status Mizrahi Jews, whether they're Mizrahi American or whether they're Israeli Jews who are Mizrahi. Let's say, they have become part of the faces of these groups and have been of concern. So now there are discussions within Jewish groups about making sure there's representation of Jews of Color. That conversation would never have happened for 10, 15 years ago.
Clarissa Marks: And is that, is that related to the white nationalist activity?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: No, it happened to dovetail. So, in so much as that Jews of Color have taken a more visible and vocal standing within young Jewish, let's say spaces and organizations also happens to be the time when white nationalists and antisemitism has started to become a more visible phenomenon to everybody.
Now, when the white nationalists are complaining about Jews, they're not thinking about black Jews of Color. They're not thinking about Mizrahi Jews and that sort of internal Jewish dynamic of, let's say, intra- Jewish tensions, they're not thinking about Ethiopian Jews, they're thinking about Ashkenazi Jews who they believe are traitors of the white race and who control and dominate financial, economic, entertainment, the banks, the government, the Academy, and so forth. They're not thinking about the internal diversity. So I'll give examples: Charlottesville march with the tiki torches, the Unite the Right rally in 2017, they were chanting "you will not replace us." And then they switched the chant to "Jews will not replace us." Well at the time I thought that was really strange because Jewish Americans were not having a lot of children. You know, they're not growing in big numbers. Why are they saying "Jews will not replace us?"
The theory amongst white nationalists is that Jews are kind of a fifth column. That is, a bunch of race traitors who are masterminding the downfall of the white race, because Jews are advocating for open borders, immigration of nonwhite people weakening, white interest by putting forward what they call cultural Marxism , which is just a kind of synonym in their minds for like kind of liberal left ideology in the academies.
In other words, behind all the things that oppose white nationalism, they see a Jewish hand. The biggest hand they see is George Soros, the very wealthy, philanthropic investor, who has been a funder of a lot of liberal movements, from gun control to peace in Israel/Palestine, to funding the democratic party progressive wing.
So they see George Soros as part of this problem. So George Soros has replaced in the white nationalists of today what the Rothschild banking family was for turn of the century Europe. The shady Jewish cabal, which, which is behind all the ills of the true white people or the true national interest.
Clarissa Marks: Okay. If we're understanding antisemitism today in America, it's more about what it's perceived as like the Jewish conspiracy. Which is almost that Jews are being too liberal...?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Yes.
Clarissa Marks: ...and championing other minorities, as opposed to what it might've been in the past, which is that Jews were a minority that would just was too popular.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Jews have been blamed for all sorts of things; human rights, democracy, communism, capitalism, homosexuality. And so the playbook of what sort of evil, alleged evil, Jews are blamed for has rotated over the, over the decades. This new upsurge of antisemitism amongst the white nationalists sees the fact, and I think this is very crucial, that let's say something like 70% to 80% of Jewish Americans are opposed to Donald Trump, for example, or we'll vote for the Democrats. They see this as part of the problem. It's liberal Jews, well-placed in the American, cultural landscape and political landscape that are responsible for the undermining of white culture, white status, making white people feel guilty.
And so when president Trump says things like, "there's a lot of Jews who are traitors, who vote for the Democrats ,who are not loyal to Israel," this is a very bizarre twist on the old accusation that Jews were disloyal to their own country. So now loyalty to the United States: Jews have to be loyal to Israel.
This is what in, now, not that Trump has a logic, but there's supposed to be some sort of bizarre logic here. In other words, you'd use really should be good nationalists and support the interests of the state of Israel, which are just about the same as the interests of the, of the right-wing part of the United States.
So that's a weird twist. Meanwhile, in Israel, 80% of the Jews love Trump because Trump has allowed for some of the worst nationalist impulses through policy to come out and has reversed, longstanding American policy against for example, recognizing, east Jerusalem, as part of Israel and not occupied territory for lifting the legality of settlements in the West Bank.
And this is terrible for the peace process. It has been a profound reversal of American policy on Israel for 50 years and is a slap in the face to not just the Palestinians, but also too much of the Western industrialized democracies who have been kind of united strategically on these positions that resist Israeli nationalism.
