Keep Your White Guilt

This Jew rejects your gift of self-denial and self-hatred

It has always bothered me how many Americans define Jews. I can’t even begin to tell how annoyed I get at having to explain over and over again that there is no controversy between my being both a Jew and an atheist.

Just like there is none between someone being both an atheist and French.

But folks don’t see it. So many Americans have come to erroneously think of Jews as an esoteric group of white people from Europe who just happen to reject bacon (as well as sports, manual labor, healthy relationship with their mothers and anxiety-free lives in the countryside). Someone has once told me that whiteness is the greatest prize America can bestow on a group of people. Such whiteness as has been bestowed on Italians and Irish, for example, originally discriminated against on racial grounds. Sometime within the last couple of generations America has decided to grant Jews a measure of honorary (yet doubtlessly provisional) whiteness, and in doing so, it has done us a terrible disservice.

It came to pass that, in America, a couple of generations of Jews have been raised who, along with the traditional values of the Jewish urban educated class, such as liberalism, philosophic reflection and open-mindedness, have absorbed the notions of their own white privilege and white guilt. Who honestly think their ancestors were Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Germans who simply happened to be of the Jewish faith. Something that would have come as an enormous surprise to actual Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Germans who most definitely never viewed those Jews as their racial peers.

I grew up in a small town in Moldova, populated in equal measures by Russians, Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians. None of them viewed me as one of their own, despite the fact that I spoke Russian like everyone else, was an atheist like everyone else, grew up reading the same books and listening to the same music as everyone else, and ate the same Ukrainian salted pork lard, Russian meat dumplings and Romanian cornmeal mush as everyone else.

My 7th-grade geography teacher once took exception to my asking too many questions in class and yelled that I “exemplify all the worst qualities of your people.” My 9th-grade gym teacher, a severely contused veteran of Afghanistan, was so mad that a filthy Jew became the captain of the school volleyball team, he took me to the locker room and expertly, without leaving a single mark, beat me up until I could barely breathe. Kids whom I considered my friends would tell Jew jokes, laugh at racial Jewish stereotypes and throw down kike insults matter-of-factly. And, perhaps most grotesquely, due to the Holocaust being censored out of the Soviet discourse of World War II, I grew up being told that Jews never experienced the war, as cowardice, weakness and treachery are their most evident racial traits.

And, of course, in case any of those clues were somehow missed, my internal passport issued mandatorily to all Soviet citizens at the age of 16, had the word JEW written in the infamous Line 5 on the first page.

The bearer of this exemplifies all the worst qualities of your favorite racial joke

Hitler didn’t care who kept kosher. My Soviet compatriots didn’t care that my grandfathers were war heroes. Pogrmoshiks in the Russian Empire had a saying about baptized Jews: “Жид крещеный - что вор прощеный” (“A baptized kike is like a forgiven thief”).

Religion has nothing to do with being a Jew. Religion is an opinion. A wrong one, but it’s a matter for a different post. Religion can be changed at will. There was nothing in the world I could have done to change what was written in Line 5 of my passport. Or how my classmates and teachers saw me. We are a racial minority and have always been one, the recent granting of American whiteness notwithstanding.

So, sure, American college kids can feel guilt and self-hatred all they want. They can reject a Middle Eastern Jewish ethnostate on the grounds of their liberal disgust with such entities (yeah, sure why not, it’s not like a Middle Eastern Islamic theocracy will spring in its place or anything). They can decry the three generations of Jews born and raised in Israel as “white colonizers” who are oppressing the indigenous brown people. None of this will matter at all to antisemites if (when) they decide to come for them.

Because antisemites don’t, and never did, care for things about you that are changeable. They don’t see you as a liberal white American of Russo-Polish background who was raised culturally Jewish. You, to them, are racial scum because you were born and will die this way.

And, I am sorry to tell you, it’s the antisemites’ opinion on this issue that really matters. They got to define us as racial others, and we would be idiots to not listen to them. Because I have news for you, American Jews.

The founder of Israel isn’t Lord Balfour or Theodor Herzl or Vladimir Zhabotisnky or David Ben-Gurion. And it sure as hell wasn’t a fictional and extremely unpleasant literary character who promised this land to the equally fictional Abraham.

It was Adolf Hitler. Hitler is the reason Israel exists as a Jewish ethnostate. Hitler is the reason Jews have a unique right to an ethnostate. Hitler is the reason we will never, ever give it up, no matter how many times US college students shout about the river or the sea, neither of which most of them can name.

But Hitler, friends, was not an aberration. Hitler was not an accident or a historical defect. Hitler was crystallized out of centuries of oppression, racial othering, hatred and violence that Europe has always expressed toward us, the recently-appointed “white European colonizers.” And he would have remained a minor Austrian-Bavarian weirdo of little political consequence if it wasn’t for all that hatred and all that violence still being there, waiting to be reawakened.

Israel exists because when that violence gets reawakened again (and it’s stirring now) and another Hitler is crystalized out of it, there will be a country that will never turn that refugee ship away. That will never see us as racial others. That will defend us and that we will be proud to defend as well.

So, if you want to start a conversation with me about Israel, be it on Zionism, the two-state solution (both of which I support), Netanyahu or religious idiots who settle in “Judea and Samaria” (all of whom I denounce and reject), first liberate yourself from the notion that you are speaking to a privileged white person.

I never asked for America’s gift of provisional whiteness. And I respectfully return it to sender.