Opening Panel Remarks

By Kenji Liu

Building Alliances: Anti-Semitism and Racism

The Complexities of Whiteness and Jewish Identity

As a person of Taiwanese and Japanese ancestry from New Jersey, I am a result of Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, someone whose history and present life has no straight lines, only tangled complexities. This is what I bring to every pursuit. I am an activist and artist in the Chinese American community, a doctoral student in anthropology, an artist, and an anti-oppression trainer, or diversity trainer as some might call it. I bring up complexity because in my studies and particularly anti-racism work, over the years I have had to radically shift my understanding of racism. Race is full of contradictions. Dominant political, economic and legal practices require racial categories in order to manage us, and delegate fortunes accordingly.

i

Affirmation of one’s racial category has been an important resistance against racism for people of color. Yet racial categories are also situational–Mexican Americans have sometimes been legally defined as white, and some have fought to be defined as such, but socially they are often not.

ii

Racial categories have also changed over time–before the end of World War II, European Jews were not white, within a few short decades they were generally considered white. The racialized system of the US twists to fit the needs of the time, and currently, the system has deemed many Jews worthy of entrance into whiteness, at least those who are light-skinned and can pass for white.

iii

In my workshops and in the lives of Jews around me engaged in anti-racist struggles, I have seen some of the costs of whiteness as an unearned system of privilege. Whiteness is more than racial privilege. It is also densely interwoven with class privilege–achievement of the American Dream through assimilation.

I have seen my partner, a working-class Russian Jew and white anti-racist, struggle with having the unearned privilege that whiteness bestows on one hand, while on the other hand living as not quite-white, often having to hide her Jewishness to live in middle-class gentile worlds. I have seen the difficulty her grandmother has with the idea of being white, because she was never treated as white in her childhood by gentiles.

When Jews bring up anti-Jewish oppression in an anti-racism group, it can be seen as an ‘out,’ a way of avoiding dealing with white privilege. It is still not seen as a legitimate focus in many progressive circles. This is a legitimate fear, but this is also part of how the oppression continues. If it is taboo for a Jew to complicate whiteness by speaking about the ongoing effects of anti-Semitism, then anti-racists are policing the borders of whiteness, making sure that white stays the right kind of white. This does not help the cause of dismantling white privilege.

And there is a view among some activists of color that anti-Semitism is somehow not important because solidarity with those they consider to be people of color is more important. To me, this indicates someone who is not addressing the real complexity of the situation–it is like saying that the struggle against racism is more important than the struggle against sexism or heterosexism or capitalism. I have never found it useful to place oppressions in a hierarchy of importance. They are all intertwined and support each other, though they are not all the same and require careful, contextualized thought.

Not a Personal Problem: Tracking Structural Anti-Semitism

I live by the idea that my liberation depends on the liberation of others. Anti-Semitism is a particularly tricky oppression to deal with in the US left, especially in the context of ongoing conflicts between Palestinians, the right-wing government of Israel and the US, and the states surrounding Israel.

In this context, it is a structural issue with global reach, intertwined with European anti-Semitism and the resistances of Jews, European colonialism, American imperialism, and the ongoing resistances of other people in the Middle East.

When I began preparing for this panel I had a hard time envisioning the outlines of structural anti-Semitism, the kind that lives in institutionalized settings where no single individual is necessarily directly responsible. Compared to structural anti-Semitism, many interpersonal kinds of anti-Semitism are easy to identify–instances of overt slurs, jokes, stereotypes and demagoguery are still not uncommon, alongside more subtle forms that strike in everyday interactions. While it is fairly easy to identify interpersonal experiences, to think about how it pervades society’s institutions and social assumptions, like the air we breathe, is more difficult.

One way to gauge systemic oppression is the extent to which it has become so ingrained in our lives that it seems natural, intuitive and personal, not social. For understanding anti-Semitism, I start with secular Christian cultural values and practices. The double-edged innovation of European Christianity (particularly Protestantism) is that responsibility for one’s actions is mostly between one’s God and oneself, and not to others.v (I am not speaking of liberation theology or the Black and Korean American churches that struggled for civil rights.) One can see this in mainstream psychology, which concerns itself with correcting the individual psyche and has little room for encouraging the individual to change society, even though society may in fact be the cause of one’s so-called personal problems. It also fits perfectly with capitalism and its need for isolated, mobile labor units who are supposedly free because they’re hyper-individuated.

