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| Two young girls wearing banners that read "Abolish child slavery" in English and Yiddish. Credit: Creative Commons |
On the one hand, Jews are deeply grateful that America provided us with a safe haven when so many other Christianity-dominated cultures had represented us as demon Christ-killers and created the preconditions for the rise of both secular and religious anti-Semitism.
American Jews rejoiced in the promise of freedom and equality before the law, and played a major role in organizing, shaping, and leading social movements that could extend that promise to all of America’s citizens.
The role of the United States in defeating Nazism at the expense of so many American lives remains an enduring source of pride even for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in World War II, and an enduring source of appreciation for this amazing country. And the generosity of the American people toward Jews has made it possible for us to thrive and feel the kind of safety we haven’t felt for two thousand years of exile and diaspora.
On the other hand, Jewish well-being in America came not because this society didn’t seek scapegoats, but rather because it already had a scapegoat long before most Jews arrived on these shores – African Americans, Native Americans, and other targets (most recently, feminists, homosexuals, and “illegal” immigrants).
While other immigrant groups from Europe found their safety in part by identifying with the dominant culture and becoming “white” (a social construct for all light-skinned people who bought into the existing systems of privilege and power), a significant section of the Jewish people in the past 150 years of presence in the United States chose instead to identify with the oppressed – most significantly with African Americans, but also with the poor (of which we were a significant part in the years 1880-1940), the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry.
Was this simply a matter of self-interest from a new immigrant group seeking to find a way to integrate into the society? If so, why wasn’t it chosen with equal energy by the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, etc.? In my view, Jews chose this path because of two radical messages in the Torah:
1. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that you were “the Other” (ha’ger), so when you come into your own power, do not oppress the stranger, but instead, Love the Other.
2. Do not accept reality as it is currently constructed – there is a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” (reality as given) to “that which ought to be” (the utopian possibilities of a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and joyous celebration of the universe). We called it YHVH – mistranslated as Jehovah, but actually a concept rather than a name, calling our attention to the reality that the world could be fully transformed and that we humans were created in the image of that force and with the responsibility to do tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world). It was this heritage that seeped into the collective unconscious of the Jewish people and that made us flock to social change movements in numbers not only out of proportion to our percentage of the population, but also more frequently than many other immigrant groups.
Unfortunately, the allure of fitting in and becoming like everyone else had a particularly strong effect on the distinctively American kind of Judaism that emerged in the temples and synagogues of American life. Seeking to imitate the decorum and respectability that WASPS had shaped for themselves, Jews in America created a Judaism that became increasingly like the other conformist religions of American society, embracing capitalist values and embracing patriotism even when it led to supporting American imperialist assumptions about the rest of the world.
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