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Woke Antisemitism Harms Jews

(Quillette) David Bernstein - In January 2016, I became President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the 70-year-old Jewish advocacy and community relations umbrella group for the American Jewish community. On my first day on the job, JTA published an opinion piece I wrote, "The Anti-Israel Trend You've Never Heard Of," in which I argued that the progressive doctrine of "intersectionality" was a danger to the Jewish community. "If a group sees itself as oppressed," I wrote, "it will see Israel as part of the dominant power structure doing the oppressing, and Palestinians as fellow victims. That oppressed group will be susceptible to joining forces with the [anti-Israeli] BDS movement." Regrettably, the dangers I warned about have come to pass. I'd come to believe that the mainstream Jewish community needed to find a way to include the Jewish narrative in the intersectional matrix - to complicate it - so that Jews and Israel were not viewed as the perennial oppressors and Palestinians the perennial victims. The writer, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, is the author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews (2022).
2022-10-27 00:00:00
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