Whoopsie Goldberg et al
Whoopsie Goldberg et al
American Jewry continues to face insanity day in day out
I could ask: what’s going on in America this past week, but many of us don’t ask the question any more. We just watch it all unfold as planned.
In the past week, American Jewry has been rocked by a series of events not unrelated to one another. Curiously close to the internationally observed Holocaust Memorial Day, the ADL announced its hiring of Tema Smith as its new outreach director and leader of a new initiative focusing on an increasingly talked-about categorization within the community focused on “Jews of Color”. The online backlash arose given Smith’s long history of berating other pro-Israel Jewish activists online, often blocking them. She’s heavily criticized Jews who highlight the ways in which Critical Race Theory and anti-racism exhibit exclusionary, often antisemitic, characterizations of Jews. More crucially, even in a most blatant attack on Jews in the UK when grime rapper Wiley went on a 48-hour Twitter tirade against Jewish people in 2020, Smith displayed empathy with him, not the community. To many, Smith represents a gatekeeper of antisemitism. Her position on antiracism appears to take priority to the ADL over her efficacy in dealing with Jew hate.
In tandem with this, it became apparent that the ADL has a new definition for racism on its website, now described as “oppression of people of color through systems that privilege White people.” It’s a definition that excludes Jews from experiencing racism, which is intellectually false. (Nevermind that it excludes all sorts of historic ethnic-based genocides from the Armenians to Rwanda, The Farhud to Darfur).
What followed was a split online between Jews who vehemently disagree with the adoption of anti-racism lingo to re-categorize and split our people, versus those who staunchly advocate for the adoption of the “JOC” terminology, arguing that it pushes conversations surrounding racism within our own community to the fore. To that I ask: why do we need new terminology to address our own internal battles? How is this division going to assist in that? We already have language to recognize our diversity. There’s nothing in our self-defining that predicates our capacity to name ourselves Jewish *and* [insert racial profile]. The definition of this new acronym is unclear, and can currently be used to create such friction, which feeds the woke mob, and further divides and conquers as, as we turn on each other in inconducive ways, alienating each other according to skin tone, which is - in my book - un-Jewish.
All the while, as some sort of reminder that we can’t afford infighting came a weekend of Neo-Nazi rallies in Florida that - again - was largely ignored by mainstream media, in which flags were waved, antisemitic slurs poured out into the streets and a banner hanged from a freeway. These guys hate us all, regardless of our own inner spats. Imagine being Jewish in Florida, and seeing this in 2022.
To top it off, Monday morning’s episode of The View saw long-time panellist Whoopi Goldberg, who has an eyebrow-raising history with Jewish-oriented prejudice, demand four times that the Holocaust was not “about race”.
I’ve written about this extensively for The Federalist this morning.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/01/whoopi-goldbergs-ignorance-about-the-holocaust-is-what-happens-when-intersectionality-rots-peoples-brains/
And while you chew on it, and contemplate that the ADL’s director Jonathan Greenblatt helped her formulate an apology last night for Twitter after dedicating his leadership last week to solidifying the notion that Jews actually can’t experience racism, also consider the egg on his face after Goldberg went on Colbert last night, repeated her statements and doubled down on her viewpoint, with the help of the host himself, who admits he is not Jewish.
American Jewry is currently divided between those progressive leaders who seek to either minimize our experience of prejudice or universalize it to fit the new woke agenda versus those of us who are clinging to our historically accurate and intellectually sound experiences in order to withstand passing trends, while attacks on our community increase regardless of the latest theoretical fads. Who knows where it’s headed.
Thank you. The last paragraph really says it all.. I fear this is a losing battle in the US. Looking at the comments on non-jewish instagram, it is quite clear that the "Whoopsie" demographic has no idea about 1-Jewish History 2-The Holocaust in all of its details 3-non-liberal jews. The Jonathan Greenblatts of America, who are more concerned with the Dem party and its power and have subjugated their jewishness to that end, will back anyone up anyone and everyone and forget their ancestors history with a smile.
It is hard to add any further comment to expand on what Eve has summarized here so well. This is well- explained on what we are experiencing and observing