Clarissa Marks: So to me it sounds like- well, I guess I'll ask your opinion on this: as we're going, are we rewriting the definition of racial groups or nationalistic groups and in a global way? So instead of white and non-white in the U.S., is society now saying, "well, we have white nationalists versus white sympathizers with people of color?" Are new definitions being written up?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Well, one thing we can think about is that when we're talking about racism, we're talking about relationships of power. We're not talking about, "I hate people because of X," It's rather the systemic situation of some groups having power over others and taking practices and policies to systematically disadvantage others. Nationalism is not nearly like pride of place or pride of country, but nationalism is a sort of assertion of the domination of that nation over either a part of its own population or populations adjacent to it. Let me give you an Israeli example. So in Israel, the Israeli nationalist mode holds that non-Jewish residents of Israel, or citizens of Israel, especially Arabs are to be ideally removed, but in the meantime, to be put under surveillance by the state and to be systematically disadvantaged by the state. So that means that yes, there are Arabs who are judges, and Arabs who go to medical school in Israel, but that is in the face of structural disadvantage to Jewish Israelis who are the dominant group. This has a racial component to it as well. Within Israeli society, non-Jews, especially Arabs, are structurally disadvantaged and excluded from the mechanisms of power and policy making. This is playing out now, too in places like Poland and Hungary where yes, here and there, there was a Jewish official or Jewish lawyer or somebody in the government who's Jewish, but Jews are also being put on probation as not really part of the Hungarian or the Polish national project. So this kind of ethno-nationalism has now become a global force and you see that playing out in the Trump administration and its supporters. So not everybody in America has to be Christian. Right? You can have a Jewish person like Stephen Miller, who's advocating for the worst sort of exclusive and nativist policies, and that the United States should be a country that's dominated by white people and white people's agenda. So yeah, this sort of nationalism has a racial component to it. Not that it never didn't. It always has, but that racial component is more complicated then merely saying, "we should not have any members of X in our boundaries."
It's more about a systematic institutional exclusion rather than like, "let us generate some hate and throw everybody in the, into the concentration camps or over the border."
Clarissa Marks: I'm not sure if you're there yet, because you were still writing the books, but do you have recommendations for American Jews who feel in the middle of the conflict? Where they want to be on the right side of history and want to be more involved in anti-racist movements, but feel confused about where they should leverage their privilege and even what their status of safety is right now?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Sure. Well, there's a lot of, there's a lot of interesting resources here and there. I'm thinking of, for example, jews for racial and economic justice has a very interesting guidebook on antisemitism which unpacks the relationships. A lot of these relationships we've been discussing. It's free online. Also, Temple University grad, April Rosenblum has a very famous pamphlet that was written for the anarchist movement in 2007, called "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, A guide for Addressing Antisemitism in Our Movements." I think that's a very interesting document to look at that is also a way of non -Jews helping to be sort of like brought up to date about what they're looking at.
So most non-Jewish activists will say, well, Jews are not a race, even though Jews have been a racialized people. That is, they have been made into a race by the communities they've been living amongst. One recent book does a very good job of unpacking the kind of dynamics between antisemitism on the left, like the labor party and in Palestinian advocacy work, is a book called "Strange Hate" by Keith Khan-Harris. He's a British sociologist and commentator on Jewish life. I also think Deborah E. Lipstadt's new book just called "Antisemitism" isn't a bad recap of the history of antisemitism and how it goes down today.
Now what Jews should do, well-meaning Jews should do, there really isn't the perfect book for this. It's more about looking to the actions and advocacy projects of certain groups like Bend the Arc and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and If Not Now. Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated question, because there are different types of Jews in America doing different things. There are already politicized Jews who are not sure what to think about Jewish community. There are not politicized Jews who are liberals, who vote democratic, who can stand Trump, but also who might be very suspicious of the Women's March and Linda Sarsour’s involvement with it.
There are Jews who are fully ready to say we have nothing to do with the State of Israel, and then there were Jews who have this like lingering, vague, sentimental attachment to the State of Israel. Maybe they have family and they're not sure how to think about things on that. I would recommend Peter Beinart's book "The crisis of Zionism." I think that really unpacks the issues very well. Those are three, three books off the top of my head.
Clarissa Marks: Okay. So I'm going to ask a very- I don't want to say it's a selfish question, but there's a self-interest in this question. When I think about this topic, what I keep coming back to is, I worked for the city of Seattle for awhile and they had some really great Race & Social Justice trainings that all the employees had to take, but everyone had to go around the room and say, what race you were when you introduce yourself; you say your name, where you're from and your race.
And I always struggled with that question because I wanted to say, "white, but... everything that we have just talked about in this conversation." If you had to introduce yourself and your race, while also alluding to all of the complexities that go with that, how would you answer that question?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: I usually check "other" when asked about my race on forms, but I would say, "Jewish" because we have been a racialized community. Jews in America, don't tend to identify Judaism as a race, but we have been racialized, which means that others have said, "Hey, you guys are, are a group apart. That means you are a race." That doesn't mean we are a race in the, in this American sense of having a different skin color, but we are a race apart. And frankly, I would advocate that people of Irish descent identify as Irish as well, or Germans identifying as Germans. I think whiteness is not a legitimate category to hold a proud identity, but being German is, or being Irish is, and Jewish is.
But being Jewish also is a kind of rejection of whiteness. Somebody made this goofy song called "I'm not white, I'm Jewish." And you know, a lot of Jews are kind of happy with that. Now at the same time, we do enjoy white privilege. So we can't just say we're raised like you black people or Latinos or Asians, because we also have the privileges of whiteness, of status within the society. So, yeah, I would say identify as Jewish and let that be the beginning of a longer, larger conversation.
