For decades, New Voices Magazine has published young, progressive Jewish journalists and activists speaking truth to power as they find their way in the causes and movements that define the era. Today, we arrive at a moment of significant Jewish political upheaval, as well as Jewish political awakening. In the face of climate change, a growing white nationalist far-Right, and profound racial and class inequality nationally and globally, more young American Jews find themselves called to justice work than ever before.
April Rosenblum, author of the landmark Jewish Left manual on antisemitism The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (2007) and New Voices alumnus, believes that this growing movement has the power to transform a fledgling progressive Jewish community into a truly powerful (and dangerous) Jewish Left, capable of fighting for justice and winning. Rosenblum returns to our magazine now with a message for today’s readers and writers. This letter is full of Torah, nurturing a new generation of organizers and activists with words of wisdom, warning, and a vision of liberation in which Jewish safety and wellbeing is not a distraction but a necessity. Contextualizing our unique moment as a potential tipping point if we so choose it, Rosenblum presents a challenge and an opportunity: to resist domination and dominating others, to treat our relationships like gold, and to live proudly as Jews in solidarity with all those fighting alongside us.
-Rena Yehuda Newman, Editor
To the new Jewish Left:
This is a letter to all of you who have come of age in the Trump era, and all of you coming of age now. It’s to you who formed the base of Jewish resistance; or who took on new kinds of political responsibility after the murder of George Floyd; or who are starting to speak now, as attacks on Palestinians force you to find your voice. And it’s to all of you who might be wondering: where does Jewish safety fit into this picture?
We are at a turning point for the U.S. Jewish Left. Over the past five years, we have begun to build power in new ways; ways that could make a difference for ourselves, for our neighbors, and – in partnership with many other peoples – for the world.
It matters whether we succeed. But some things stand in our way, and we can’t become the movement we need to be until we wrestle through them. I want to talk to you here about a few of these questions: whether Jews should fight for ourselves, the repression we could face if our movement grows stronger, and how this all connects to class identity.
What’s so new about this Jewish Left?
It is a big deal that this 21st century Jewish Left is coming together. The last time the U.S. had an openly identifying, large-scale, national Jewish Left that was deeply integrated within the larger U.S. Left was in the 1950s. That Left was destroyed from the outside by the Red Scare, and by some crushing disappointments Jews faced within the Left.
Over the next fifty years, Jews on the Left searched for ways to rebuild. Just like Jews had filled movements from the 1880s to the 1950s, we joined the New Left in huge numbers. But something changed: many more of us now hesitated to organize as Jews.
I grew up as a child of that radical Left, listening to the stories of how different movements rise and fall. Growing up, I felt so connected to Jewish radical ancestors – and intensely disconnected from the actual Jewish community. In college, when I first brought my Jewish identity into my organizing, I started wondering why the radicals I’d grown up with hadn’t done the same. Was it because they felt detached from the Jewish community, with its growing privilege and support for permanent Israeli rule over Palestinians?
Over time, I noticed more missing pieces; more historic forces that pressured us to be less visible as radical Jews. One was the Jewish community: During the Red Scare, liberal Jewish groups stopped treating radicals as fellow Jews, cutting us off in hopes of protecting themselves from the political risks we faced.
Other pressures came from the Left itself. U.S. Left thinking about Jews is shaped by generations of European Left tradition which pressured Jews to downplay their difference; from early Left thinkers who expected Jews to assimilate, to socialists who saw a movement full of Jews as a serious disadvantage, since it turned off antisemitic workers. Leftist leaders accused Jews who sought to preserve their culture of hurting working class solidarity, while Russian socialist leaders scoffed at Bundist ideas that a people without land deserved national cultural rights. U.S. Jews, in the 1930s and the 1960s, felt persistently embarrassed about their large numbers in the U.S. Left.
Despite all this, many of us kept reaching for ways to do our radical work as our Jewish selves. We carved out new Jewish spaces to fight for a better and more beautiful U.S. and world, including raising our voices against Israeli actions. Finally, during the second intifada (2000-2005), this need to gather as Jews in defense of Palestinians led us to identify ourselves nationally in more sustained and coordinated ways. These were my college years, when I rooted myself deeper in my Jewish identity and wrote The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, a Left guide to antisemitism.
