Jews unwelcome on the feminist left
Honestly, what calamities aren’t the Jews responsible for?
I’m not about to argue that my people are the most maligned in history, but it’s safe to say we are the most creatively maligned.
Not only are we allegedly responsible for the death of Christ, the Black Plague and 9/11, we are also believed to have found time in our extremely busy, evildoing schedules to fake the moon landing, kill Kennedy, train a dolphin to spy on Hamas (that one I actually wish were true), and, according to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “control agencies of government” like the FBI.
Farrakhan isn’t just the leader of a recognized hate group; he is obsessed with Jewish conspiracy theory. In fact, I could fill an entire column with hateful, inane things Farrakhan has said about my people, but I’ll settle on just one. The following is a statement from a rambling anti-government, anti-Semitic speech he gave at his group’s annual “Saviours’ Day Address” late last month.
“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through.”
The Nation of Islam leader has a lot of unkind things to say about LGBTQ people, too, namely that we have a “psychological chemical imbalance” — but Jews appear to be his primary target. In his mind we are responsible for “all of this filth and degenerate behaviour that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men.”
As a double degenerate in his books (being a gay Jew), all of the above makes me angry.
But I’m less angry with Farrakhan, whose anti-Semitism is predictable.
I’m far angrier, the week of Interna- tional Women’s Day, with a less predictable foe.
I am angry with the leaders of the American Women’s March: women who preach “intersectional feminism” but who refuse to condemn the man quoted above. Worse, who embrace him. I’m referring to leading feminist activists Tamika D. Mallory, Linda Sarsour. and Carmen Perez.
Mallory, a longtime friend of the Nation of Islam and a high-profile AfricanAmerican activist, attended the February event where Farrakhan gave the above-mentioned speech. He even gave Mallory a shout-out. Mallory posted a photo of the event to Instagram; in a previous post on the site she refers to Farrakhan as “The GOAT” — the “greatest of all time.”
When criticized this week about her long-time fondness for the anti-Semite, she refused to denounce him. Instead, she penned a column full of platitudes defending her attendance at the event. She writes on NewsOne, “Where my people are is where I must also be.” (Translation, if my people attend viru- lently anti-Semitic speeches, I, too, must attend virulently anti-Semitic speeches.)
Mallory tweeted her commitment to “ending” all forms of prejudice but refused to call out and condemn Farrakhan specifically. Meanwhile, other leaders of the women’s march, some of whom have personal ties to Farrakhan, have bent over backwards to defend Mallory. Here is Sarsour on her official Facebook page, taking Mallory’s critics to task.
“I don’t think these people have our best interests at heart to make us better people or to disrupt misconceptions or anti-Semitism because trashing a strong black woman and holding her accountable for the words of a man is not the way to bring people together. When will we break the cycle and actually build a transformative movement that protects all of us even when we don’t agree on some issues.”
In a sense, this is the left-wing equivalent of Donald Trump condemning anti-Semitism while winking at antiSemites.
It’s infuriating because Mallory and Sarsour are activists who would argue in any other circumstance that intersectionality demands the condemnation of all forms of bigotry — and that big-tent feminism does not tolerate intolerance.
But it’s clear that when the wronged party in question is Jewish and the wrongdoer is a gentile leader of colour, the opposite is true. Suddenly intersectional feminism demands (as many members of the alt right do) that all perspectives deserve a fair shake, even odious ones. We must tolerate intolerance in the name of togetherness!
This is hypocritical BS at its stinkiest. But it confirms what I’ve suspected for a long time now.
Jews are unwelcome on the feminist left.
The refusal by Women’s March leaders to condemn Farrakhan in the strongest of terms or, frankly, in any terms whatsoever, is proof that intersectional feminism does not yet take anti-Semitism seriously.
Anti-Semitism, in the eyes of those at the helm of the Women’s March, is less objectionable and less cause for concern than Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.
Perhaps this is because most Jews are white. How bad can we possibly have it, right?
Unfortunately, being white has been kind of overrated for us. Being white didn’t help us during the Russian pogroms, and it certainly didn’t help us during the Holocaust. It doesn’t help us today against the likes of David Duke, Richard Spencer, nor any other white supremacist the Trump administration openly flirts with. To these men, our Jewishness is an irreversible stain on our whiteness.
In the end, we’re not white enough for the far right, but we’re too white for the feminist left.
Where does that leave us? Out of place. Nomads.
Nothing new there.