In W.E.B Du Bois’ groundbreaking essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois wrote movingly of the second sight, or “double consciousness,” afforded to African Americans, who were caught in, but not of, the West. Being seen as an object by others does not render, as Du Bois says, “true self consciousness”—but it does tell one a great deal about the looker. For Du Bois, Blackness to white people is an abstraction, a name for a social conflict that does not include real Black life.
Du Bois describes this state as “[m]easuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt or pity.” He suggests Black subjectivity is shaped by the process of being seen by white people. In his opening essay in Souls, he gives several examples of the subjective experience that emerges from constantly facing—indirectly—what he calls “the real question,” namely, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
It’s a passage I’ve thought about repeatedly these last few weeks as October 7th loomed, the terrible anniversary of what has now been over one year of death, the sometimes slow and sometimes fast annihilation of Palestine as a place and a people, often in the name of “Jewish safety.”
What can it possibly mean to be Jewish in the United States in such a moment?
Jewishness in the present is not so much gazed upon by whiteness, but refracted in whiteness’s image; to be less invisible but a kind bright, always hyper-visible negation of the Other. It is not so much a problem to be solved for power, but one to be wielded by it.
The question I find myself asking myself is in a way the inverse of Du Bois’ question over a century ago: not how does it feel to be a problem, but instead “the real question” of our time, namely, how does it feel to be a weapon?
Since October 7th, Jewishness has been implicated, or at least evoked, as both a cause and justification for Israel’s crimes. It has been weaponized overtly, repeatedly, and aggressively in the American public sphere to silence dissent, crush protest, even end the public university as a site of free speech, debate, criticism, and activism on the side of the dispossessed.
Concerns about “Jewish safety” on college campuses have been rhetorically mobilized by the likes far-right GOP senator Elise Stefanik during widely publicized hearings, suggesting that student protests for justice in Palestine are calling for the mass extermination of Jews. While such hearings directly led to three Ivy League presidents’ resignations, they also supercharged even more far-reaching lawsuits and federal complaints against pro-Palestine demonstrations and encampments, challenging not only speech codes at U.S. colleges, but even the entire legal framework around religion, race, and the law.
The most remarkable of these cases, Frankel v UC Regents, argued that the UCLA pro-Palestine student encampment violated Jewish “religious liberty” when it limited entrance to anti-Zionist students. While there is important context missing from this exclusion in the case—as the night before the litigated incident, the encampment was violently attacked by pro-Israel counter-protesters, including assaults with bottle-rockets and hurled furniture—its argument was stated on constitutional principle, not immediate needs for protesters’ security. The encampment created a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” the case argued, suggesting both that Zionism is the core of religious Judaism, and legally speaking, anti-Zionist Jews are thus not Jews.
Yet the meaning of the case is not empirical but normative: there were observant anti-Zionist Jews in the encampment, and anti-Zionist Jews, as has been widely noted, have played major, leading roles in student encampments and protests in solidarity with Palestine over the last year.
Indeed, a majority of American Jews believe the U.S. should suspend arms shipments to Israel; a plurality of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide, a number that shoots to over half if one selects for Jewish youth. Yet this case—building on earlier right-wing “religious liberty” cases—constructs Jewishness as essentially Zionist.
The case goes even further to mandate that Zionism itself is a protected form of first-amendment activity and may not be curtailed or restricted in any way. While the UC crushed student encampments and enacted harsh restrictions on protests, such a ruling now reconfigures authoritarian measures as the “protection” of vulnerable religious/ethnic minorities.
Such inversions of reason take an additionally absurd shape in a recent Title 6 complaint at the University of Washington (UW). The complaint suggests that Jewish students faced repeated harassment and threats of violence, as evidenced by anti-Zionist and anti-colonial slogans. At a board of Regents meeting, strenuous objections to accusations that they were antisemites by Jewish anti-Zionists were themselves taken as claims they were indeed antisemites.
The objections by Jewish faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the University of Washington—a group that includes UW’s leading Jewish Studies faculty—to the findings of UW’s task force on antisemitism were also dismissed, for they did not support the claims that antisemitism is indeed a crisis on campus. In one of the stranger incidents reported on the story, protests against Charlie Kirk, a far-right wing (yet pro-Israel) antisemite, were included as examples of antisemitism. Apparently protesting a neo-Nazi is now an antisemitic act.
Of course, American Jews do protest against their conscription. A common Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) sign days after October 7th, “Our Grief is Not Your Weapon,” was an early attempt at making an intervention in this inverted discursive world in which we find ourselves. The slogan argued that whatever mourning many Jews may be in—even as someone who has no immediate family in Israel, in a small Jewish world I nonetheless knew two people who were killed on October 7th—this grief should not be weaponized to launch a brutal war against Gaza.
Regardless of protest, Israeli deaths on Oct. 7th continue to be mobilized in an endless narrative of Jewish grief and trauma, with the Holocaust at the center. President Biden and Vice President Harris evoked October 7th to reaffirm their commitment to arming Israel. A recent Trump ad, in which he promises to “keep Jews safe,” despite a long record of open antisemitic remarks, is brazenly asserted despite Jewish voters rejecting him by a margin of 5-to-1.
Closer to home, Indiana recently passed a higher education law designed to make “conservative students feel more comfortable” at state universities. The law subjects faculty to periodic review to ensure they comply with this vaguely worded but nonetheless legally binding guideline. Designed to do away with fields such as women’s studies and ethnic studies—fields in which conservative studies feel particularly “uncomfortable”—this new law was paired with the “antisemitism awareness act” as the GOP’s chief educational legislative priority.
