This post comes in response to Harpo Jaeger’s critique of my Holocaust Remembrance Day post from last week.
Harpo accuses me of promoting Jewish exceptionalism. While my post dealt with the importance of remembering the Holocaust and not with Jewish achievement, I believe that Jews should be proud of their exceptionalism and there is no reason to stop writing about it.
Regarding Harpo’s comments on my post, I would like to start with the Israeli-Palestinian debate that got cancelled at my high school. Harpo writes that “this [the debate] seems rather irrelevant to Holocaust education.†I agree that the debate itself is irrelevant to Holocaust education, but I was trying to emphasize that in addition to Fieldston not educating students about the Holocaust, my high school put no effort into educating their students about Israel or anything regarding Judaism.
Harpo also misunderstood the structure of the debate. The debate’s original format included a person representing Israel’s perspective on both the one-state and two-state solutions and a person representing the respective Palestinian perspectives. Fieldston’s administration then decided to completely change the format without announcing it ahead of time. Instead of having an Israeli and a Palestinian debating one another, there would be two Palestinians “debating†one another. One speaker would represent the one-state solution and the other would represent the two-state solution. This is no debate. Where was the Israeli perspective that was promised?
Harpo called my analogy of African-American slavery to the Holocaust a “huge generalization.  Regardless of its (highly debatable) accuracy, nothing good ever comes of comparing tragedies.†I agree that this is a generalization, but my point was that both Jews and African-Americans have painful pasts. The fact that many of Fieldston’s assemblies focused on African American history and not the Holocaust is a disservice not only to Jewish students but to the whole community as well.
Regarding my observation that both Jews and African-Americans are minorities, Harpo wrote,
This is not ‘the fact of the matter,’ it’s an issue of race and ethnicity, a topic highly related to class and social standing in this country and elsewhere.  It’s unfair to assume that all Jews feel the same way about their racial identity (and the practice of calling [usually white] Jews a ‘different race’ imparts some degree of non-belonging on non-white Jews).
Jews being a minority is not an issue of race, ethnicity, class, or social standing. All that being a minority refers to is statistics. Yes, minorities have faced discrimination and due to this discrimination most tend to be of lower class or social standing, but as I mentioned before, this is not the issue. It does not matter how “Jews feel…about their racial identity†or whether or not they consider themselves to be a part of white society. Jews represent two percent of the American population, which makes them a minority.
Finally, Harpo writes, “All people have suffered discrimination.†For someone who hates generalizations, this is big. Do you think that WASPs have suffered from significant discrimination in the US? Additionally if all people have suffered from some form of discrimination, then why is it that only certain groups are entitled to government handouts such as affirmative action? If “All people have suffered [from some form of] discrimination,†then why is it that certain groups have more entitlements than others?
