Does the Holocaust Discount Jewish White Privilege?
By Phoebe Maltz Bovy
April 7, 2015
The New Republic
"...The top three most popular articles right now on the online Jewish magazine Tablet all deal, in one way or another, with the question of Jews and privilege. The most interesting of the three, as well as the most viral, is Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s personal essay, “I Probably Won’t Share This Essay on Twitter: Some thoughts on being Jewish in contemporary polite society,” which opens with recent tweet of hers:
"Ask me about my Jewish privilege. It includes having only 5 blood relatives, since the rest were murdered."
Brodesser-Akner describes a sort of Jewish underground where, behind closed doors, Jews tell one another how they actually feel about Israel, anti-Semitism, and so on. She begins by mentioning an off-the-record conversation she had with an unnamed “famous screenwriter/director” who confessed to her that he was “really, really pro-Israel,” and adds further off-the-record evidence: “My DM boxes on Twitter and Facebook are filled with people like me—liberals, culture reporters, economics reporters—baffled and sad at the way the cause of Jews avoiding another attempt at our genocide has gone from a liberal one to a capital-c Conservative one.”
Articles that make assertions about secret, unquotable conversations pose certain methodological challenges. How can we be sure we’re not just getting the author’s own musings on Jewish identity? This sort of argument is especially frustrating to Jews who are not speaking out in the way she advocates, not out of fear of saying publicly what they’d only admit privately, but because they actually think the opposite. Some who insist that Jewishness is a form of privilege are Jewish themselves, an observation I could further back up with my own semi-private social-media evidence; but let’s turn instead to some of the responses to the piece from members of the American-Jewish press...."
Read the Full Article at:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121474/holocaust-doesnt-discount-jewish-white-privilege
April 7, 2015
The New Republic
"...The top three most popular articles right now on the online Jewish magazine Tablet all deal, in one way or another, with the question of Jews and privilege. The most interesting of the three, as well as the most viral, is Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s personal essay, “I Probably Won’t Share This Essay on Twitter: Some thoughts on being Jewish in contemporary polite society,” which opens with recent tweet of hers:
"Ask me about my Jewish privilege. It includes having only 5 blood relatives, since the rest were murdered."
Brodesser-Akner describes a sort of Jewish underground where, behind closed doors, Jews tell one another how they actually feel about Israel, anti-Semitism, and so on. She begins by mentioning an off-the-record conversation she had with an unnamed “famous screenwriter/director” who confessed to her that he was “really, really pro-Israel,” and adds further off-the-record evidence: “My DM boxes on Twitter and Facebook are filled with people like me—liberals, culture reporters, economics reporters—baffled and sad at the way the cause of Jews avoiding another attempt at our genocide has gone from a liberal one to a capital-c Conservative one.”
Articles that make assertions about secret, unquotable conversations pose certain methodological challenges. How can we be sure we’re not just getting the author’s own musings on Jewish identity? This sort of argument is especially frustrating to Jews who are not speaking out in the way she advocates, not out of fear of saying publicly what they’d only admit privately, but because they actually think the opposite. Some who insist that Jewishness is a form of privilege are Jewish themselves, an observation I could further back up with my own semi-private social-media evidence; but let’s turn instead to some of the responses to the piece from members of the American-Jewish press...."
Read the Full Article at:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121474/holocaust-doesnt-discount-jewish-white-privilege
0 Response to "Does the Holocaust Discount Jewish White Privilege?"
Post a Comment