Brad Lander recently wrote this op-Ed in collaboration with Bend the Arc in the context of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election. I am really bothered by the implication that, for the sake of humanity, we must set our Jewishness aside and find common ground with people who cannot accept us as we are. My Jewishness is not a “part” of my identity — it is the soul of it — nor is my Jewishness “limiting” or in conflict with any other parts of me.
Haber’s life was the tragedy of the German Jew – a tragedy of one-sided love.
Albert Einstein on his friend and colleague Fritz Haber
In 1892, Fritz Haber converted to Christianity to advance his academic career. The Nazis persecuted him out of Germany anyway.
JEWISHNESS AND HUMANITY ARE NOT OPPOSITE OR CONTRADICTORY
There over 8 billion people living in the world today. Of those 8 billion, over 2.6 billion are Christian and 2 billion are Muslim. That means that over half of the world’s population borrowed their moral code – the Tanakh and the Ten Commandments, that is – from Jews. Yet somehow, historically and today, “Jewishness” and “humanity” are consistently framed as oppositional.
- The Christian church historically depicted Jews as sinful as opposed to virtuous on the basis that we rejected Jesus on the cross.
Yes, it’s true that Jews tend to look out for each other. Not only does the Talmud tell us that “All of Israel is responsible for one another,” but thanks to centuries of enforced segregation and discrimination, Jews have historically been a largely insular community. But that does not mean that our Jewishness is separate from our humanity. Our Jewishness is central to our humanity.
It is known that the Jewish people are polluted with wickedness, blasphemy, and the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ so that their wickedness has no limit.
Pope Gregory IX, 13th century
For millennia, antisemites have depicted Jews as sinful and even demonic – the opposite of virtuous, or, in modern times, the opposite of humane or humanitarian.
WHO MADE JEWISH SAFETY CONDITIONAL?
Hint: it wasn’t us. According to the concept of “collective liberation,” our safety as Jews is bound to the safety of other marginalized groups, the implication being that if we are humane enough, we will be safe. And while it’s a heartwarming concept in theory, in practice, for the past two years (and even longer), Jews have been pushed out of just about every social justice movement and subjected to impossible litmus tests with ever-moving goalposts. And here’s a secret: Jews deserve to be safe from antisemitism, even if we were bad allies.
INTERNALIZED ANTISEMITISM IS NOT A NEW PHENOMENON
Historically, Jews too have often internalized the antisemitic idea that Jewishness is the opposite of virtue. Some examples:
- During the Enlightenment, more assimilated Jews – generally from Western Europe – tended to look down on traditional Jews from Eastern Europe, as they considered themselves more cosmopolitan and humanitarian.
- In a series of letters published in the Jewish weekly The American Hebrew, titled “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” Jewish poet and activist Emma Lazarus chastised assimilated American Jews for prioritizing the opinions of antisemites at the expense of the Jews suffering in Eastern Europe. American Jews, she wrote, worried that caring for their Jewish siblings would be seen as “tribal” and “narrow,” as opposed to the “humane” and “cosmopolitan” qualities exhibited by antisemites.
"But lest we should justify the taunts of our opponents, lest we should become 'tribal' and narrow and Judaic rather than humane and cosmopolitan like the antisemites of Germany and Jew-baiters of Russia, we ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes — until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips."
Excerpt from An Epistle to the Hebrews by Emma Lazarus, 1883
JEWS AND ALLYSHIP
I do not want to fall into the habit of turning out my pockets to prove to antisemites that Jews are “deserving” of allyship, so I almost didn’t include this slide. People should care to fight antisemitism based only on the fact that Jews are human beings and antisemitism is wrong. But if you’re going to accuse a minority of not showing up for others when they are in need, Jews — including Zionist Jews — are a pretty odd choice.
- Women’s rights: Zionist women were overrepresented in first and second wave feminism. For example, American suffragettes were disproportionately Jewish.
- Civil rights: though Jews only constituted about 3% of the American population in the 1960s, over half of the non-Black riders in the Freedom Buses were Jews, and over half of “white” Civil Rights lawyers in the South were Jewish at the time. Of course, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s contributions to the Civil Rights movement and his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. are well-known.
- Immigration reform: arguably no minority has so disproportionately positively impacted the fight for immigration reform more than American Jews. Organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) are among the oldest nonprofits providing aid to immigrants in the United States. Jews played a significant role in the 1960s in advocating for family reunification, and as early as 1985, the Union for Reform Judaism passed a resolution supporting sanctuary for refugees.
- LGBTQ rights: Zionist Jews have been at the forefront of the fight for LGBTQ rights, both in and outside the United States. In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld established the first trans healthcare clinic in the world in 1919. Though homosexuality in the U.S. wasn’t decriminalized nationwide until 2003, Jewish groups were calling for its decriminalization as early as 1965. Prominent LGBTQ figures like Harvey Milk were Jewish…and Zionist. Americans owe their right to marriage equality to the Supreme Court case brought forth by a Zionist Jewish lesbian couple.
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Indigenous rights (in the United States): Jews began actively advocating for the rights of Native Americans in the 1890s, and by the time of the New Deal, that advocacy had become a lot more organized, strategic, and visible, with Jewish lawyers playing an important and outsized role in the Indian New Deal. In 1973, during the Wounded Knee Occupation, the majority of lawyers representing the Oglala Lakota prisoners were Jews.
In my SOLIDARITY highlight, you can also learn more about historic Jewish solidarity with Indigenous nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
It’s true, as the saying goes, that allyship is not meant to be transactional. As Jews, we support others in need because that’s the right thing to do. But to accuse Jews of being “bad allies” is utterly ahistorical and untrue. It’s just another libel to justify the demonization, stigmatization, and isolation of the Jewish people in the name of “activism.”
YES ALLYSHIP IS NOT TRANSACTIONAL
…But some people are not allies. Gaslighting the Jewish community about it won’t make them so, either.
Nobody deserves to be subjected to hate, discrimination, or persecution on the basis of their ethnic, religious, national, racial, sexual, or gender identity – even if we find their politics objectionable or even despicable. Zohran Mamdani does not deserve to be subjected to Islamophobia or racism. But that in itself doesn’t make him my ally.
Likewise, not a single Jew deserves to be subjected to antisemitism, even if you despise us as individuals. As I always say, antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred, not a punishment for bad behavior.
And yet, that is precisely the message that collective liberationists – generally fellow Jews – try to sell us: if you stop prioritizing your own people, if you put other minorities ahead of your own, then you, too, will be safe. No. Absolutely not. All Jews deserve protection from antisemitism because antisemitism is always wrong. Period.