DEI, Jewish Vulnerability, White Privilege, and a Position That Can Survive the Room

SERIES I — PART  IV

I have now participated in Rekindle, an EXODUS dinner and SEA Change at my synagogue. Those experiences have confirmed something I did not fully appreciate when I first began writing about Black–Jewish relations: warmth is not trivial. Trust has to be built before people will risk telling one another what they actually think. A meal, a friendship or the simple experience of being welcomed into another community can create the conditions in which harder truths can eventually be spoken.

Trust, however, is a means rather than the destination. It is relatively easy to leave a dinner agreeing that racism is wrong, antisemitism is wrong, King and Heschel were inspiring figures and people should learn to love one another. The harder work begins when a Black participant says that white-presenting Jews benefit from white privilege, a Jewish participant answers that a tiny minority population is nevertheless targeted by a wildly disproportionate share of religion-based hate crimes, and both participants discover that their moral vocabulary does not organize privilege and vulnerability in the same way.

Ackman, Booker and the DEI Divide

Bill Ackman offers a human example of how complicated that divide can become. Ackman was once a liberal Democratic donor who admired Cory Booker and supported his work in Newark. Years later, Ackman became one of America’s most prominent critics of DEI, invested in Vivek Ramaswamy’s anti-“woke” Strive Asset Management and argued that DEI had itself become discriminatory and had contributed to antisemitism. The useful question is not whether Ackman simply “became racist,” but how people who once shared a commitment to racial progress came to such different conclusions about whether contemporary DEI advances equality or undermines it.

Black Americans generally approach DEI through a history in which formally neutral institutions repeatedly preserved racial inequality. Equal treatment on paper did not erase unequal schools, segregated housing, employment discrimination, exclusion from capital or the accumulated consequences of slavery and Jim Crow. Many Jews approach group classification with a different historical memory: universities, professions, neighborhoods and other institutions explicitly restricted Jews because they were Jews. A policy designed by one community as protection against discrimination can therefore resemble, to another, the kind of group sorting once used to exclude it.

Affirmative Action 

Affirmative action exposes this disagreement particularly clearly. Many Black Americans see race-conscious remedies as necessary because apparently neutral competition begins after generations of deliberately unequal opportunity. Many Jewish organizations historically resisted rigid quotas in part because Jews remembered what happened when institutions decided that too many members of one group had been admitted. Black Americans can reasonably ask whether support for racial justice weakens when a remedy imposes an identifiable cost; Jews can reasonably answer that opposing a particular race-conscious mechanism is not the same as opposing racial equality.

That dispute cannot be reduced to hypocrisy on one side or racism on the other. It is a deeper disagreement about whether equality is best protected through formally individual rights or sometimes requires group-conscious remedies for group-conscious injustice. Reconciliation requires taking both historical fears seriously without allowing either history to become an excuse for refusing to see the other.

Jewish Vulnerability and White Privilege

The same complexity appears in debates over whether Jews belong within DEI frameworks. Most American Jews are white-presenting, and Jewish Americans as a population have achieved substantial educational and professional success. In situations where skin color determines treatment, a white-presenting Jew can receive racial advantages available to other white Americans. Anti-Black racism and antisemitism therefore should not be treated as though they operate identically; they have different histories and social mechanisms.

Yet Jewish vulnerability has not disappeared. FBI data for 2025 recorded 1,528 reported anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents, 63 percent of reported religion-based hate-crime incidents and about 14 percent of all reported hate crimes nationwide. The figure declined from the 2024 record but remained the third-highest annual total recorded. Economic success does not cancel discrimination, just as racial privilege in one setting does not eliminate religious or ethnic vulnerability in another.

Yavilah McCoy offers a particularly useful vocabulary for understanding this complexity. Reflecting on the biblical story of Esther, McCoy described Esther as “both privileged and oppressed simultaneously.” Esther possessed access to power because she was queen while remaining vulnerable because of the Jewish identity she initially concealed. McCoy has used that story to think about her own location as a Black Jewish woman moving through institutions in which different parts of identity can confer access in one setting and vulnerability in another.