Out of the ruins of the Red Scare, the framework of a Jewish Left was taking shape. But the Left’s historic thinking about Jews still dominated much of our work: We didn’t need to emphasize Jewish needs. We could simply express our Jewishness by supporting others.
The Trump era marked a turning point. As antisemitism came into undeniable view, it forced us to articulate what it meant to fight for ourselves as Jews, in connection with others. It became clear that mainstream Jewish leaders could not be trusted to resist the government in a time of danger. If there was going to be leadership for Jews, it would have to come from us. And it did. In numbers, in spirit, in commitment to defending our neighbors and ourselves, the Jewish Left rose to the occasion.
When we took this step, from being a movement purely of support to others, toward envisioning a world in which our own liberation fits into the puzzle, we made a quantum leap. A Jewish Left that speaks to the needs and concerns of all Jews is a movement with the power to grow in much bigger ways: the power to inspire regular Jews to the vision of safety through solidarity and communal fulfillment through justice.
That vision is essential, because these Jews’ fears are not imagined. Long before many on the Left noticed, the U.S. far Right which gained notice under Trump has been growing and organizing for decades, readying itself to debut and take power. As I’ve written,
We are now a few months out from a period in which antisemitic white nationalists had access to the highest levels of state power in the United States, and were pushed out by the slimmest of margins. While our day-to-day efforts may be focused on holding a new Democratic administration accountable, we know that the white nationalist far Right is using this time to regroup. They have been energized by their taste of power and are determined to seize it again. It would be a foolish mistake not to recognize this period for what it is: not a return to “normalcy,” but a moment of political leeway to take advantage of; not a relief, but a reprieve that offers us room to maneuver.
Antisemitism is real, and we have to fight it. But it can be hard for us to look this issue in the face. Five years ago, some of us on the Left had a delayed response, holding back at first from naming antisemitism even when neo-Nazis marched with torches in the streets denouncing Jews. Post-election, some of us feel an urge to change the subject, breathing a sigh of relief as though the far Right has dissolved into thin air. What makes us so anxious to distance ourselves from this fight?
Becoming dangerous
Part of our hesitation is rooted in good instincts. We don’t want to risk diverting energy away from work against institutional racism. Nor do we want to risk reinforcing the exploitative ways we’ve seen Jewish institutions emphasize antisemitism: lashing out if people draw connections between current-day injustices and memory of the Holocaust, as if this does an inherent disservice to Jews; using fears of antisemitism to bolster support for Israeli policy and silence opponents. It’s healthy that we feel these cautions; it’s good that we debate how to do this work well.
But below all the logic and good instincts are uncertainties that have lived in us for longer. Unlike the Third World liberation movements who took down rigid European assumptions and reshaped Left theory to fit their reality, Jews’ battles over who belongs in revolution and why got frozen in time. All the old doubts of the European Left about Jews hang over us quietly.
This letter was inspired by an editorial earlier this year that spoke these doubts aloud: “How Not to Fight Antisemitism,” in the magazine Jewish Currents. I’ve written elsewhere (as have others) about what Currents got wrong. While much of Currents’ work is a bright spot on the Jewish Left, this piece missed the mark: misconstruing Jewish organizers’ work, erasing their accomplished coalition-building, and urging them to tone down Jewish identity and the fight against antisemitism. As an example of our movement’s internal dynamics, though, it was a gift; it can help our whole community advance. That’s how I want to use it here.
Currents editors talked about why they don’t see Jews facing much risk. They think of Jews as a group with shared status and shared safety in the U.S. The “institutions we’ve built over the last century to successfully wield [power],” they write, show that “we” Jews are fine. At the end of the day, they think U.S. Jews (at least – the white ones) are part of one privileged community with some power and status.
I love Jewish people, and I love how our history connects us. But in practice, U.S. Jews aren’t one family. Key, powerful U.S. Jewish institutions were created to suppress the Jewish Left. Jews look like one group only while that image remains convenient for the most powerful Jews in the community. Then, when Jews step out of line with oppressive systems, we find out: Many conservative Jewish leaders don’t intend to protect us. They treat safety as a scarce resource, reserved for their kind of Jew.
