What America’s Organized Jewish Community Got Dead Wrong!
Wokeism Is The basis of the New anti-Semitism
Even today after Hamas’ October 7, 2024 pogrom on Jews and other Israelis and friends in Southern Israel, serious thinkers in the organized Jewish Community get it dead wrong.
For example, the New Yorker Magazine March 13, 2024 article, The Problem with Defining Anti-Semitism, by Eyal Press https://bit.ly/4cbJV3B highlights how the organized community is obvious to its error. Mr. Press, who drafted the widely accepted definition of anti-Semitism, which was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.) in 2016, thinks that the definition has lead to more harm than good and it should no longer be used. Mr. Press and everyone else whom I have read in the Jewish Press are clueless about what is wrong with the definition. Nothing is wrong with it. Nor is anything wrong with my mother’s definition, “They don’t like us? So what else is new?”
The real problem is Woke DEI, e.g., Wokeism, the ideology that people are not individuals with inalienable rights, but first and foremost members of a group and they are to be treated according to their group designation. Wokeism has two groups in its quest for social justice: the Oppressed (all minorities except Jews) and the Oppressors (Whites and Jews (who are a multi-racial minority). Under Wokeism, special laws must be passed to protect members of the oppressed group. The most famous was Affirmative Action with its minority hiring and promoting quotas. Wokeism relies on Group Rights in that there must be special laws, rules, and regulations for the various groups which Wokers identify.
Group Rights Always Divide People along Group Lines
The classic Stanford Prison Experiment divided a group of volunteers into prison guards and prisoners. People were outraged at the outcome and to this day the study’s originator Philip Zimbardo is castigated by those who dislike the result. Within five (5) days the guards started abusing the prisoners and the prisoners retaliated the best they could. Virtually no one wants to admit that the mere dividing of people into separate groups where some have privileges and other lack power causes terrible intergroup hostilities.
For Wokers, the solution to injustice is more groups competing for scarce resources such as jobs. Wokers then heavily indoctrinate members of the oppressed group that all their problems are due to racism by the oppressors. The oppressed are hapless victims who need the Wokers to redistribute jobs, college admissions, and hiring in business on the basis of degree of Oppression which their members have experienced over the last two to four centuries.
Thus, an essential element of Wokeism is that the individual has no inalienable rights, but rather an individual’s rights and duties derive from his group label. This system is far from new. In fact, it may be oldest form of social organization, where life’s fortunes rise and fall on the group to which you have been born.
The best way for power-mongers to consolidate their group is through hate and fear of The Other. Thus, there is a Brave New World type barrage from the Woke ministry of truth about how evil the Whites and Jews are with their White Privileged and their in-born racism to abuse and cheat the oppressed. Wokeism also enlists the oppresseds’ support for the Woke demands that the oppressors give stuff, especially money, power, and prestige to Woke guardians of the oppressed. See, Hate Money Stalks America https://bit.ly/3fUBy1z
This dynamic has played out endlessly in world history. Our founding fathers were most impacted by the European religious wars with beheadings of royals and their associates, confiscation of lands, enslavement, massive destruction of productive property. Thus, the Declaration of Independence totally completely and irrevocably rejected any sort of Group Rights. All men are equal and have certain inalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The Constitution’s Preamble expressly stated one goal of the government was to secure the Blessings of Liberty and promote the general Welfare. Individual inalienable rights could not exist in the Hobbesian state of nature. Thus, it was the government’s duty to provide the context in which individual inalienable rights could flourish.
Since 1654 when a few Sephardic Jews landed in New Amsterdam, Jews recognized the importance of individual rights so that they could not be barred from public life by their religious classification. Americans were slow to set aside their religious group rights thinking so that it was not until the 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon that being a Roman Catholic ceased to be an unspoken barrier to the Presidency. Nonetheless, the Declaration and the US Constitution are the rock solid basis for each individual to be treated as an individual on his merit and not on the basis of his skin color, ethnicity, or religion. Wokeism not only has no use for individual rights but it also teaches that individual liberty is an evil White ploy to oppress Blacks. Thus, one may not focus on the individual but upon his group to determine his merit. Wokeism makes life simple: If your skin is light, you’re an oppressor and merit punishment, but if your skin is dark, you can do no wrong. If a minority slaughters the elderly and rapes women and children, it is the not fault of the oppressed minority; the murderers and rapists are exacting social justice from the Oppressors.
There are American college students across the nation, cheering October 7th and exhorting our leaders to allow Hamas to exterminate all the Jews from the River to the Sea.
The Silly Academic Discussion about the I.H.R.A. Definition of Anti-Semitism
As the New Yorker article endlessly drones on, the problem is allegedly free speech. Calling for the genocide of Jews is just an idea and everyone should be free to publically express themselves. The I.H.R.A. definition has nothing to do with free speech and it has everything to do with the woker Group Rights indoctrination in university and business DEI programs. Without that group rights context, anti-Semitism would not be a problem and no one would be so delusional as to blame the I.H.R.A.’s definition for anything. Even the Charlottesville’s Tiki Torch Paraders did not call for the annihilation of the Jews. They chanted, “Jews Shall not Replace us.”
Wokeism is a creature of the Left and not of the Right Wing. Thus, there are the few lunatic far right wing anti-Semites and they do not control GOP policy. MAGA, for all its faults, is not anti-Semitic. That’s due to the fact that for the most part, GOP are running away from its own past love affair with Group Rights, e.g. segregation.
In brief, we still have the marginalized anti-Semitism of the criminal far right, but that’s a law enforcement problem. On the left, however, we have a vicious anti-Semitic mass movement based on the group rights classification that Jews, by virtue of being Jews, are evil and merit extermination.
One reason the organized Jewish Community does not want to admit this fact is that agencies like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee have spent years supporting anti-Semitic Woke DEI in the universities, in business and in government. Now some professional Jews are saying that Jews are the problem because the I.H.R.A. definition infringes on the free speech rights of Palestinians to call for the genocide of Jews. In Wokedom, it’s a sin to use the wrong pronoun, but it’s sacrosanct to call for the murder of your fellow classmates and their families.
The organized Jewish community got it wrong when it promoted the Woke DEI group rights agenda and they are getting it wrong again where they thinks it’s a free speech issue. No! It is a battle over the nation’s fundamental values: Are we a nation which recognizes each individual’s inalienable rights or are we a nation where individual inalienable rights no longer exist and one’s life and welfare ultimately rests on the group into which one is born?