Whiteness Won't Save Us

We'll only be safe when all of us are safe

I grew up in a Jewish household in northern California. Jewish rituals like lighting candles on Friday night and hosting a Passover seder were important in my family. I loved these traditions, and they also made me feel different from my classmates who watched “Home Improvement” on Friday nights and celebrated Christmas. 

And I was taught that being Jewish did make me different. I was raised to understand Jewish values like tzedekah (righteous giving), gemilut hasidim (acts of loving kindness), and tikkun olam (repairing the world), and I was told stories about pogroms and the Holocaust. I learned that the world is not a safe place for Jews, and my own family’s story reinforced this. My great-grandparents had fled antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe to start new lives in the United States. While some of my classmates made antisemitic jokes, including jokes about the Holocaust, I attended synagogue with many Holocaust survivors. 

My great-grandparents and grandparents assimilated into whiteness partly as a survival strategy to access education and jobs. In most ways, my family’s story is the prototypical Ashkenazi Jewish success story. My great-grandfathers sold rags and junk, my father’s father earned a degree in molecular biology. My father is a doctor, and my mother is an educator. My parents were able to buy property, accumulate wealth, and raise our family in a racially and economically homogeneous community. I hold two Ivy League degrees and I am an educational consultant.

  But my family’s success came at a cost that so many ethnic groups have paid. I did not learn to speak Yiddish, the language of my ancestors. My family doesn’t eat the recipes of Ashkenazi Jewry of Romania, Poland, or Lithuania. And while I enjoyed Jewish rituals in the privacy of my family’s home, I always felt deeply uncomfortable being outwardly Jewish in public, even among other Jews. I remember being at weddings and b’nai mitzvahs: when the music came on to dance the hora, I would cringe inside and try to avoid participating. 

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about white supremacy and anti-Black racism and the ways they can shape the narratives we use to construct our identities. Only then did I realize I had unconsciously internalized a desire to be “normal” and to reject any parts of my identity that felt different from mainstream, white Christian culture. Like so many other members of ethnic groups, my heritage had become a source of shame. 

I am especially sad and angry reflecting on all this because conditional whiteness has utterly failed to keep Jewish people safe. This lure offered to Jews was a scam all along. It provided many Jews with upward mobility: college degrees, career paths, and houses. And all of these are valuable in a world where resources are denied to so many. 

But despite the material benefits my family gained from whiteness, we never escaped from antisemitism. In assimilating and internalizing the American Dream, we lost our connection to our roots. Furthermore, we were enlisted into an exploitative system that goes against our Jewish values and separates us from our Black and Brown neighbors.

Jews and allies at Grand Central Station in New York City, October 27 demanding a ceasefire now!

Most recently, I have borne witness to the heartbreaking logical conclusion of the trade we made of our identity and humanity in exchange for white solidarity. In many ways, the state of Israel exists as a nation built on the premise that economic and military partnership with U.S. imperialism will keep the Jewish people safe. So Israel seizes and colonizes land, and acts as the tip of the United States’ imperial spear throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa. Meanwhile its existence threatens to eclipse the complex realities of Jewish history. Our story is much more than a series of dehumanizing deaths. Our resilience pre-exists the modern nation-state. And the bad-faith conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism gives dangerous political cover to the genuinely antisemitic ideologies and politics of right-wing Christian Zionist groups like Christians United for Israel and reactionary elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene.  

Embracing white supremacist colonizing tactics has not kept Jews safe. On October 7th, Hamas carried out an attack which killed 1,400 Israelis. While the dead and wounded included Israelis of various religions and ethnicities, the attack triggered intense Jewish fear and grief, which was then used to erase decades of Israeli occupation and justify unbridled and genocidal vengeance. I have been wracked by grief and anger. I am in anguish over the loss of life in Israel and in Palestine. And I’m furious that Jewish fear and history of victimhood has been so effectively exploited and weaponized against innocent Palestinian civilians and against even our own interest as Jews. 

I don’t want any part of this anymore. I want to live in a world where I feel deeply connected to my ancestral roots and am truly safe. To be honest, I’m not sure how to build this world. But I know that it involves learning as much as possible about the history and culture of my Ashkenazi ancestors, organizing alongside others for racial and economic justice in New York City, and taking action to demand that “never again” means never again for anyone, anywhere.

This post was originally published as the introduction to the November newsletter for Organizing White Men for Collective Liberation

Other Recent Writing

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Other Recommendations for Reading/Listening/Watching

“What Kind of Times Are These” by Adrienne Rich

“On Loving Jews” by Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents