How Critical Race Theory Can Be Antisemitic

Antisemitism exists within both the far left and far right

“All models are false, but some are useful”– George E.P. Box

“People view the world through their theories”– Thomas Kuhn

It once dawned on me why some people believe antisemitism is a problem within some American and British progressive movements. A—I didn’t say the, as I know people on the left with different definitions—standard definition amongst many progressives and progressive movements is that racism = prejudice + power. As these groups define Jews as part of the white privileged, or “white supremacy” (their term for white America) segment of society, that means that the adherents to that definition are saying antisemitism isn’t racism. Or, if they say antisemitism is racism, they’ve undercut their own definition.

Perhaps they say that antisemitism is not racism but a different form of bigotry, and that is a fair topic for debate. How to define race, what is race, and the question of if Jews are a race are interesting questions. While eighty percent are Ashkenazi, Jews come in the diversity of skin colors and shades.

Many scholars, the United Nations, and the World Jewish Congress define antisemitism as a type of racism, and many textbooks and international laws define racism as including both race and ethnicity. Anne Frank House states that race is an artificial cultural construct and, thus, Jews are not a race, but that the classification of Jews as a race and discrimination based on that is racism.

A Jewish friend said the question of whether Jews are a race or an ethnicity is a matter of semantics and joked, “When you find out which we are, let me know.” This all says that the world, societies, structures, concepts, and ethnic oppression are far more complex and nuanced than a simplistic equation or definition can encompass.

American racial categories are not only unfixed constructs but often peculiar to the United States. Americans on all parts of the political spectrum have long drawn the lines to suit their political ideologies and agendas. Depending on the political and ideological sentiments, Japanese, Latinos, Irish, Greeks, Ashkenazis, and Arabs have fallen in and out of the “white” category. 

Armenians have alternately been classified in the United States as “yellow,” “white” and “brown.” Though, if you ask Armenians themselves, they usually will reject any color label, as that is not how they, and many other non-Westerners, define race. I attended a lecture on Islam by two Somali immigrants. One said they didn’t like it when Americans called them black “because that’s not how Somalis view people.”

Brandy Shufutinsky of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and the Alliance for Inclusive Ethnic Studies said, “I don’t use white Jews or Jews of color. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.” She says the prevailing “colorism” is American-centric and that “Jews predate race.”

There is no denying that the American color code categories have been socially and psychologically influential in American history and used for ill, including to justify slavery and Jim Crow laws. Though, as this essay shows, many Jews say American artificial color codes and stereotyping that have been decried are now being used by the far left to pigeonhole and oppress them. They point out the hypocrisy and that two wrongs don’t make a right.

A problem with power as a required element in the definition is that Jews have been persecuted in major part because of the stereotype that they had power. It should disturb that some movements in today’s far left use this same trope that has been and is used by antisemitic movements on the far right, including the KKK and Neo-Nazis.

In the 1800s to early 1900s many elite American and Canadian universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, and Toronto, had quotas on Jews in part because they were perceived as being too successful. Physics Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman could not get into Columbia University as an undergraduate because of quotas on Jews, and National Medal of Science winner Norbert Wiener was rejected for a professorship at Harvard due to a similar quota. Interestingly, Feynman was secular and identified himself as Jewish only ethnically.

The Nazis and white supremacists defined/define Jews as both having power/privilege and being an inferior people/race. This all points out that there are many ways, types, and directions of discrimination, racism, oppression, and persecution.

Another common point that is brought up is that it is incorrect, or at the very least problematic, to generalize across all members about their privilege and power. There have been many poor and powerless Jews and Jewish communities throughout history, and a homeless opioid-addicted white man in rural West Virginia will likely question the existence of his privilege and power in the United States.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, says the privileged categorization is a stereotype. He writes, “This argument leaves out the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have not ‘made it’ the way their Manhattan brothers and sisters may have.” A Jewish friend, whose grandparents were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe, chafes at the privileged generalization. He says, “We have been listening to this white privilege stuff for 5,000 years.”

A complaint from many Jews is that some movements and people within the far left trivialize or dismiss the significance of antisemitism, and many Jews say that some progressive movements are antisemitic. That has been an accusation of the British Labour Party and the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement.

Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson said, “If Jews are seen as ‘white’ (which, in this permutation of progressivism, they are), and ‘whites’ cannot be subjected to racist attacks, then antisemitism becomes a trivial concern.”

The 2019 LGBT+ DC Dyke March organizers banned marchers from carrying the Israeli flag (other flags were allowed) and banners with the Star of David symbol. A Jewish friend said, “Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.” A gay Israeli Jew who considers the Israeli flag “the Jewish Pride flag” wrote that the “ban says I should be ashamed of my nationality and my faith rather than be accepted for who I am.”

I was talking with an English Jewess in London. As an American curious about her perspective, I asked her if she thought there was antisemitism in the British Labour Party, and she said, “Yes, in my opinion, and generally in the left.” I said, “Some within the American extreme left use the same stereotypes about Jews as the far right.” Her response was, “Yes, exactly.”

