Arlene Stein’s Jewish Fragility

Recently, a lot of Jewish content has been gaining prominence in my circles — mostly because of what is going on in Israel. Arlene Stein’s Jewish Fragility is an article that I recently read along this topic.

In short, Jewish Fragility tries to pinpoint the role Jews play in racial hierarchies. It clearly (and obviously, by the title alone) relies heavily on Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility, a semi-religious, catch-22 book that is responsible for some of the worst progressive talking points this century.

Even if you haven’t read White Fragility, you can probably figure out its Manichaean nature from the beginning. There are the oppressors and the oppressed. A very clear spectrum. How Diangelo handles the complicatedness of human identity is lazy, if not underwhelming. In short, your position on the racial ladder hinges on how easily you pass as white.

‘Passing’ here is deliberately vague, because any amount of time spent looking at non-black, non-white people in the United States shows that Diangelo’s dichotomy is flawed. To explain Asians and their ‘model minority’ status, you need to redefine the term in order to make this book make sense. But I digress.

Now, to progressive Jews — most of whom, like Stein, are white or ‘white-passing’ — this is a bit of a problem. If you want to accept Diangelo’s proselytism, you need to come to grips with the fact you have white privilege and are in fact an enabler of white supremacy. A bitter pill to swallow, especially when this worldview equates victimhood to virtue so frequently.

Stein’s article is a response to this problem, chosen over just cutting the Gordian knot and rejecting Diangelo’s flawed doctrine.

The best way I can describe my feelings as I read this article is: déjà vu. Stein’s words remind me of myself as I gradually lost faith in God. I reworked Catholic tenets. I tried to redress the religion I still wanted to believe in, to cover the holes that my questions were opening. This is what I believe Jewish Fragility is. Initial logical attempts to patch up holes your faith can no longer cover. And here’s why it doesn’t work:

1) Catch-22

The first problem with any attempt at rationally ‘fixing’ White Fragility is that logic is outright rejected in Diangelo’s worldview. If you are white, or ‘white-passing’, any attempt at disputing her BS is already proving her point. Hence, your two options are: admitting your white privilege, fragility, and racism; or contesting it, thus revealing you are privileged, fragile and racist. Her worldview is correct in either case.

Much like astrology, Diangelo came up with a perfect system that, even if you don’t believe in it (or worse, disprove it), her followers will always have a handy rulebook that explains why your doubts or arguments are actually further proof she is right.

Stein’s article, even if it walks on eggshells when critiquing Diangelo’s worldview, is already damning by virtue of existing. Granted, she doesn’t try to deny her whiteness, only downplay it. Is that not fragility, though?

Now, if I believed in Diangelo’s nonsense, I could call this an article. Luckily, I don’t, which means I can actually engage with her ideas like, you know, a non-fundamentalist would.

2) What about European history?

I don’t think anyone on Medium is going to be surprised to learn that black people have had a miserable experience in the United States for the majority of its history. Hell, can you scroll past 20 Medium articles in your front page without seeing something related to racism in the US?

This is the part where Diangelo, shockingly enough, is correct. Aversion, if not outright contempt towards black people played a large, if not foundational role in the birth of the United States. This factors in heavily in how black people are perceived and treated today.

It’s true that antipathy to Jews is not as foundational as anti-Black attitudes and structural racism in the US.

And while Stein is technically not lying here, this is the equivalent of me saying: “It’s true that Islam played a smaller role in founding the United States than Christianity.” Not a lie, but this implies that Islam was somehow significant in the creation of the US. It’s a clever little trick that affects how you perceive the proportions of something.

And I can prove that this alleged antipathy towards Jews is not foundational to the US at all. As early as 1904, Tsarist Russia was being condemned by the US for her harsh treatment of Jews. This was before the Holocaust even happened, and while Jim Crow was starting! There is no historical, structural antisemitism in the US that is remotely comparable to the anti-black racism Diangelo rallies against.

Stein, effectively, knows this. She goes on to explain how Jews endure trauma of generations past — an important part of progressive doctrine.

Notions of white privilege also fail to appreciate the ongoing trauma and sense of loss that animate Jewish life. This sense of loss is most acute for those who have direct relationships to the victims of Nazism, though it is not limited to them. (…) Jews were confined to ghettos in 16th-century Venice, subjected to pogroms in 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, denigrated by the Nazis as racially inferior, and exterminated because of who they were and how they identified.