Young Jewish radicals in Argentina, South Africa, and in the last U.S. Jewish Left learned in sometimes violent ways that Jewish communal leaders were happy to let them take the fall in order to buy more safety for themselves. In fact, some U.S. Jewish radicals already experience this today. For years, Jews who publicly and consistently oppose Israeli policy have been targeted for political repression by the Jewish Right.
But Currents editors aren’t seeing our movement’s potential the way the Jewish Right does. The Jewish Left that Currents portrays, inspiring though it may be, comes across as harmless and non-threatening. And, in a way, if we follow their advice, that will be true. If we step away from antisemitism, if we stop speaking to the needs and worries that many Jews hold in their hearts, if we stop holding out a vision that can inspire many more people than we currently have, we won’t be a threat. We will go back to being a small cluster of people who take solace in our moral superiority and who don’t really pose a problem for the unjust structure of the world. We can keep being an enlightened fringe railing against a cruel world, and yet go home at night still holding onto the expectation that liberal institutions and police will keep us safe. (Again – at least the white ones.)
If we actually do what we believe in, though, we are going to become dangerous. If we fight effectively for a world where all people have their human needs met, in ways that inspire many more Jews to join us, we are going to become a threat to very profitable systems. And we’re going to face political repression – not just from other Jews, but from the state.
What happens to movements who present a true danger to inequality? In the U.S., the state’s playbook is to keep these movements from succeeding by dividing them. Small fissures between activists are widened; tensions are exploited and inflamed on purpose. Surveillance was the most polite form of state repression in the last century (and it didn’t end then). The less polite forms were fabricated letters designed to stoke hostilities between activists, rumor campaigns to destroy the reputations of effective leaders, public challenges pitting factions against each other politically, and violence.
America’s most brutal repression has been reserved for activists of color, especially Black leaders with powerful visions for change. In a white supremacist society, the most basic demands of Black, brown, and indigenous communities threaten the whole foundations of an unequal system. Already, Jews of color on the Left are singled out for intense Right-wing targeting when they speak up politically. They are threatened, libeled, harassed in a way designed to wear them down – and despite this, many of them come back every day to lead.
If our new, multiracial Jewish Left becomes effective, we may face repression on a level most of us don’t yet recognize. The whole movement will need to ensure that Jews of color have access to protective resources. Nor will white Jews go untouched, though the protection of whiteness will shape how they are targeted. Before the Red Scare brought down the last strong, national Jewish Left, most white Jews did not face state violence. Rather, they faced being hounded out of jobs, harassed at home by FBI agents, losing their careers and having the state seize and liquidate the mutual aid institutions they had poured their wages into building for their old age.
Why do I tell you this? It’s not to scare you out of activism. It’s to help us take seriously what we hold in our hands. Right now we still lapse into mistreating each other – belittling each others’ work in an editorial here, posturing as more radical than others on social media there. We don’t yet have the kind of discipline that we will need to protect each other, as a movement.
If we are serious about transforming society, we need to be serious about recognizing the force of our opposition, and thus serious about treating each other in ways that protect and sustain the movement; not ways that advance our personal image, or our preferred organization against any other organization. Any fissures will be used against us. Individuals who emerge as effective leaders will be attacked – and it will not always be obvious, in the moment, that such attacks are acts of political repression.
One of our best forms of defense is to treat all of our political relationships like gold: not to whitewash over our meaningful differences, but to consistently speak with respect about everyone in our movement: partners and rivals, in public and when we think we’re in private. Protecting our movement means thinking carefully about how to work through interpersonal, strategic and ideological conflicts; it means finding ways to do this in person, away from the public stage, or finding ways to work through differences in public that lift everyone up.
And herein lies a contradiction for today’s Left to figure out: While we have to take care how we show our divisions, the appearance of unity also carries risks. We know what it’s like to be silenced for airing Israel’s dirty laundry; to be tone-policed for calling out racism; to go through gaslighting or humiliation for exposing abusers or unhealthy group dynamics. We’ll need to look to the wisdom of many people, from activist elders who survived COINTELPRO to abolitionist thinkers innovating transformative justice practices, to figure out ways of nurturing openness, criticism and support for dissent, while making ourselves minimally vulnerable to division and repression.
