Let’s not ask if European Jews are white. The more urgent question is: what price have they paid in colluding with whiteness?

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2017-03-11 04:07Z by Steven

Let’s not ask if European Jews are white. The more urgent question is: what price have they paid in colluding with whiteness? The price of heritage, of language, and of culture? Or the price of dignity, of accountability, of moral authority? Far from giving white Jews a free pass on confronting their own white privilege, I hope that answering this question might just lead more of our Jewish communities towards truly joining the multi-racial, multi-faith fight against white supremacy.

Mark Tseng-Putterman, “More than a Feeling: Jews and Whiteness in Trump’s America,” Unruly: A racial justice blog by the Jews of Color Caucus organized in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace, February 23, 2017. http://jocsm.org/more-than-a-feeling-jews-and-whiteness-in-trumps-america/.

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More than a Feeling: Jews and Whiteness in Trump’s America

Posted in Articles, History, Judaism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Religion, Social Justice, United States on 2017-03-11 03:06Z by Steven

More than a Feeling: Jews and Whiteness in Trump’s America

Unruly: A racial justice blog by the Jews of Color Caucus organized in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace
2017-02-23

Mark Tseng-Putterman

A few weeks after the election, I had dinner at my grandparents’ house. I typically associate my visits to their home with raucous family gatherings of a cross-section of our grandparents’ six children and twenty-odd grandkids. But this was an unusually intimate setting—just my sibling and I across from them at their dining room table.

The relative silence refracted objects and half-memories in the way that only an old home can. The Magen David brooch around my grandmother’s neck; the overflowing pile of kippot in the foyer, amassed from decades of B’nai Mitzvot; the ice bucket that has chilled four generations’ worth of cocktails. This is the desk where my father chipped a tooth, climbing to reach a misfired toy dart in his childhood bedroom. Here is the piano bench where his uncle, the World War II veteran turned wedding singer, taught him to play by ear. These are the wedding albums, full of awkward bar mitzvah photos, the elegant portraits of black-and-white elders wearing garb of the Old Country that perhaps is now gathering dust in my grandmother’s attic…

Read the entire article here.

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