Signaled Virtue

In reading an impressively emotive, nonspecific and fundamentally schizophrenic article about Miley Cyrus’s twerking and how the use of unconventionally-appearing Black women in her performances is actually an elaborate conspiracy to further degrade Black woman as a currency for use in capitalistic systems (https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/) I came to wonder again about the marvelously precarious place we Jews occupy in the minds of racial mass-attributers (the folks for whom everything has a racial element).

To them I have most often heard myself described as White. On the face of it describing myself racially in the same terms as Mr. Mayflower or Mr. Jesuit seems absurd but I can just as easily hear the rebuttal: “Your skin color has afforded you opportunities that nobody else has.” Yet challenged outside this context on the components of race these persons would not hesitate to describe race in terms besides skin color (although they would surely describe it as the predominant characteristic).

There is something more here. To place me on the same plane as the slaveholders of old America is to entirely eradicate Jews as a racial entity. We may perhaps be ethnic but not racial. In which case antisemitism cannot be racism (as we aren’t a race to be discriminated against). In which case events such as the Holocaust may be termed, as Whoopi Goldberg (the esteemed racial scholar) said best, “white on white” violence. The word which describes the inherent, explicit, and proud discrimination employed by the Nazis in order to denigrate, discriminate, and eradicate the Jews on racial grounds is, according to Mrs. Goldberg, nothing because that never happened.

Jews occupy a very unique position as the fatal rebuttal to oppressor-oppressed thought systems. Our collective refusal to remain oppressed by embracing a victim mentality in the wake of the Holocaust, instead transforming pain into action (for reference, protest, awareness-gathering, and other activities which can be performed at a desk or on a couch are not genuine action) has made us Public Enemy #1 to those who would rather perennially embrace squealing over doing. The expressions of this mentality (embodied by the article's allegations of a vast conspiracy enacted by Miley Cyrus to oppress Black women through song and dance) betray themselves increasingly as nothing more than things they’d wish were true. The blanket vague statements made by people enraptured by this theology (e.g., from the article, “Capitalism is a gendered enterprise” – disprovable by the fact that capitalism is not only not an enterprise, but the sum total of all economic action in a voluntary society, and also by the fact that voluntary systems like capitalism provide the same total freedom to all genders) serve as meager substitutes for genuine oppression once experienced. The fact that these statements aren’t true (or more accurately, unverifiable, as I cannot deny that there is a 0.000000001% chance that Miley Cyrus is the leader of the Klu Klux Klan) is besides the point because the point is to be, internally, the victim at all costs. It was a mentality that I remember embracing as a deeply autistic young man and exploiting it for personal comfort in the form of self pity. It didn’t get me very far and I am grateful to have had a mother and father who readily analyzed my own behavior back at me and forced me to continue working even when the math problems got a bit complicated.

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Yet another manner in which the Jews are eliminated as a race and demoted, in this false hierarchy, to the status of Whites is in the destruction of the concept of discrete nationhood. Why should us Whites get a separate nation from all the other Whites? The natural conclusion is that Israel, whose Jewish population is 70% Middle Eastern Jewish origin (as opposed to Ashkenazi/European Jewish origin), is a white settler colonial project. It is unique among nations described as such in that the Jews are indeed from Israel (the “Rhodesians” never claimed to have been from Zimbabwe). But unlike the racial-attributers, who aim to maintain the illusion of their oppression as equivalent to the oppression of their ancestors, the new antisemites simply hate Jews and want them dead. A wonderful illustration appears in the Times of Israel when a pro-Palestinian (a term which has unfortunately become a dog-whistle) group made plans to beat Jews but ordered its members to always refer to them as Zionists (https://www.timesofisrael.com/nycs-public-law-school-releases-video-of-antisemitic-commencement-speech/). Anti-Zionism takes its place as our second dog whistle, mainly because the Zionist is always a Jew, and the Jew almost always a Zionist. There is no significant or genuine distinction that can be drawn in good faith. Plenty of distinctions can be made in bad faith by, for example, pointing to extremist Haredi sects (the same ones which advocate wife beating, complete seclusion from society and Gentiles, and the total excommunication of “heretics” – cults by another name) which interpret Torah to say that Messiah must come before, not during the establishment of Israel as a state. Or to those Jews who have been so supremely secularized that they actively reject Jewish history as a fabrication.

Even using “Jewish history” as a term is actively ahistorical because it suggests that there is somehow a “Jewish” version of events which holds credence. Obviously there is a single version of events which is true and did happen as opposed to every other version which, in some aspects at a minimum, didn’t happen. It’s in our interests to emphasize that over sectional histories because the reality is that we’re from Israel. If we embrace historical relativism we give the same people who banned the teaching of the Jewish building of Jerusalem in schools the leverage to claim that we actually never came from Israel (which we can call “Palestinian history”). And we lend credence to versions of history which have woven into them as essential parts antisemitic commentary (“Nation of Islam history”). This is the only consequence that can come from embracing multiple “truths” about history.

This is represented readily by the characterization of Israel as a white settler colonial project, which is so entirely at odds with actual historical events that it can only be justified by the propagandist if these events did not happen (or, in a return of the prior mentality, they wish they did not happen). In order for Israel to be a colony it must be inhabited by people who are not its indigenous peoples, and they must inhabit it by force. The latter statement is indeed how modern Israel continues to exist – by force. The former statement is where the rejection of history lies. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, so they by-definition cannot be colonists unless you “disagree” that Jews are indigenous to Israel (Maybe read https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/De-Judaizing-the-Homeland%3A-Academic-Politics-in-the-TROEN/89693e447dd2297e90a01d3641e9be61ce07aad5). Of course, it is settled historical fact that the Jews came from Israel, so the only way to “disagree” is to construct an internal narrative where the Jews didn’t come from Israel and give it priority over external reality. At which point your version of events becomes arbitrary and can include anything from “World Zionist Organization creating a New World Order” to “Flat Earth”. The supreme irony is that in describing Israel as a settler colonial project the post-colonial academics have subverted their entire field and mission, since they have explicitly chosen to disenfranchise the indigenous population. It entirely explains why they have made excellent comrades for modern Nazis, given that Nazis also hate indigenous peoples (i.e., pan-Germanism under Hitler).