Jews cannot ignore Syrian refugees

When I was a child, my mother taught me that Thanksgiving was a holiday of immigrants and refugees. It was fitting, then, that Thanksgiving was a holiday my family spent with my maternal grandparents, who were themselves, along with my mother, Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union in 1981. Although my understanding of the holiday has become much more nuanced since then, as I’ve learned to struggle with the fact that so much of Thanksgiving is mired in colonialism and the persecution of those who lived here before the arrival of European settlers, the holiday continues to hold meaning for me.

My gratitude on Thanksgiving is a complicated one: On one hand, growing up as the son of an immigrant whose family fled their home because of religious persecution, I was raised to be keenly aware of the fact that I have faced comparatively little religious stigmatization. Having grown up in a city where traditionally observant Jews were always visibly present, I never really had to worry about wearing my kippah or being visibly religious in public. On the other hand, my thankfulness is muddied by the fact that Thanksgiving can’t be ever fully separated from the fact that it celebrates the building of a country at the expense of millions of Native American lives.

In order for me to fully show proper gratitude on Thanksgiving, I have to acknowledge that there is an immense privilege involved merely in the celebration therein: I have a family that can provide me with food and shelter, and the generosity of those before me enabled my family to leave the Soviet Union so that they could practice their religion freely here in the United States. At the same time, I have to acknowledge the privilege that I, as a white man of European descent, have in American society today, a country built by white European settlers at the expense of the Native Americans who already lived here.

My gratitude — and the privilege that comes with the ability to be grateful — also brings with it the responsibility of deconstructing Thanksgiving as a holiday and detaching it from the simplistic meaning that I was raised to believe it had as a child.

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, many within the Jewish community have begun to question the parallels between Jewish refugees to the United States in 1939 and Syrian refugees attempting to find asylum here today. While so much has already been said about what the Jewish position (owing either to religious or historical obligation) on accepting Syrian refugees should be, factions within the Jewish community who are wary of — or outright reject — support for Syrian refugees in the United States still remain, further fueled by so much of the political fear-mongering from right-wing political figures today.

And although many in the Jewish community have been unequivocal in their support for Syrian refugees, others have instead argued that these parallels between Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Syrian refugees are flimsy. These are arguments that stem in part from the general fear of terrorism — due in no small part to rampant Islamophobia, which still plagues the American Jewish community today — but also the seeming idea that we as Jews have a monopoly on suffering, especially when parallels are drawn to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

For far too long, we have used the Holocaust as a way to monopolize pain and suffering — no other religious or ethnic group can, or has, suffered in the ways we have. And yet, if we look around us, other people continue to suffer.

When I sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, I was thankful that my family was able to celebrate not only Thanksgiving, but also holidays like Passover, which holds a similar place in my family’s memory. I was thankful that my family was able to resettle here in the United States due to so much of the work done here by the organized Jewish community, which lobbied, advocated for, and brought to light the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. In turn, my being thankful means that I now have the obligation to work toward creating spaces for other refugees.

If we elect to ignore the suffering of refugees today, then we aren’t grateful — we’re selfish. We might have suffered in the past, but we American Jews today enjoy so much privilege to be able to even engage in these debates or, if we so choose, to ignore them entirely as we sat down for Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday night. Now we need to forgo the uniqueness of our own past communal suffering, and make sure that we are among those calling for the United States to continue resettling Syrian refugees today.

 

Amram Altzman is a student at List College.