We’re at a turning point. It no longer matters how good any of us are at using the right radical words in public. What matters is whether we take our potential seriously enough to protect what we are building.
Choosing resistance
In a society designed for domination, treating each other well doesn’t happen by accident. Racial capitalism isn’t built to give us practice caring for each other collectively. Unless we grow up in communities where we have to look out for each other to survive, this society trains us to try to advance ourselves at the expense of others. It takes rigorous attention and practice to act in a different way.
It’s not that this is a new idea, that it takes ever-present awareness to resist replicating oppression. In Jewish Left spaces, for example, Black and indigenous, Sephardi and Mizrahi and other Jewish leaders of color working to undo white supremacy and Ashkenazi dominance have been teaching this for decades. It’s just that a lot of us have trouble staying attuned to the goals of this rigorous awareness. Instead, for many of us raised in a punitive society like the U.S., it morphs into a drive to stay vigilant so we don’t make mistakes, so we don’t get caught, so we don’t feel shame.
If we want to build healthy movements, we need a different kind of consciousness. We need to start treating all of our choices as opportunities to resist domination – of ourselves and of others. If we don’t make these active choices, we will keep reverting to the urge to dominate others. It will just play out in seemingly “safe” ways; in oppressions we don’t have names for.
Take, for example, the culture of class domination. It’s a quieter issue that has necessarily taken a back seat to race, but it’s very relevant for this Jewish Left. If my historical picture is correct, we’re the first cohesive U.S. Jewish Left to be largely born without working class roots. For our Jewish Left ancestors, many of whom had close ties to the working class, class identity gave them a solid way to understand that they were fighting for themselves along with others. This made up, a little, for the ways that Left theory was never super consistent about Jews’ own needs to be liberated from antisemitism. When that working class foundation disappeared for many of our families, it left Jews disoriented about whether we still get to fight for ourselves.
Jews whose families have assimilated into class privilege grow up absorbing the lessons of their class culture about how to dominate others, and how to try their best to avoid being dominated. Since I grew up poor, I’m most familiar with the receiving end of this domination. But my relationships with Jewish friends and comrades raised with class privilege have slowly made it clear to me how much pain they have also grown up with from this class culture of domination. This style of domination gets carried from the mainstream Jewish community into our Left spaces. It becomes so default in our spaces that even those of us from poor or working-class backgrounds can start to embody it in hopes of commanding respect.
The class cultures we grow up with or adopt come out in how we treat people: the way we talk down to people in tones of calm superiority; the way some of us convey an air of confidence and authority (even when they have no idea what they’re doing); the intense pressure we might feel to project competence, even when what we could really use is help figuring things out. (For training and resources on this, I highly recommend the working class-led organization Class Action.)
Unchallenged class privilege blunts our perceptions: of ourselves and others, of our place in the world, of our political reality. When mixed with another form of domination, like whiteness, it can make people ill-equipped to sense changing risks (like, for instance, antisemitism) and hasty to pronounce life “back to normal” as soon as they feel comfortable. White people with class privilege grow up hearing and living the message, Bad things won’t happen to me; they happen to other people.
The summer after the Tree of Life massacre, a radical Jewish friend broke the news to me that white supremacists had posted an online directory of Jewish activists’ names, faces and workplaces. Similar groups had already targeted or actively threatened Jewish writers and Jewish students. This hit even closer to home, leaving us both shaken. But I also felt frustrated. I had been encouraging progressive Jews for a while to consider proactive safety measures for their congregations (which takes thought and planning, since white modes of “security” have never been safe for Jews of color). I’d been met with discomfort and disbelief.
That day, I told my friend how it felt, to me, like these progressive Jews’ lack of preparation for violence had so much to do with class. Since most of them were white, it probably came from a perfect storm of race and class. If you grow up without these combined privileges, you know: bad things can happen to us. It’s a survival skill to be aware of your surroundings: to understand that things can take a turn for the worse; that whatever specific privilege you have will not always be enough to protect you.
