We Need to End Racism and
Anti-Semitism at the Same Time
Any oppression we choose to put our attention on in the bigger quest to end all oppression is a good place to start. And wherever we start, we will find that in fact we need to end all oppressions to end any one oppression.
I am white in skin colour and was raised middle class in the Melbourne Jewish community in Australia. My parents came to Australia as refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia following the Second World War. They and their parents and extended families had been targeted for destruction in the attempted genocide of the Jewish people known as the Holocaust.
My family on both sides were cosmopolitan Jews—well-educated and cultured. At the same time, in Poland my Nana (grandmother) and my mother were not considered white or Polish. Jews were seen as a completely separate category of people, despite their having lived in Poland in significant numbers for centuries. The level of institutionalized anti-Semitism in Poland was such that my Nana learned and used the martial art of Jiu-Jitsu to gain access to the lecture theatre at the university where she studied. There was segregation of Jews in lecture theatres, and members of extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic organisations tried to prevent Jews from attending lectures, using physical violence.
My Nana was not able to study medicine (her first choice), because there was a quota of one Jew a year. So instead she studied chemical engineering. She was the only Jew who attended the lectures and would share her notes with the other Jews in the course. After a year, she decided it was unsustainable and left to study engineering in Italy (after first learning Italian).
This story is at the same time one of great privilege and one of great oppression.
In Australia I fit fairly inconspicuously into the range of appearances assumed to be white. I am not particularly targeted for my appearance, name, or the way I speak (English is my first language). I live a privileged life. Yet I am not exactly considered a white Australian. Jews have been in Australia since the first convict ships arrived from England in 1788. Yet still the people who are considered the “real” Australians are the white-skinned people of Anglo-Celtic and Christian heritage. While Australia has been a wonderful place for Jews to live freely, it also has a long history of mainstream, explicit, and overt—as well as subtle and invisible—forms of anti-Semitism.
Since early in my Co-Counselling days (over twenty years ago), I have participated wholeheartedly in support groups and workshops on ending racism. In these groups I would invariably notice myself as a Jew with a group of Gentiles and be pulled to discharge on anti-Semitism rather than on my own racism. This persisted regardless of my good intentions or how much I liked the Gentiles in the group. It appeared to me as if I had no racism, but I knew that could not be the case.
My experience and understanding shifted dramatically when I had the opportunity to discharge on my racism with other Jews. From 2000 to 2002 I lived in Israel, where I joined an ending-racism support group for white Ashkenazi Jews. In that group my racism (and privilege) was easy to notice and discharge—a dramatic and exciting revelation to me.
I have come to understand that nearly always when I am with white Gentiles I experience them as the oppressor, even though I may not be aware of it in the moment. From early in my life I understood that they were the people to copy, fit in with, and be like in order to survive, be happy, and get on in life. This is how assimilation works. It has been invisible to me and therefore all the more powerful.
Anti-Semitism is much older than racism. It functioned as a key way to divert people’s anger and resentment away from the ruling classes. It was the model for racism. As Harvey Jackins explained in 1976 in The Upward Trend (on page 387 of “Jewish Liberation Is Everybody’s Concern”), “Anti-Semitism is the model for the divide-and-rule tactic which has been the only thing that has maintained oppression for a long, long time, probably for hundreds of years by now. Only the conditioning of each group of the oppressed to oppress every other group of the oppressed has allowed oppression to continue. And anti-Semitism was where this all developed.”
When we work to end white racism, if we ignore the impact of anti-Semitism—of seeing Jews as different, other, or less than—we can never be united as white people.
Also, anti-Semitism (like any oppression) deeply affects the people in the oppressor role. It keeps white Gentiles separate from their full humanity and from each other.
If we want to be united and closely connected as white people, we need to do it as Jews and Gentiles together. This means that we need to end anti-Semitism at the same time as we end racism.
Talking about Jews and anti-Semitism whenever we work on racism helps Jews to feel fully part of the endeavour and brings all white people closer together.
Malvern East, Victoria, Australia