None of what she said is a lie, but you must again notice how the US are conspicuously absent from this list. The instances of Jewish oppression come from Europe and, had she had the guts to go there, the Islamic world whenever a sultan hated the Dhimmi.

Do you know who else loves to rally about past historical grievances, seemingly in competition with black people for the victim points? White supremacists. And I am not talking about Diangelo’s ‘white supremacists’, which happen to be any white people that question her bullshit. I’m talking about actual, real, white humans that actually believe other races deserve subservience or extermination.

A few examples of white supremacists going on about past oppression to downplay or compete with African-Americans include: the Irish being sentenced to serfdom in the US, the Slavs being enslaved by the Romans and the Ottomans, and even the Zimbabwean purges against white farmers. They might even mention slavery still happens today in the Arab world (implying of course that descendants of slaves need to just stop crying about it).

Have Jews been oppressed a lot more than white people throughout history? Oh, certainly. I’m not trying to say the aforementioned instances ‘match’ their grievances. I’m a Diangelo heretic — I don’t compete for victimhood points.

What I’m trying to say here is that Stein’s rhetoric is not new. Grievances are not new in human history, and focusing on any identity is naturally going to lead to more grievances surfacing. Using those grievances to deny or downplay your privilege goes against the tenets of White Fragility.

3) Stein approaches the point

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

As Stein moves on to her next topic, discussing Lipstadt’s book on antisemitism, she actually comes very close to stepping out of line. At a certain point, I even expected her to contradict a progressive religious tenet instead of just going back into lockstep.

During discussions about bigotry and prejudice, she tells us, Jewish students’ attempts to address antisemitism can, at times, be muffled because of the claim that, since Jews are a “privileged” group, the connections these students are trying to make are irrelevant and invalid. Fellow students and faculty members chide them, according to Lipstadt, informing Jewish students that for something to be racist or prejudicial, it must be composed of “prejudice plus power.”

She is quite close, dangerously close even, to realizing the purpose of “prejudice plus power” here. This Sarkeesian little catchphrase was never meant to help anybody. It’s just meant to downplay some people’s problems and avoid looking at them at best, and at worst it is meant to disguise bigotry by pretending it doesn’t exist among society’s chosen victims. Unfortunately, I was swiftly disappointed as I kept reading.

Under such definitions, those who possess power, such as white, middle-class Jewish Americans, cannot also be victims of prejudice. This “prejudice plus power” argument positions American Jews as, simply, oppressors — a deeply ahistorical reading that perpetuates age-old stereotypes of the powerful Jew and feeds antisemitism.

So, in other words, we segue into a case of special pleading. You see, “prejudice plus power” isn’t wrong because it’s disingenuous, dismissive, or outright hinges on evil-minded, spiteful logic. It is wrong because in this case it leads to my people being on the wrong end of it!

The fact Jews can be oppressors, as we see in Israel today, doesn’t seem to feature in her logic. This is especially odd, since the Jewish homeland and its less savory aspects are mentioned in this same article. By her own logic, we can’t pinpoint that Israel does any oppression since it feeds into a stereotype. The fact progressives have such a hard time seeing certain people as oppressors really goes to show how anti-universalist their doctrine has become, but I digress.

4) Left vs Right Antisemitism

Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash

While analyzing Lipstadt’s writings, Stein disagrees with her fellow Jewish author on which kind of antisemitism is more dangerous. I attribute this to Lipstadt’s obvious Zionist leanings and Stein’s seemingly reluctant Anti-Zionism.

For Lipstadt, college campuses and their harsh criticism of Israel make her worry more about the institutionalized, academic left-wing antisemitism, which is probably given leeway in universities if you just replace ‘Jews’ with ‘Zionists’.

Stein, again, tries to reconcile the existence of Israel with Diangelo’s wreck of a worldview. And by reconciling, I do mean moving on to actual white supremacy (again, not Diangelo’s made up one).

This is a great rhetorical shield, in a way. Most white supremacists hate Jews. No better way to dismiss allegations of whiteness and “white supremacy” (the made up kind) than bringing up how actual white supremacists hate you.