In our movements, what strikes me most is how class domination gives us approval to accept substitutes for real liberation. Growing up in working-class spaces, the message I got was: We want change. We want it now, because we need it now, and, if a tactic looks like it’ll help us get change done, we’ll do it – even at the risk of embarrassing ourselves.
But in what passes for Left culture online, I see messages about change as translated through the culture of class privilege: I stand up for justice so I can know I’ve done the right thing; so I can show I’m a moral person. If the cause fails, it’s sad; even heartbreaking. But the consequences will probably impact someone else, and you get the reward of knowing you stood on the right side.
In this performative view of change, the consequences of our actions disappear. What matters is how good we feel, how hardcore we look, how untarnished our reputation stays. We’re probably even more susceptible to this in times when injustice feels overpowering, when it feels like dominating others will make us feel the slightest bit more powerful or effective. If we can curate that reputation by dominating others a little – if we can make ourselves look smart by making them look stupid, if we can stave off scrutiny about what worries us inwardly by deflecting that scrutiny to others, it’s all innocent, right?
What I find so valuable about the Currents piece is how it shows that you can be trying to do the right thing, but if you don’t make a conscious choice to resist the culture of domination, you end up replicating it. I think that’s how they ended up discouraging work against antisemitism, just moments after antisemitism’s most dangerous recent peak; suggesting that caring about Jewish identity makes you a bad antiracist, at a moment when multiracial Jewish organizations have established, in partnership with non-Jewish communities of color, that racism and antisemitism must be fought together to succeed; shaming a new generation of activists, misrepresenting their work as petty navel-gazing, and taking credit for suggesting those activists build coalitions (which is what they’re already doing). That’s the funny thing about domination. It doesn’t require intention. All it requires is that for one moment, you stop making an active choice.
If I look at this behavior with compassion, I see one more layer to why we settle for less. When injustice is so powerful, we find ourselves asking: Can we really get to another place? If we can’t actually get to a fair world, maybe the best choice we can make is to bear witness: to know we spoke out against this unjust fate we couldn’t stop. When that’s your state of mind, the practical outcome of your stance suddenly becomes much less important than how honorable you looked doing it.
But the organizing tradition teaches a different perspective: Our victory is not guaranteed, because we’re up against forces with real power. But there are methods to effect real change. We can get to another place. Just not with behaviors made in the image of a culture of domination.
In this society, dominating others and looking good in public pays us a certain currency. It’s short-term and illusory. It has no value where we’re going. The investment that will get us to a world worth fighting for is what we accumulate through meticulously protecting each other.
With all of our heart, with all of our might
Sixteen years ago I was finishing college and thinking through antisemitism for the first time. Until then I’d almost always focused on anti-Black racism in prisons, policing and political surveillance. Having grown up white in a Black community, my heart was, and is, centered on support work for Black liberation.
It was only with the passage of time that I understood the connection between the two: how antisemitism and anti-Black racism are interlocking gears in the machine of white supremacy; how all work for justice is hurt by false explanations for injustice (which is what antisemitism is); how Jewish Leftists need to lead on antisemitism to unplug the Right’s favorite tool, which is calling non-Jewish Black (and Muslim, and Arab) leaders antisemitic to disrupt work for Black and Palestinian liberation.
I wouldn’t have chosen to fight antisemitism. But once I started noticing it, I couldn’t work around it. The Left was my home, in a way nowhere else would ever be. I had no choice but to figure out how to talk about it, and so The Past was born.
All this doesn’t keep me from feeling self-doubt, just like other Jews on the Left. Because of our political movement’s history, that’s just part of how internalized antisemitism impacts us. But I’ve learned that even if the day never comes when I feel confident about this, that’s okay. Those doubts can rest while I keep going.
I have to keep myself accountable to this. Although I’ve talked to Jewish radicals from many backgrounds about this work, I’m much newer at bringing it up with the non-Jewish Black radicals I meet. I make it a practice, now, when I build a relationship with a non-Jewish Black radical, to be upfront with them that I am in social change not only to fight at their side, but also to fight for my people. If we are going to work together, I need to let them see who I am.