The contrary opinion to Jews being a race, and certainly it's not a consensus, is that Jews are just the religion. This is something Palestinian advocates will say. They'll say, "Jews, you don't have a national identity. You're just a religion." And I think that very disingenuous because a lot of Jews do not say we are just blank people with a religion. Jews have been saying, not all Jews, but a significant part of Jews have been saying that we are a nation, we are a people, since the rise of Zionism, roughly 130 years or so. And to deny that we have a national consciousness, it's like saying to the Kurds, you're really not a people. You're just a bunch of like, I don't know, scallywag Muslim, half-Arabs or something, you deny people their own self identification.
It's like saying to the Palestinians, you're really not a people, either. You just, people who happen to be caught in the crossfire of the battle over the Holy land, you have no history. You have no identity. Palestinian national identity is very real to Palestinians and they would identify themselves as a people.
I think Jews should be allowed to be identified as their own people. Now, when somebody asks, "what race are you?" there's also weird dynamics and that can come in that question too, so much in that how we identify as racialized subjects in the U S might be different from how we might identify in other places.
Clarissa Marks: Yes, absolutely. Is there anything else that I should have asked, but I haven't yet?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Yeah, I do want to say a few, just a few things we have time. So my whole book also is premised on identifying a gap in the way that especially American Jews talk about our own commitments politically and ethically around racial justice.
Oftentimes you will hear that American Jews are for economic justice, racial justice, Tikkun Olam, welcoming the stranger, and often this is done in a very superficial manner. A rabbi might give a sermon arguing that we should stand for justice, but that's never quite fleshed out. At the same time Jews, especially in the last 50 years have been confronted with accusations that the Jewish religion itself is a racist project in that it excludes non-Jews, that it creates the distinction between peoples and sometimes have been blamed for the origins of race itself. It's true that anti-black Christianity draws much from the Old Testament in a distorted way to justify the exclusion of black people and interracial relations.
At the same time, within the Torah itself, as much as there are forms of tribal exclusion, there are also commandments, like to love the stranger and to treat the sojourner in the land with equality. And there are universal prophetic pronouncements that God is unhappy the way that the Jewish people has been conducting itself.
So the Torah itself speaks two trends at least: welcoming the stranger, but also excluding the stranger. And out of that matrix, Judaism has created certain types of religion and certain types of policies in different times in different contexts. So in Israel today, the radical right, the radical religious right brings up those passages and stories about exclusion and domination. Whereas, the American Jewish community brings up those passages about inclusion, justice and equality. So Jews as a community, and Judaism as a religion, has to be much more clear about where we stand about anti-racism, and our relationships to these projects, even in the face of imperfect coalitions partners who misunderstand the Jewish experience and Jewish history.
The other big point in this is that Zionism, the Jewish national project, which culminated in the creation of the state of Israel, Zionism itself has been cast as a racist project as a form of racial exclusion, a kind of apartheid, and that has to be reckoned with as well. So my project is not just about the, let's say topical upsurge of antisemitism in the last, let's say 15 years, i's also about longterm questions of where does the Jewish community stand in terms of anti-racism. My model for this somewhat is the Catholic church because the Catholic church has taken in several and cyclicals, very clear stances against forms of race science, against racial domination. The American Catholic bishops have released several letters, being very clear about what they mean by racism and the steps needing to be taken for racial reconciliation.
And so by doctrine, the Catholic church is against certain forms of racism and racial science. And I think the Jewish community also needs to wrestle with these questions and be very clear about them. Because a lot is at stake, both the Jewish national project and the status American Jews, vis-a-vis the other group within the American tapestry.
Clarissa Marks: Hmm. Well, I want to thank you so much for a really engaging and interesting conversation. I feel like you've given me a lot more to think about when are you expecting your book to be completed?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Hoping to get it finished by June and then probably be another season before it gets published. I'm not sure what the timeline is on this, but as it does, I'll hopefully release some essays and op-ed pieces to accompany them.
Clarissa Marks: If listeners are interested in your work and want to learn more about what you're doing, or if you're speaking somewhere, where's the best place that they can find information?
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: One thing is I'm always willing to share a bunch of important pieces and aspects of my syllabus from the Race and Judaism course. So they can get in hold of me at elratzman@gmail.com. There really isn't a manageable resource for this outside of the group called Be’Chol Lashon, which is a, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the inner diversity of the Jewish people. That's a San Francisco based group and they have on their website a very nice resource list. There's also a group called Jews in All Hues, which is a coalition group between Jews of Color and their allies also has a lot of excellent resources.
Clarissa Marks: Fabulous. Okay. I will make sure all of those are in the show notes.
Well, thank you so much, Elliot Ratzman for your time. It was lovely talking with you.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Thank you. Thanks for having me on your podcast.
Clarissa Marks: No problem. Have a good rest of your semester.
Dr. Elliot Ratzman: Thanks. Okay. Bye
Clarissa Marks: This episode was produced by me, Clarissa Marks with music by the Rondo brothers. If you like the show, you can support us by sharing it with a friend or by adding a review to your favorite podcast app. That'll make sure that other listeners can find us. You can connect with me on Twitter or Instagram at ClarissaRMarks, and to hear more episodes, read transcripts, or learn more about the people or media we mentioned, visit our website: Onwandering.co. Take care and see you next time.