Stein summarizes the dissident right’s view on Jews very effectively, even if she still uses the outdated alt-right term.

But Jews play a central, symbolic role in alt-right political discourse for having supposedly engineered the decline of white dominance. Much as they were economic “middlemen” in Europe for centuries, according to the racist right, Jews in the US act as political middlemen who stand in the way of white supremacy. “Most white nationalists,” Stern writes, “see a Jewish stranglehold on American society that fuels multiculturalism and feminism and hence accelerates white extinction, constituting the largest obstacle to the white ethnostate.”

This should be straightforward, but Israel’s existence again complicates things. If you divide the world between white supremacists (who hate Jews) and people who aren’t white supremacists, where do you put the Jewish nation state?

The answer is, you pretend! Just conjure a swathe of racial and political opponents that believe the things you hope they believe.

At times, these old antisemitic tropes coexist with a kind of alt-right philosemitism that publicly reveres Israel as a model ethnostate. That Benjamin Netanyahu is now cozying up to antisemitic leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a case in point.

This is a falsehood that stems from the fact progressives do not actually know the labels of their reactionary opponents. Orban is not alt-right, nor dissident right. He rose to power in 2010, long before alt-right discourse reached the mainstream or the West was struck by a tide of right-wing populism.

Orban is a far-right, majoritarian populist, sure. He is anti-Semitic, true enough. But alt-right? A man who banned Richard Spencer from Budapest? In the Hungarian Overton window, Orban is only robustly right-wing, even if he is anti-democratic and shows contempt for liberal values.

Not a single neo-Nazi will ever be pro-Israel. If you read The Turner Diaries, you will know what real white supremacists actually think of Israel. If you look at Stonetoss’s comics, you will see what contemporary, Holocaust-denying, actual neo-Nazis think of Israel. But again, this must be ignored if you want to think of Israel without Diangelo’s ideology falling apart.

Agreeing with white supremacists on certain topics is not the end of the world, Arlene. It’s just the end of a terrible, terrible ideology that can’t survive scrutiny.

5) The last ditch effort

By the end of the article, there isn’t much else to see. After clarifying Stephen Miller and Netanyahu are ‘bad’ Jews with ties to the alt-right, she drops another little subtle attempt to safeguard Jewish victim status in Diangelo’s pantheon.

Perhaps this signals a growing split among Jews: a division between those who can and do choose to pass as white, actively embracing white privilege and sometimes furthering white supremacy; and those whose bodies, backgrounds, or politics exclude them from power, including growing numbers of Jews of color, along with leftist Jews, and others.

Notice the little nod to ‘politics’ there. You can’t choose your body or your background. But you certainly can choose the politics you support. Perhaps not entirely, but politics are not nearly comparable to what our essential identity is.

Of course, when you are a light-skinned, secular Jew, you are probably going to have a hard time convincing progressives you are a victim instead of an oppressor. So, in comes one last attempt at saving your soul from the original sin of whiteness: politics. Your politics can make you non-white.

Now, this already blatantly ignores the fact that White Fragility was made to have progressives confront their own racism. Progressive politics do not factor into your identity, to the point Diangelo aims her book at progressive white people (after all, it’s not like she’d be able to sell this nonsense to reactionaries, anyway).

In the end, there are still a few more scattered ideas thrown around, but they have little more substance. There is a brief allusion to Noel Ignatiev’s quackery of ‘becoming white’, which doesn’t lead anywhere. Then there is a brief exposition on how Jewishness is too complex to fit in Diangelo’s worldview.

Again, Stein approaches the point there, but her primary issue is, once more, how her identity should not exclusively label her an oppressor. Never does she try to confront the flawed ideas that confine her people to the Manichean evil role.

Instead, what she does is wiggle inside Diangelo’s vision a little bit, which is what this whole article has already been. It’s an attempt to crawl up (or down — don’t forget the fight is for victimhood here) the progressive racial ladder without ever challenging its warped existence.

Identity is a complex thing — the polar opposite of Diangelo’s simplistic religion. Jews are not the only people who face complexities in this regard. It’s a shame that, when confronted with this clash between real-life complexity and storybook dichotomies, Stein simply tries to salvage her people’s special place instead of discarding the holy book. And that is the problem with Jewish Fragility.