COLLECTIVE COMMUNITY CARE
What is Antisemitism?
Written by Basha Hofheimer Nachman
What do we mean when we say it/what/how do we define it? How does antisemitism impact Jewish individuals differently across intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location? The impression of antisemitism to me as growing up in my household and raised in Reform Judaism, one of the many branches of Jewish tradition, I perceived antisemitism as discrimination and state violence that primarily impacted European Jewish immigrants fleeing the Holocaust to the United States. There are many branches of Judaism including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist. Living in Seattle, WA I knew antisemitism existed in the form of housing discrimination written into covenants, hateful speech, attacks on sites of worship, and interpersonally. This limited and incomplete working understanding and analysis of how antisemitism functions alongside interlocking systems of oppression, which has led me to this question, What is an intersectional approach to antisemitism that analyzes geography, race, gender, sexuality, and economic class?
The desire to build an intersectional analysis of antisemitism directly stems from Black Feminism, a political movement with an action-based practice that centers the lived realities and ancestral past of Black womxn, as the Combahee River Collective Statement names resist an “interlocking forms of oppression” to “combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face,” such as anti-Black racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, impacted by geographical location. Thus, this definition of Black Feminism alongside Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality, “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (1). Crenshaw is using intersectionality as a lens to identify where oppressive forces intersect and constrain the lives of Black womxn specifically, which can also be transferred to address the lives of women of color transnationally (1).
Throughout the rest of this resource, I will be exploring how these two definitions of Black Feminism aid my understanding and development toward a collective intersectional analysis of antisemitism.
I am in the initial steps of unlearning this version of antisemitism that was taught to me, deepen my understanding, and center that antisemitism impacts individuals who identify as Jewish differently, for Judaism and Jewish identity encapsulate a diverse form of religious and secular practice, traditions, cultures, languages, and lived experiences.
What was your first understanding of antisemitism? Who told you? How did you learn it? Which Jews are impacted?
In the ancient world, Jewish people experienced the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. The spread of Christianity, the Spanish Inquisition that expelled and persecuted the Jews, the Crusades, blaming Jewish people for the death of Jesus, social and economic discrimination of the Enlightenment era in central and western Europe know has “the Jewish question” and the genocide of the Holocaust in the 1940s, in which Jews were blamed for economic and social problems. Jewish people in Germany were forced into specific jobs, such as debt collectors that perpetuated stereotypes associating Jews with money, control, and or intangible powerful forces. Jewish European immigrants were faced with quotas in the United States. In 1948, the State of Israel was created, dispossessing Palestinians and Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews of Israel/Palestine, and selectively extending the right of return to specific Jewish populations and not, for example, Ethiopian Jews.
Tallie Ben Danel, a Mizrahi Jew, offers an alternative narrative to the overly simplified one above beginning with the development of a Jewish community in Iraq, who “made tremendous contributions to Iraqi society in the field of commerce, education, arts, and served in the military” (173). In, 1941, farhud, an anti-Jewish riot in Baghdad, that historian Orit Bashkin describes is a result of “German propaganda disseminated into the Iraqi print market,” and created “a period of intense debate among intellectuals concerning Nazism and racism,” alongside the fusion of Zionism with Judaism. The state of Israel was established in 1948, but Iraqi Jews and many-non European Jewish communities were perceived as uncivilized and “othered”, thus placed into refugee camps by the Israeli government (112; 174).
The first narrative no longer sits comfortably with me because it removes the experiences and histories of non-European Jews. Diverse Jewish communities exist all over the world. Also, in a North American context, this narrative does not require, myself, as a white US Jews to confront my unearned white privilege, how I participate in white supremacy, and reinforce anti-Black racism. Lastly, the first summary may be interpreted as the removal of Palestinians to establish the State of Israel solved ongoing antisemitism experienced by some European Jews, who were granted the “right of return”.
At the same time, the conditions of founding the state of Israel in 1948 culminated with the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” a military expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and a destruction of villages creating the second-largest refugee population in the world (21).