One effect of this innovation is a Western cultural tendency to define responsibility as

something individuals have, rather than groups or society. As a person of color and an anti-oppression trainer, I can not tell you how many times I have heard white people treat an instance of structural, institutionalized racism as if it were only the personal problem of a particular white person, or a misperception of a person of color. Or as if the solution to racism is for each individual white person to just take personal responsibility for their actions while not creating or contributing to a social movement for real systemic change. In a similar vein, it is disturbing that it is difficult for me to articulate the outlines of anti-Semitism in terms other than the personal. It is hard to see systemic anti-Semitism when secularized Christian culture says the problem is just in your individual soul or psyche.

Looking at secular Christian cultural dominance is also useful in developing alliances with other targeted groups such as Muslims. And in order to build alliances, we need to think systematically and historically, or anti-Semitism will remain the personal problem of Jews, racism the problem of people of color, sexism of women, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, etc as the problems of individuals, and we will continue to divide and conquer ourselves. And to comment on a tendency in the left right now, to stand against anti-Semitism does not mean agreement with the actions of the state of Israel, nor does addressing anti-Semitism automatically mean that white privilege is being ignored.

Anti-Intellectualism and the US Left

I have encountered anti-intellectualism among progressives who do not see the value of "talking about all that academic or theoretical stuff." At the same time, I have heard stories of Jews acting on how they have been raised by speaking up in progressive groups with a strong, relevant analysis and being told that they’re too heady: Get out of your head and into your heart, or into your body, as if these were naturally disconnected. Would the Marxist Ché Guevara, who said that a true revolutionary must be guided by feelings of love, have been accused of being too heady if he threw down an in-depth analysis of capitalism and class conflict? No, these two are one and the same, because revolution is love, and passionate intellectual work feeds revolutionary change.

Some of the most important leftist thinkers in the West have been Jews–Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Arendt, and Derrida. In the US, many leading leftists have been Jews. Emma Goldman was considered the most dangerous woman in the United States. Whether you agree with them or not, their thoughts and actions are an important legacy for us in the present moment. The McCarthy period effectively squelched much of the old left, which means many Jews were targeted and silenced, along with many people of color. Since then, an understanding of the old left’s theoretical frameworks seems to be regarded as unimportant for the common US progressive activist.

Perhaps the right’s triumphalist proclamations of capitalism’s victory has lead to an internalized anti-intellectualism in the left. To not avail ourselves of important and relevant social theories, from Marxism and feminism to postcolonial and queer theory, is to dig our own graves.

Cultivating Accountability to Each Other

In closing, it is very important to do the personal and theoretical work to help us understand anti- Semitism, and the larger systems that shape how we understand and live anti-Semitism and other oppressions in the US and globally. We are so embedded in these systems that we do not even know that they have convinced us that anti-Semitism is a lesser issue. While I struggle against racism, colonialism and imperialism here or abroad, I will not let myself forget that Christian European governments and ruling classes first tested racist thinking and practices on Jews.


To include anti-Semitism in my anti-oppression work means giving up simplistic views and living with even more complexity. I request the same accountability from my white Jewish allies against racism. For those who pass as white, use its privileges for justice, and undermine it systematically as white people and as Jews. Let us draw ourselves closer to each other in ever tightening webs of accountability, towards ongoing freedom for everyone.

Presented at Facing a Challenge: A Progressive Scholars and Activists Conference on Anti-Semitism and the Left, August 21-23, 2004. Work in progress. Copyright Kenji Liu. Kenji is a doctoral student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. This paper would not have been possible without the guidance, input and feedback of professors and colleagues, particularly Professor Richard Shapiro, Ilise Cohen, Swan Keyes, Noa Kram, and Pei-hsuan Wu.


i Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1994). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. NY, NY: Routledge.

Roediger, D. R. (1999). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. NY, NY: Verso.

ii Sheridan, C. (2003). ‘Another white race:’ Mexican Americans and the paradox of whiteness in jury selection. Law and History Review, 21(1). 14 October 2004,

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/21.1/forum_sheridan.html

iii We must also complicate our understandings of Jewishness with the histories and identities of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews (includes Middle Eastern and North African).

Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Lipsitz, G. (1998). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

iv "Semitic" also refers to Arabs. However, for the purposes of this paper, I use "anti-Semitic" to refer to anti-Jewish oppression.

v Brown, P. (1992). Late Antiquity. In Veyne, P. (ed.), History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Foucault, M. (1988). The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. NY: Vintage Books.