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Positively Jewish: Jews with Christians for social justice In the US, a Christianity-oriented
country, the Jewish condition is often experienced as one of
"otherness". Omar Swartz advocates transcendence of this
condition in order to unite with Christians in combating social injustices. But
will the Christian forgiveness ethic have to give way to that of Jewish justice? Similar
to other Jews living in the United States, I live daily with the demands of
being a non-Christian in this Christian country. Fundamental to these demands is the questioning of everyday
normative existence—the problem of finding a place to have dinner on Christmas
Eve when everything is closed; having to be subjected to a Christmas tree in the
lobby of the public library every winter; questioning whether a particular
stereotype on television is a fair or unfair representation of Jewish life; or
even, confronting more serious issues of social justice from a non-Christian or
anti-Christian perspective. A
critical Jewish engagement with these topics, and with the more systemic
political assumptions that underlie a normative Christianity, can provide
powerful and progressive insights that can help people of all religious
backgrounds understand a significant dimension of American cultural wars that
involve but do not acknowledge the politics of religious representation. This
also will help all of us to understand many of the Christian communities in
which we live and work. I
wrote above that the United States is a Christian country.
Legally, the United States is not
a Christian country. The U.S. Supreme
Court in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
made it clear that the United States has no official religion or ideology. This
makes the assumptions that ground normative Christianity particularly worthy of
critique. Such critique is, itself,
a normative American activity. Legally
speaking, cultural life in the U.S. can be seen as an ongoing process (notice
the recent and welcomed activity in the legal arena toward recognizing
homosexual rights in privacy and marriage) and not something grounded in
cultural first principles (i.e., religious doctrine).
As a society we do not have to allow ourselves to assume pre-packaged
cultural identities. The
issue as I see it—and I know that many Jews will disagree—is not how, as
Jews, we experience “otherness.” It
is, rather: how do we transcend this condition? Being
“other” to the Christian is, I argue, an opportunity to recognize the
urgency for destroying the condition of otherness and to outgrow the oppressions
that such binaries entail. Assimilation
is not necessarily a worthwhile goal—and perhaps by itself may even be a
shortsighted goal (many Jews in Europe were “assimilated” before the
Holocaust). Arguably, the other extreme also is not always a worthy goal
either—a pride in difference which recreates the binary at the expense of
something else, as seen in modern Israel and contemporary Zionism.
Normative Judaism should be just as uncomfortable to us as Jews as is
normative Christianity. In
the Jewish radical-critical tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the goal was to use our outsider status to break from the traditional
normative values causing so much suffering in the world (for Jews as well as for
non-Jews). Our collective goal (if I may
assert such) was to help usher in a new world—a better world.
Because Jews were so oppressed throughout a Europe saturated with
Christianity and, later, capitalism, many Jews in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries became convinced that nobody should suffer oppression in the future and they actively
worked for the actualization of that goal. It
strikes me that critical Jews can benefit from exploring the reasons why most
Jews today no longer feel this way—why being Jewish is no longer synonymous
with being politically progressive. Because
the Jewish critical tradition animated so much of the labor movement and the
struggle for social justice during the formative period of world secularization
and labor politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I grew
up proud to be a Jew. I am in awe of, and
inspired by, the Jewish contribution to critical intellectual life—by the
people who enacted the belief that that to be only for oneself is to be immoral.
