Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary

There’s something about the university president’s brief, empty statement two months later about the mass murder of eleven Jewish congregants in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Something about the omission of the word antisemitism or its variants from the statement, and the president’s comparison of the massacre to other acts of violence, including “drive-by shootings” and bomb threats against “high-ranking” politicians. There’s something, too, about the absence of any statement at all after a similar shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, less than a two-hour drive from where you now work. Something about learning that “a recognizable symbol of hate” was found on a school building, receiving no additional information, and never hearing about it again. Something about wondering if it was a swastika or if it was a noose, then wondering if you’d feel safer if it turned out to be the latter – wondering, that is, if you’d feel safer knowing it was your students being targeted instead of you. Something about how grotesque that thought seemed and how, when you tried to push it out of your mind, it settled in the lining of your stomach.

There’s something about being told by your fellow professors of composition, rhetoric, literature, and linguistics – people who study language, even some who rally against linguicism – that the culturally situated way you speak is a problem. Something about being positioned by those colleagues as, to use their word, the scapegoat for the department’s well-documented racism and sexism, because it was you, the outsider, who called them out (Grayson, 2022). And there’s something about hearing the word kike as the punchline to a joke spilling from your coworker’s mouth, the subsequent laughter from your other supposed colleagues, and the feeling as your stomach knots around itself that tell you: You don’t belong here.

At the Intersection of Whiteness and Jewishness

I know antisemitism in my skin and viscera. Yet, outside of my own body, most of the messages I’ve encountered in academia have told me that antisemitism isn’t that bad, that it doesn’t exist anymore, or that, if it does, it doesn’t matter because, well, I’m white.

Given the focus of my research and teaching, I spend a lot of time thinking about whiteness: How it is constructed and interpellated, how it is reified and reproduced, and how I benefit from it. I have joined, founded, chaired, and facilitated committees, task forces, working groups, and workshops on whiteness, white privilege, and the necessity of critical reflection around individuals’ own white racialization. Yet, when I have spent time in many of these spaces, virtual or otherwise, I have still felt different.

Often, I have been the only Jewish woman in these groups; the other members have been predominantly white, Christian women. They did not talk the way I talked, and their experiences were not the same as my experiences. They didn’t describe being told by grade school classmates that they were going to Hell because they celebrated Chanukah. They didn’t talk about being called a “Jew bitch” and a “kike.” They guiltily confessed to automatically clutching their purses in Black neighborhoods, but they didn’t share stories of being terrified in certain white neighborhoods too. They didn’t talk about realizing as a child that churches didn’t have security guards stationed out front the way that synagogues did. Even those whose families had instilled in them a critical view of whiteness didn’t recall learning early on, like I did, that two seemingly contradictory realities could co-exist: Some Jewish people were white, but white people weren’t Jewish.

Though I have spoken and written about the necessity of understanding one’s own white racialization, understanding my skin privilege didn’t explain all of my experiences of racialization. Whiteness didn’t explain why, when I was walking through Washington Square Park two weeks before I left New York, a light-skinned man jumped in front of me and sneered: “Nice nose.” Whiteness didn’t explain why a dark-skinned stranger on the FDR Drive rolled down his window and called me a “hook-nosed bitch.” White aesthetic ideals may explain why I, like so many Jewish women, spent my teen years dreaming about getting a nose job, but it was my Jewish face, not my whiteness, that made me want one. As Jewish writer and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007) noted of the Jewish woman’s desire for this particular plastic surgery: “Nose jobs are performed so that a Jewish woman does not look like a Jew… Tell me again Jewish is just a religion” (pp. 29–30).

Though some scholarship from the late twentieth century, such as anthropologist Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folk and What That Says about Race in America, has explored the racialization of Jewish people and, specifically, Jewish absorption into whiteness, I have rarely seen my identity fully accounted for in scholarship on race or whiteness. Until I began working with the Jewish Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I found few places in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS) where I could talk to other Jewish people about being Jewish. Since connecting with other Jewish scholars and since conducting the research that I describe in this book, I have learned that, if I have felt alone, at least I am not alone in those feelings of isolation or my frustration with the lack of critical discourse around academic antisemitism and disciplinary Christian hegemony. Whatever comfort this solidarity has provided me, it pales in comparison to the sadness of knowing that so many Jewish educators feel isolated and unacknowledged, especially at a time when antisemitic sentiment and violence are on the rise.