While religious and racial discrimination are already prohibited by Indiana state institutions, the “antisemitism awareness act” would specifically include “more than normal” criticism of Israel to the state code, which assumes either that Israel is “normal” or that any protest of a U.S. ally is “abnormal” given the state’s response to pro-Palestinian students. This twinning, this combination, cracking down on ethnic studies while “protecting” Jewish students, is not incidental. Jewishness is the name “white supremacy” is now given.
As a Jewish faculty member who teaches ethnic studies at IU, it was strange to hear that the same state legislators who were so concerned with my safety were also threatening my job.
In a rational world, it would be counterintuitive to see that teaching courses that are critical of the construction and oppression of people by race are also attacked by the same people who claim to care about a particular form of ethnic discrimination. But in our world, this is no more counterintuitive than the Jewish faculty member at a small liberal arts college brought up on Title 6 charges for making Jewish students feel “unsafe” due to this faculty member’s criticism of Israel and solidarity with Palestine: the first professor to be openly fired over antisemitism is a Jewish professor, who teaches Jewish studies.
It would be a joke if it weren’t also deadly serious.
Of course, this is not the first time Jews have been deployed as “model” or even “exemplary” minorities, often against the working class, especially the working class of color. Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1965 report on “The Negro Family” blamed generational poverty in many African American communities on the assumed pathologies of Black family life. Liberal turned neocon Nathan Glazer added a Jewish twist to this, charging that, in the words of scholar Keith Feldman, “Black people are always already deficient as compared with the properly assimilable Jews.” Not only was this for Glazer a way to explain the sudden post-war rise of American Jews in educational institutions, but such a framework also attempted to explain away structural racism in the United States, suggesting that racialized poverty is again, rooted in the pathologies of the poor, not the structural inequalities inherent to capitalism.
Despite Glazer’s praise for the free market and the solid (and very un-Rothian) Jewish family, this latest form of weaponization goes far beyond the racism of Glazer’s rhetoric to reshape public institutions, even racial and religious case law.
I certainly do not write this essay as a call for Jewish guilt. I am not a Zionist. No one is a Zionist in my immediate or extended family. I don’t belong—as a Jew—to a Zionist institution, religious or secular.
The Zionists institutions to which I do belong—the federal government, my university—are not Jewish institutions, but public and state ones, nominally secular, formally protestant.
“Jewish guilt,” like “Jewish safety,” posits a universal Jewish subject and an untroubled Jewish peoplehood, which disguises both the class and racial divisions within the Jewish community and, more importantly, the names and addresses of those who are responsible for such actions: very particular Jewish institutions, and very specific class interests.
Guilt, however, is a private emotion and as such is unreliable; rage, its opposite, is public and prophetic, and yet it is just such a public life that is under the censors’ spotlight.
This essay is a call for protest, non-compliance, and solidarity with the most oppressed. Jews are neither the first nor the last ethnic or religious minority to be mobilized against their will for reactionary projects.
As a student of Jewish and American left-wing cultural history, to say that we not in a moment of radical transformation would be to misread the moment: the speed and ferocity of this mobilization has taken me surprise. Of course, if one is Jewish, one may feel, as I feel, a profound sense of disorientation. Yet for anyone who thinks seriously about race, identity, and the ways these are positions within systems of power, there is a particular lesson to be gleaned.
I am not sure what being used as a weapon offers American Jews, even those who resist it. One is imbued with a power one does not want, a role by the state that one did not ask for. Rather than a second sight, one finds oneself inside a hall of mirrors.
If there is any “gift” to this “second sight” today, it may only be to identify the strangeness of this moment, the two-ness of it, the contradictory ideals wrestling through what is posed as a singular identity—and to call out those who look so incorrectly upon us, or those among us who think such identities are inherent to our history.
I admit, it feels strange to be a weapon in this way, wielded against one’s will, in spite of protests, even against oneself. One feels both for oneself and against oneself, a need to speak and be silent, to be present and to disappear.
I am not a particularly observant Jewish person, but I have in many years past relied on the weeks of the High Holy Days for reflection, slowness, and interruption to what would otherwise be a rushed and panicked start to the academic year. This year I felt a sense of dread. I write about the Jewish left and the left more broadly; I believe in the power of radical history and culture to disrupt the seeming inexorable force of capitalist and imperialist realism.
Yet it seemed there would be no way to participate in the Holidays and not feel, should we be visible, to be a part of a figural Jewish image used against our will. No radical Jewish history I could think of seemed capable of disturbing the “conformity of the present.” I wanted to light candles in a basement and whisper shema into a handkerchief.
It’s not that I feel nothing: I feel tidal wave of rage and anger at Jewish and non-Jewish institutions that perpetuate not only Israel’s genocide, but mandatory Zionification of Jewish, and American life.
And yet, in terms of Jewish identity, I mostly just feel sort of hollowed out, without a firm place to stand. It was nice to be stopped by a Moroccan Palestinian woman after Tzedek Chicago’s tashlich service at Loyola Beach on Rosh Hashanah, and thanked for being openly anti-Zionist Jews in public (she noticed both the shofar and all the keffeyiahs). But even then it was like being thanked for not being a weapon, what she expected us to be.
I felt both humbled by her gratitude but also saddened by it, as her earnest questions amounted to: How do you refuse to be a weapon?
It was the question she did not quite ask but did nothing but ask. While others appropriately and graciously responded, I have to admit, to her thanks I personally could not utter a word.
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