This hasn’t been easy. Before saying all this, I always wonder whether I will be understood. I sometimes hold back from getting deeply involved with an activist who I’m not sure is ready to hear me. I build trust slowly. But on the whole, the reaction I have gotten has been positive. I have found that people who are serious about their own liberation respect others who respect themselves. And it has meant that I feel fully present, bringing all of myself to the fight.
There is something that unsettles Jewish Currents editors about the prospect of Jews being fully, unapologetically rooted in ourselves as we sync up with others. They watch the opportunism of liberal, centrist or Right-wing Jewish leaders, and they fear that “leaning in” to deeper Jewish identity will drive Leftist Jews to self-absorption and victimization, too. They worry that somewhere underneath this, there’s some scam. I know why they’re on guard, but I don’t share that fear.
I feel something different powering this Jewish Left. Maybe, if you’ve had a good experience of these years of Jewish resistance, you’ve felt it too: A rush, being out there together, like you were resisting in the way you’d been longing to. Like you were fighting in a way that did honor to your ancestors. That’s not opportunism. That’s us sensing our full power, when we tap into all the generations of Jews who have longed for a chance to overturn the systems that dehumanize us. We are so lucky we might really be the ones who get to do it.
When people tell us that we should stop thinking about our own stake in this struggle, they don’t usually notice the underlying message they’re sending: that the status quo, where some members of the Jewish people have enough privilege to float along in an unequal system, is an adequate substitute for liberation. Because let’s be clear: If what we want is an end to antisemitism, it will require restructuring the world. As I wrote in 2007,
The Left mistakenly writes current-day [anti-]Jewish oppression off as fake or minor because it’s not based on poverty, skin color or colonized status. But it’s exactly that difference in our oppression that makes Jews a revolutionary force.
Oppressed groups (including us) can often be fooled into thinking that if they just obtain surface reforms they’ll be on their way to freedom… But in the case of Jews, it is clear that the dangers to us will exist as long as there are ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the world at all. That’s because we’re not just oppressed by the people at the top…[we are] used as the ‘pressure valve’ whenever oppression grows worse for other groups. We can’t escape the cycle of our oppression as long as systems of inequality run the world.
[Anti-]Jewish oppression affects all Jews, in all economic classes, and our oppression cannot be ended without fighting and transforming social injustice as a whole. What does this mean? It means that we are a reserve of revolutionary potential — in all classes, at all times.
You are a new Jewish Left. And you’re connected to generations of Jewish radicals who’ve come before you, and our people is a part of all the human generations who’ve found ways to resist oppressors throughout history. For all the mistakes you have made and will make, you are not worse than any other Jewish Left before you. Every generation of Jews and non-Jews has struggled to get it right. No one has succeeded yet in permanently bringing the rule of tyrants down. Our job is to preserve the clues they figured out, and add in the revelations that become clear to us in our time.
Torah tells us that the generation of Israelites who left Egypt had to completely die out before the next generation could enter the promised land. For the new Jewish Left, the promised land is not a place; we’ve seen where that gets us. It’s a future: not promised, but possible. And the generation before you – the generation in which some people took the first brave steps out of the known activist world where Jewish liberation didn’t matter, and into the reality where our liberation is an essential piece of the puzzle – won’t all make it there with you. Some will be with you 1,000%. Some you’ll have to teach, or you will have to decide to go further than them. But it’s your generation, not theirs, who will determine the next part of the path forward.
Keep going. Make mistakes. Search for the words to explain antisemitism. Put it on the back burner when you have to; but not for long. Believe that Jewish liberation is an essential part of the full fight ahead of us for a world where all people are free. If you’ve excelled at deepening your ties to the non-Jews we’re struggling beside, take pride in it. If you’re still new at it, learn from what these other Jews have to teach you, and then do it in your own way, with your own strengths.
Know that there are many people out there – non-Jews who don’t even see yet why they should stand with us – who are also finding their way forward in this collective fight, with all of their heart and with all of their might.
The time is coming when we will fight together.
July 2021
April Rosenblum would like to thank the all-star crew of organizers, scholars and veterans of the Jewish Left who shaped this essay, and especially Rena Yehuda Newman for their vision and dedication in editing.
You can find and follow April Rosenblum’s new blog, “Long Game” for more essays on this significant moment for the Jewish Left.