The second narrative is also simplified yet is a powerful call to action and reminder that when speaking and learning about antisemitism, I/we cannot only refer to the experiences of white Ashkenazi Jews. Mizrahi, Sephardic, Jewish communities and Jews of color exist in Israel/Palestine and in the United States, by centering different marginalized histories and political contexts of Jewish communities we begin to challenge the dominant idea that European Jewish history, exclusion, and discrimination is the single historical narrative for all Jewish people.
Building an intersectional understanding of antisemitism naturally connects to Black Feminism, which provides a framework to create an analysis of how antisemitism intersects with “interlocking forms of oppression” such as anti-Black racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and geographical location.
The desire to build an intersectional analysis of antisemitism directly stems from Black Feminism, a political movement with an action-based practice that centers the lived realities and ancestral past of Black womxn, as the Combahee River Collective Statement names resist an “interlocking forms of oppression” to “combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face,” such as anti-Black racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, impacted by geographical location. Thus, this definition of Black Feminism alongside Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality, “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (1). Crenshaw is using intersectionality as a lens to identify where oppressive forces intersect and constrain the lives of Black womxn specifically, which can also be transferred to address the lives of women of color transnationally (1).
Throughout the rest of this resource, I will be exploring how these two definitions of Black Feminism aid my understanding and development toward a collective intersectional analysis of antisemitism.
I am in the initial steps of unlearning this version of antisemitism that was taught to me, deepen my understanding, and center that antisemitism impacts individuals who identify as Jewish differently, for Judaism and Jewish identity encapsulate a diverse form of religious and secular practice, traditions, cultures, languages, and lived experiences.
What was your first understanding of antisemitism? Who told you? How did you learn it? Which Jews are impacted?
In the ancient world, Jewish people experienced the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. The spread of Christianity, the Spanish Inquisition that expelled and persecuted the Jews, the Crusades, blaming Jewish people for the death of Jesus, social and economic discrimination of the Enlightenment era in central and western Europe know has “the Jewish question” and the genocide of the Holocaust in the 1940s, in which Jews were blamed for economic and social problems. Jewish people in Germany were forced into specific jobs, such as debt collectors that perpetuated stereotypes associating Jews with money, control, and or intangible powerful forces. Jewish European immigrants were faced with quotas in the United States. In 1948, the State of Israel was created, dispossessing Palestinians and Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews of Israel/Palestine, and selectively extending the right of return to specific Jewish populations and not, for example, Ethiopian Jews.
Tallie Ben Danel, a Mizrahi Jew, offers an alternative narrative to the overly simplified one above beginning with the development of a Jewish community in Iraq, who “made tremendous contributions to Iraqi society in the field of commerce, education, arts, and served in the military” (173). In, 1941, farhud, an anti-Jewish riot in Baghdad, that historian Orit Bashkin describes is a result of “German propaganda disseminated into the Iraqi print market,” and created “a period of intense debate among intellectuals concerning Nazism and racism,” alongside the fusion of Zionism with Judaism. The state of Israel was established in 1948, but Iraqi Jews and many-non European Jewish communities were perceived as uncivilized and “othered”, thus placed into refugee camps by the Israeli government (112; 174).
The first narrative no longer sits comfortably with me because it removes the experiences and histories of non-European Jews. Diverse Jewish communities exist all over the world. Also, in a North American context, this narrative does not require, myself, as a white US Jews to confront my unearned white privilege, how I participate in white supremacy, and reinforce anti-Black racism. Lastly, the first summary may be interpreted as the removal of Palestinians to establish the State of Israel solved ongoing antisemitism experienced by some European Jews, who were granted the “right of return”.
At the same time, the conditions of founding the state of Israel in 1948 culminated with the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” a military expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and a destruction of villages creating the second-largest refugee population in the world (21).
The second narrative is also simplified yet is a powerful call to action and reminder that when speaking and learning about antisemitism, I/we cannot only refer to the experiences of white Ashkenazi Jews. Mizrahi, Sephardic, Jewish communities and Jews of color exist in Israel/Palestine and in the United States, by centering different marginalized histories and political contexts of Jewish communities we begin to challenge the dominant idea that European Jewish history, exclusion, and discrimination is the single historical narrative for all Jewish people.
Building an intersectional understanding of antisemitism naturally connects to Black Feminism, which provides a framework to create an analysis of how antisemitism intersects with “interlocking forms of oppression” such as anti-Black racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and geographical location.
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