The Reemergence and Mainstreaming of Antisemitism

I began this research in early 2021, while working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic still spreading, virtually unchecked, across the U.S., amid an increasingly white nationalist social and political landscape. I must admit that writing this book at this time was emotionally challenging for me. One weekend of writing was derailed when I learned of a hostage crisis at a synagogue in Texas. An afternoon I had intended to spend writing was spent reeling from an email sent by my union representative in which she described my ongoing experiences with misogyny and antisemitism as “personality disputes.” Many, many more of my planned writing times became thinking time, mourning time, and grieving time, when the weight of reflection or the weight of the present became too heavy to keep writing.

Consider, for example, a February 2021 complaint by two Jewish students against Brooklyn College, a City University of New York campus that serves one of the largest Jewish student populations in the U.S. and which happens to be the school from which both of my parents graduated, becoming the first in their families to finish college. The students criticized the school for “advancing the narrative that all Jews are white and privileged” (quoted in Redden, 2022) after a series of events in the counseling program. During an identity development activity, information was provided on multiple racial and ethnic identities, but “the only reference to Jewishness was in the worksheet for ‘White Racial Identity Development’” and a Jewish student who expressed frustration was told they were “in denial” of their whiteness (Redden, 2022). Apparently, the professor was unaware of the existence of social justice educator Christopher MacDonald-Dennis’s (2006) Jewish identity model; the model is also unmentioned in accounts I have read of the incident.

One complainant was a Jewish Latina woman who left the program due to her experiences. She explained:

Colloquially, “crazy-making” describes manipulative discursive moves and behaviors, like gaslighting, designed to confuse a person, delegitimize their experiences, or make them believe their experience of reality isn’t real. Such behaviors are commonly weaponized in service of white supremacy, such as when a person is labeled “too sensitive” for identifying racism as racism or antisemitism as antisemitism.

What This Book Does and Doesn’t Do

If the relative assimilative success of Jewish people in the U.S. has taught us anything, it’s that inclusion does not equal equity and that representation is not enough to change the structures of white supremacy. The experiences of those who do not identify as Christian are understudied in antiracist research – which is, of course, another form of marginalization that upholds Christian hegemony. This book attempts to fill part of that gap in hopes of eventually developing a more inclusive community of antiracist educators and an even stronger coalition prepared to challenge white supremacy.

This book is about the embedded antisemitism and Christian hegemony of the U.S., its academic institutions, and the field of RCWS, and how those ideologies and dynamics impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars. Importantly, because this book is situated in a U.S. context in which Christianity is hegemonic, this is not a book about Islamist antisemitism. (See Kiewe, 2020, for a rhetorical examination of that topic.) This book is about the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the white supremacy imaginary, via popular and academic discourse, for the maintenance of U.S. white Christian cultural hegemony. This book is about how that rhetoric essentializes the diversity of Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims and character of antisemitism. This book is about the complicity of our academic institutions and our own professional spaces in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of anti-Jewish racism.

This book celebrates being Jewish without a caveat. Such celebration neither requires nor suggests that all Jewish people are good people or that some Jewish people do not enact the same toxic white Christian supremacy that endangers all Jewish people. Like other marginalized and oppressed peoples, Jewish people are not immune to internalized white supremacy. Some light-skinned Jewish people have uncritically accepted whiteness as a racial identity or a set of ideals, and may not even realize they’re doing it at their own expense.

Surely, more can be said about how Jewish communities, like other marginalized communities, perpetuate whiteness and racism. But this book is not that book. Laboring against racism in academia amidst the mainstreaming of white nationalism and antisemitic conspiracy theories has made clear to me that, in our profession and in our society, we are sorely lacking even the most basic considerations of Jewish identity, history, and experience, and of antisemitism’s construction and functions in contemporary racial discourse.