Robert Walker, director of Hasbara Fellowships Canada, says that radical left activists on university campuses often dismiss the opinions of Jews, including on issues of discrimination because Jews are catalogued as privileged.

Walker says: “Our fellows have seen more instances where a pro-Israel side is dismissed in a summary manner, merely because many of our students are Jews, (and are) therefore seen to be privileged and therefore excluded from consideration or mainstream dialogue. . . . Their opinion is often dismissed for being Jewish or pro-Israel and seen as part of the privileged white bourgeoisie. . . . People are dismissed simply for who they are. We’re seeing this more and more.”

Rabbi Lerner says many Jews, including he, do not consider Jews white and he considers categorizing Jews as white as an act of oppression. He says some on the far left categorize Jews as white as an attempt to paint them not as historically marginalized and persecuted people with their own unique culture and history, but as a part of the generic oppressive power structure. Lerner writes, “Jews are not white, and those who claim we are and exclude our history and literature from their newly emerging multicultural canon are our oppressors. . . . Jews can only be deemed ‘white’ if there is massive amnesia on the part of non-Jews about the monumental history of anti-Semitism.”

Samuel Goldman, professor of political science and executive director of the John L. Loeb Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University, writes, “The reduction of American history to an unbroken story of racial oppression comes at particular cost to Jews. Because we have been among the greatest beneficiaries of liberal institutions, we are unavoidably targets when those institutions abandon or reject their liberal mission. A widely despised and persecuted people who thrived in America like nowhere else, Jews do not fit into the sharp distinction between oppressor and oppressed that characterizes ideological ‘antiracism.’ Therefore, Jewish experiences must either be ignored or reduced to a monolithic conception of white supremacy.”

Pamela Paresky, of the University of Chicago’s Stevanovich Institute and the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), writes, “In the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”

I attended a Unitarian Universalist racial justice meeting where a zealous supporter of critical race theory did not want the group to read an article by a Jewish professor “because he is white.” She wanted a vetter to prevent articles from such voices from even reaching group members. I am not generalizing about the group, as two group members said they thought the article was worthy of discussion, if in a different forum.

Whatever one’s definitions of the terms, the rhetorical odiousness of telling Auschwitz survivors in Pittsburgh or Charleston that they are part of “white supremacy” and part of the “racist oppression” should be obvious. Following that up by then telling those survivors that any offense they take is “white fragility” is nothing short of gaslighting.

A Jewish woman who objected to being called a member of the “white supremacy” by people on the far left explained, “It is not a matter of intellectually debating the issue. It simply is offensive.”

I know people on the left, progressives, racial minorities, and Jews with a wide variety of views on this topic. I am not painting with a broad brush. I know many progressives and racial minorities do not subscribe to that definition of racism and its antiracism theory.

However, as with any model, a key is how the “racism = prejudice + power” definition is considered.

The recently deceased Physics Nobel Prize winner and philosopher of science Phillip Anderson was an antireductionist and was for complexity in modeling. He correctly saw that reality, and any area within it, was far too complex and nuanced to be reduced to a simple theory or model, and said that “more is different.”

All models and theories are artificial and, thus, false representations of reality. However, when used as one of many different lenses through which to view things, a theory can be useful and offer insight. Science uses multiple and often competing theories to examine an area, each theory limited but together giving a fuller, if still incomplete, picture. Philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote, “No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain.”

The antiracism “racism = prejudice + power” definition is an interesting and useful lens to view things through. However, as with any theory, it is too simplistic and must be just one of many different lenses through which to look at the complexity of racism, oppression, and society. Making it the only lens—and making it dogma, and saying that no other lenses, theories, or viewpoints can be expressed or used—is false and foolish.

Race, racism, ethnicity, oppression, and bigotry are complex areas, full of gray areas, contradictions, paradoxes, and diverse personal life experiences that cannot be defined, much less solved, by one model. Jews demonstrate that one can be both privileged and marginalized, that oppression and persecution can involve both punching down and punching up, and that someone can both be oppressed and an oppressor.

Author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism Bari Weiss said that there is “good anti-racism and bad anti-racism,” and that the bad kind—one, she writes, that “has dangerous implications for Jews”—is the current neo-racist version pushed by authors such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Weiss says that good antiracism “reflects the idea that we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, the kind of anti-racism that insists on our common humanity, the kind of anti-racism that no one should be inheritors of collective guilt or inheritors of collective innocence, that we should all be judged as individuals.”

If the “racism = prejudice + power” definition and critical race theory are dogmatically used as the sole or key definition and lens through which to view the world, social structures, and people—as some and some groups on the far left do—it is clearly antisemitic, using dangerous and ignorant characterizations and theories about Jews.

The irony is, as antisemitism where Jews are defined as a racial category is a form of racism, that makes that particular antiracism model racist.