'White' and oppressed? When 'the left' excludes Jews, and why

Someone says Jews are not really 'white' and should not be hated for that reason (but white Christians should be?). Nonsense. Jewish culture is largely European, and it is a minority culture that like many involves 'accented' (in terms of meaning, not sound or style) thinking in 'major' languages, which has been the case since the Hellenistic period, when Jewish culture massively adopted most of European Greek culture, except its religion, which rapidly was dying anyway. The results included both the Talmud and the close integration of Jewish and 'gentile' European culture whenever it was a question of the arts and world of ideas, especially when the French Revolution made this integration finally possible and largely mandated. The Jews are as white as the Irish and should have as much reason to oppose imperialist practices and institutions as they do. Or as Americans should. Our history can make that possible. 

The truth is Jews are different because of different values. They have consistently stood for a more uncompromising morality, misrecognized as ‘cruelly’ focused on justice without love, though in fact these principles are unitary. Judaism also maintains a different relationship than Christian culture to power, authority, and the state. A religion of faith and empire, Christianity like Islam tends to closely identify God and state whether through subordination or opposition. It also regards the world as essentially created ‘fully’ like a product, with the faults in creation only being individual sin, and ‘salvation’ is individual redemption, not the perfect of the social world. Jews of course were always a minoritarian and outsider people, and while the religion allowed a patriarchy and could seem to support apolitical stances of moderation, Judaism was too intellectual, too egalitarian, and too ‘outside’ to be as authoritarian as the dominant society always was. These are among the reasons there have so many Jewish radicals.

But these things also dispose us to social criticisms that, while not necessarily reducing politics to ethics, do tend towards skepticism of nationalist xenophobias on right or left (such as one of ‘the oppressed’), including our own. The Talmud says “Do not favor the rich man because he is rich, or the poor man because he is for.” That inequality of wealth and power is an injustice is a theme central to the Prophets, but we also think injustice in most instances, where it can be judged, is a matter of what is done, not who does it. And recent historical events that have affected us particularly can lead to the conclusion that, good and bad, there is almost no limit to what human beings can either suffer or do. Certainly, you can be privileged and oppress no one (though you might owe some of your luck to structural oppression, which is not the same thing at all), and you can be oppressed and poor and oppress others. The Torah commands us not to “oppress the Egyptian.” The Egyptian nation did not oppress the Jewish one, in our legendary antiquity, because of some genetic disposition for evil, a notion that only makes sense in a line of thinking that extends from racist appropriations of Darwin to Hitlerism itself. It is just a fact, troubling as it may be to those who need everything to be simple, and to moralists who need to stop short thinking in order to enforce the just judgments, that matters are not always so simple. The good and bad, politically and otherwise, are not so readily identified, as if they were like two sports teams with different colored jerseys, or two armies that can always be told apart though they act similarly.

Also, we are not ennobled by oppression, and claiming it is little title to justify much of anything at all. The divine is not in such an instrumentalization that appropriates evil, but in the response. People should stop pretending that the Holocaust justifies anything. If there were only oppression, or domination, along with cruelty and indifference, in the world, God would not be possible. But oppression is resisted, always, and sometimes well, though often badly. History has so far proven far more painful than simple. It’s not a soccer match that the good play against the bad. Some figure war (or policing) that way: the good then just is the war against or suppression of the bad. Obviously, that is war and policing ideology; Christianity called it the Manichaean heresy (that God is at war against forces of evil), which neither Christianity or Islam ever became fully free from, our own nation’s leaders taking a cue from that playback sometimes in demonizing opponent regimes abroad. The Cold War was Manichaean, and it involved anti-semitism in the form of anti-communism (anti-radicalism, anti-oppositionality) and the inevitable anti-intellectualism. Jews in America are far more likely to suffer from hatred of intellectuals, leftists, or other elites, then any dislike of our religion per se, especially given some of America’s constitutive principles and anxieties, a nation founded in ideas of liberty and opposition to oppression, which, it should be remembered, are all too easily distorted and falsified even in their exercise. Colonialism and slavery are part of the cause of that, of course, but it remains the case that radical postures of opposition to oppression, particularly of some particular social group, and rather in-born to this country, and so they ought to be regarded with skeptical caution, as well as enthusiasm, when sober judgment and careful analysis warrant.

There are Jewish radicals and Jewish elites and high-achievers who prized a culture of the mind. Anti-Semites have hated both. We don't think education and intellect and professional achievement can be bad things just because of associations with elites and upper classes. Pogroms will kill Jewish violinists as well as butchers, barbers, and beggars. This is possible on the left because of the appeal of resentments, and the fact that artists and intellectuals can be positioned on the side of the rich, powerful, and cynical, as well as that of the more normally oppressed poor. This is the Jewish anomaly that most American leftist overlook. This and the fact that Christianity is both less intellectual and more authoritarian are the major constituents of the black-Jewish rift. Which is one of the biggest problems on the American left, and most liberals get it wrong. 

The critique of 'whiteness' is a fascist pseudo-left-wing meme that leads nowhere e except to pogroms.

Our motto should be less policing, more affordable food, housing, health care, -- and quality education, --- and violinists. To vary a quote of Emma Goldman’s, if I can't enjoy great art in leisure and speak and write freely, than screw your revolution. If I can, since I also say we all should, then include me in.