This, not the Jewish religion per se, was my connection to Jewish
culture. In spite of my efforts to transcend my ethnicity, I am still very much Jewish—I am conscious of that every moment of my life, as are, I assume, many or most Jews who are positioned by Christianity as the other. But the more that I see Jews trying to become like the Christians—with their reform synagogues and often trendy rituals, the social acceptance of Jewish holidays within the wider society as parallel Christian celebrations, and the increasingly conservative politics of wealthy, reactionary Jews, the more I see Judaism as irrelevant as a force for social change—or as an alternative narrative to normative Christianity. As
a Jew, I’m proud that I am not Christian and am proud that the Jewish people
helped keep alive alternative traditions and alternative narratives and
practices to Christianity over the last 2,000 plus years, which many scholars
agree have helped enrich Western culture. During
most of that time being Jewish meant being different and that difference was
critical for Western culture, as exemplified in the first chapter of Max
Dimont’s, Jews, God, and History
(Mentor Books, 1994). Now, with acceptance and assimilation, to be Jewish is
often to be politically, culturally, socially indistinguishable from Christian
business-as-usual. In achieving our much
needed security, Jews risk forgetting that others still suffer.
Jews, historically, have been among and on the side of the sufferers.
To me, that is what made them, and us, unique and interesting.
I am particularly moved by the following quote from Emma Lazarus, writing
in the nineteenth century: "The
very latest reforms urged by political economists, in view of the misery of the
lower classes, are established by the Mosaic Code, which formulated the
principle of the rights of labor, denying the right of private property in land,
asserting that the corners of the field, the gleanings of the harvest belong in justice,
not in charity, to the poor and the
stranger; and that man owed a duty, not only to all humanity, but even to the
beast of the field, and 'the ox that treads the corn'." Emma
Lazarus: Selections of Her Poetry and Prose (New York: Emma Lazarus
Federation of Jewish Women Lubs, 1978), 78. Along
with Lazarus, I believe that Jewish justice,
rather than Christianity charity,
could go a long way toward making our world a more peaceful and equitable place
to live. But in order to enact such a justice, we have to embrace more firmly
our collective commitment to such a world.
Such a commitment involves not only how we see ourselves, but how others
see us and how we react to their vision. Some examples are provided below. In
May 1995 I graduated from Purdue University and was working at my first teaching
post in Greensboro, North Carolina.
I had never been to the American South before and I, as a Jew, was rather
uncomfortable living there. (This feeling of discomfort remained with me for the
six years I lived in North Carolina).
Within a few months of joining the department I had two run-ins with
another faculty member on the subject of my ethnicity.
In the first, shortly after I arrived, this faculty member cornered me in
the mail room and asked: “The
graduate students and I want to know what you are. Your first name is Arab and
your last name is Jewish. Are
you a Jew or an Arab?” I
replied: “Does it
matter?” “Yes,”
she insisted. She needed to
know so she and the students would know how to treat me.
Would she assume, for example, as did an Israeli law student I would
later meet in law school, that because I was Jewish I would adopt the same
nationalist condemnation of the Palestinian uprising?
Or, if I were an Arab, would she be free to express her uninformed
assumptions about Jewish people? I
refused to answer her question. Later in the semester, as I was preparing to go to China over winter break, this person pulled me aside and, with great concern, asked me: “What are you going to do for Christmas when you are in China?" She wanted to know if I was sad that I would not be able to celebrate Christmas in the United States with my family. Her implied point was, how terrible it was for me to be in China over Christmas, as they do not celebrate Christmas in China and that condition is wrong. This was clearly an issue for her, as was her need to determine whether I was an Arab or Jew. My response, while typical of my attitude, was not very strategic in terms of my career. I said, “I’m looking forward to it. For the second time in my life (the first being when I was living on a Kibbutz in Israel) I would not be in an environment in which I had to deal with Christmas and all the hoopla surrounding it.” In both cases, my response to this faculty member did not go over very well. After two years, I was forced to leave the faculty in large part because this colleague of mine hated me. Yet, I could not answer in any other way without betraying myself. I tend to attract interactions such as the above. As a child growing up in West Los Angeles, I interacted mostly with other Jews. But when I went to college in a remote location in North California, I found myself to be one of the only Jews on campus. Since I stood out in appearance and attitude (I “look” and “act” Jewish), I