By Benjamin Gladstone
Saturday, October 01, 2016
Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to
Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the
president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers
to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the
planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me
because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.
That was neither the first nor the last time that I would
be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a
petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock
because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the
event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to
talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students
would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to
participate in that conversation.
Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting
refugees, combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices
and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut out of
these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to fight
oppression.
My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism
that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge
the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or
left on chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus.
They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal
Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.
Nor do they speak against the anti-Semitism in American
culture. Even as they rightfully protest hate crimes against Muslim Americans
and discrimination against black people, they wrongfully dismiss attacks on
Jews (who are the most frequent
targets of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States) and
increasing anti-Semitism in the American political arena, as can be seen in
Donald Trump’s flirtations with the “alt-right.” They don’t take issue with
calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Many of my fellow activists also perpetuate anti-Semitism
by dismissing Jews of color, especially the Mizrahi and Sephardi majority of
Israel’s Jewish population, descendants of refugees from Southwest Asia and
North Africa. Ignoring the expulsion of 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from
Arab and Muslim countries from 1948 to the early 1970s allows students to
portray all Israelis as white and European and get away with making a
“progressive” case for dismantling the Jewish state.
Even hummus has become politicized: Anti-Zionists at my
school who demanded that cafeterias stop serving hummus produced by a company
with Israeli ownership, also claimed that the product showed cultural
appropriation even though Mizrahim and Sephardim have been eating Southwest
Asian cuisine since long before the rise of organized Zionism.
In my experience, anti-Semites refuse to acknowledge
Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews to minimize the history of oppression against Jews,
and in doing so dismiss contemporary Jewish concerns. For example, non-Jewish
students at Brown tell me that I cannot appreciate a history of marginalization
because, as they see it, Jews have historically been a powerful group, the
Holocaust being the only few years of exception. They play down the temporal
and geographic scope of that history so that the oppression appears circumstantial
rather than global and systemic.
These are serious issues, and social justice movements
should be addressing them. I recognize my white, male and other privileges,
and, accordingly, I listen to people of color, women and members of other
marginalized groups and support them as allies. Likewise, I expect non-Jews at
Brown and elsewhere to recognize our oppression to include us in efforts for
change.
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