#benjamin says they did? but overall just really do believe in this framing and conclusion

[theburialofstrawberries]

As a Marxist, I am drawn to neat materialist arguments. Race, as ethnic studies scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out, is material project, constructed as a means to legitimate and organize slavery and Indian Removal, while simultaneously enfranchising a white body politic. And Brodkin follows this thesis: in the meta-organization of capital, as Jews ascended from the proletarian ranks of immigrant labor to the middle class, like other white ethnics, so too did their racial classification. In this post-war context, organizing as Jews makes as much sense as organizing as Slovaks or Russians; one misses the forest for the burning crosses.  

The trouble of course, with this materialist analysis is the stubborn persistence of antisemitism, its discursive nature, its location in political rather than strictly economic projects. Just as “American Jews celebrated the postwar consensus,” enjoyed their “integration into the suburbs” and found “common ties” with their new often white, Christian neighbors as historian Marc Dollinger describes, the greatest antisemitic purge of the 20th century was taking place in the United States–the Second Red Scare.

Discourse–even tropes shall we say–of the Judeo-Bolshevik aside, the proof is in the numbers: two-thirds of those questioned in the 1952 McCarthy hearings were Jewish, despite Jews accounting for under 2 percent of the American population. Congressman John Rankin delighted in “unmasking” the Jewish names of Hollywood actors and directors while under HUAC investigation, and of course, the only two people ever executed on federal espionage charges during the Cold War, the Rosenbergs, were Jewish. My own grandparents, Jewish members of the Communist Party, referred to the Red Scare as an American pogrom.

(...)

But this brings me to my final point, which is rather personal. Jews are physically harmed by this discourse. While the Responsa claims that antisemitism is “rare,” one wonders for whom. I did not grow up in a big city or central suburb. As one of the few Jews in my small California town, I heard antisemitic slurs on a regular basis, swastikas were routinely painted on the one area temple, I had a swastika carved into my locker. I was chased by baseball bat wielding skinheads and saved from a certain beating by white nationalists only when the cops happen to bust up the illegal club I attended, scattering the crowd. The FBI tracked nearly 1000 antisemitic hate crimes in 2019, the last year for which there are easily accessible records. As an adolescent in rural California in the 80s and early 90s, antisemitism did not seem “rare” to me at all. But perhaps as Robert Warshow would have said 70 years ago, this is just another cliché.

Ultimately however, this not an academic, or even personal, debate: it’s a debate on movement strategy. Perhaps the writers of the Responsa are correct, and the Trump era is over, and the rise of the far-right was merely a blip on the orderly march toward liberalism. Perhaps we should all just go back to brunch. I would be happy if that were the case. But I am not so sure. Such predictions as Adorno warned toward the end of his life, are far “too contemplative.” This way of thinking he writes, “which views such things from the outset like natural disasters about which one can make predictions, like whirlwinds or meteorological disasters…already shows a form of resignation whereby one essentially eliminates oneself as a political subject.” We are political subjects in a world undergoing massive transformation–and the stakes are too high to be wrong. Targeting antisemitism is the work the Jewish left needs to be doing and is uniquely suited to do. The organizations doing so understand that it is intersectional, in coalition, building power on the left. It is an act of solidarity, not solipsism.

On Anti-Semitism and Left Strategy, Benjamin Balthaser