constantly was approached by campus Christian groups such as the Campus Crusade for Christ who, in their own words, “never spoke with a Jew before” and treated me as if I had some special insider kin connection with Jesus of Nazareth through which I could put in a good word for them. In one particularly extreme interaction, I had a person tell me matter-of-factly that the holocaust was “good” because it had the potential to force Jesus to return to save his “people.” (Jesus is waiting for the enemies of Israel to strike before he makes his dramatic reappearance; Hitler, apparently, bungled the Second Coming by killing only three quarters of European Jewry). I conclude this essay by discussing a more serious event that occurred when I lived in North Carolina. Most Jews (or non-Jews for that mater) in this country probably have not heard about an event called the “Greensboro Massacre,” but I think they should. This is a significant event in American labor and racial history, which took place in 1979. In their legal essay on the topic Ronald and Margaret Ivey Bacigal write that this event “stands as one of the bloodiest and most dramatic episodes in the history of this nation's civil rights movement” (“Essay: When Racists and Radicals Meet,” Emory Law Journal 38 (1989)). I would go further and argue that this was a significant event in American Jewish history. Five members of the Communist Workers party were killed by Neo-Nazis and Klansmen with the compliancy of the Greensboro police. No convictions were made in the case, although the killings were committed in broad day light in public with many witnesses (all the suspects were acquitted at trial). A subsequent civil case against the Greensboro police was won by families of the victims. The part of this story that is interesting for my discussion is the fact that most if not all of the five people killed were Jews. Four of the five were medical doctors who had given up medicine to work for social justice. I
am cognizant of the Greensboro Massacre for three reasons.
First, progressive political science professors at Purdue who had
connections with the 5 people killed warned me before I went to Greensboro that
these killings occurred. Second and related, these professors introduced me to a
friend of theirs who was a former party member, a close friend of the five slain
party members, and the producer of the documentary film that was made about the
event. Third, and most
relevant for this essay, as late as the year 2000, reaction to the killings in
the local Jewish community of Durham, N.C., about 65 miles from where the
killings took place, was still vibrant.
When I visited the synagogue as a law student at nearby Duke University,
it was in the midst of a very public campaign to whitewash the victims—to
reclaim their “Jewishness” by removing them from their connections with the
Communist Party. According
to this campaign, these misguided, idealistic young people were “good Jewish
boys” (not subversive “commie” radicals) who meant well, sacrificing their
professional careers to work for civil rights—the killings had taken place in
a public housing project where the Party had organized an anti-Klan rally to
give support to the impoverished black community who was suffering through an
increased Klan activity (a result of black workers attempting to unionize the
textile mills). Joining the
Klan in this campaign of intimidation was the American Nazi Party. This is
clearly an event with which Jews should be concerned. My
question, which I pose rhetorically, is why did the Durham Jewish community feel
the need to apologize for its members’ communist connections?
What is the shame in acknowledging and embracing Judaism as a radical
trope for initiating social and political reform?
Why cannot Jews be communists or socialists and why cannot we embrace
progressive politics as Jews on behalf of others who suffer?
Anyone who stands up to and dies in opposition to the Klan and to
neo-Nazis deserves our respect on his or her own
terms. While we need to theorize the Jewish identity(ies) and respond strategically to the challenges of living in a Christian society (one which, unlike Europe, is becoming increasingly theocratic and fundamentalist), I urge Jews to consider, at least, the Jewish identity as counter-normative not only to Christianity but also to the larger “Christian project” which often devalues women, people of color, the poor, and non-Christians in general.* To be Jewish in the sense I evoke in this essay is to stand beside these people—the “victims” if you will of Christianity or of any religion, including that of Judaism—and to reclaim our past commitment to social justice and to a secular society. * I realize that I am essentializing Christianity here and not all Christians or branches of Christianity do this; although I have to admit that, as a Jew, I have a difficult time in appreciating differences among different forms of Christianity and tend to see the theological debates and bickering among the different Christian traditions as pedantic. Note: This article was first published by JUST Response on October 25 2004. Omar Swartz is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado at Denver, USA.
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