The experience of Jews of Color shows why the distinction matters. The Jews of Color Initiative’s Beyond the Count project surveyed 1,118 self-identified Jews of Color who opted into the study. Among participants, 80 percent reported discrimination in Jewish settings, 60 percent said they had felt tokenized and 65 percent said American Jewish leaders were doing poorly or very poorly in addressing racism in the Jewish community. The researchers explicitly caution that the sample is not a statistically representative portrait of every Jew of Color and emphasize that there is no single Jews-of-Color position, including on Israel. That caution is part of the lesson: intersectionality should make categories more precise, not create new monoliths.

A white-presenting Jewish man can therefore experience racial privilege in one context and antisemitic vulnerability in another; a Black Jew can experience anti-Black racism and antisemitism simultaneously; and a wealthy Jew can possess enormous class privilege while still being targeted because he is Jewish. The task is not to decide whether Jews are privileged or oppressed as though one answer must cancel the other. It is to ask what form of exclusion, advantage or vulnerability operates in a particular context.

The Political Cost of Speaking Differently in Different Rooms

The political danger of failing to develop such a framework became visible in Michigan during the 2024 presidential election. Kamala Harris lost the state by more than 80,000 votes amid several simultaneous weaknesses in the Democratic coalition. Anger among Arab and Muslim voters over Gaza was one important factor, while the campaign was also conducting outreach to pro-Israel Jewish voters who worried from the opposite direction. Many Arab and Muslim voters regarded Harris as too supportive of Israel, while some pro-Israel Jewish voters worried she was not supportive enough.

That is more than an electoral story. It is a warning for reconciliation. Political campaigns routinely tailor emphasis to different constituencies, but a moral position cannot become one thing in a Black church, another in a synagogue, another in Dearborn and something else in Jerusalem. For me, this is personal. I want to be able to say substantially the same thing at Peoples Baptist Church, where I spent years in ministry, and at Temple Beth Elohim, where I attend Shabbat. The language may change because audiences carry different histories; the underlying principles should not.

What a Position That Survives the Room Requires

Such a position begins by recognizing the legitimacy of both Jewish and Palestinian national self-determination. Israel has a right to exist securely, and Palestinians have a right to political freedom and meaningful national self-determination. Neither claim should depend on approval of a particular government or political organization. Jewish self-determination cannot require approval of Netanyahu, just as Palestinian self-determination cannot require approval of Hamas. Neither people should have to demonstrate moral perfection before its national rights are recognized.

Consistency also requires confronting violence and suffering without selective vision. October 7 was an atrocity. Palestinian civilian suffering is real and cannot become invisible because Hamas committed atrocities. Antisemitism is wrong whether it comes from a white supremacist, a Black leader, a Muslim activist or someone on the political left. Anti-Black racism is wrong regardless of who expresses it. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, just as support for Israel is not inherently anti-Palestinian. Zionism is not synonymous with Netanyahu, and Netanyahu is not synonymous with Israel.

The reciprocity must run in both directions. Those who reject Israeli policies should learn enough Jewish history to distinguish Jewish self-determination from the policies of a particular government and to understand why words such as Zionism, boycott and Jewish power can carry meanings shaped by statelessness, exclusion and persecution. Jewish supporters of Israel should learn enough Black political history to understand why occupation, apartheid, boycott, South Africa and Palestinian displacement activate memories shaped by slavery, segregation, colonialism and liberation struggles.

Breaking Bread Is the Beginning

This is where Van Jones’s dinners become more than dinners. The table matters because people rarely reveal their deepest fears and suspicions to strangers. Yet a table devoted to reconciliation must eventually become strong enough to hold King and Heschel, apartheid South Africa, Black Lives Matter, October 7, Gaza, AIPAC, DEI, white privilege, Jewish vulnerability, Black antisemitism, anti-Black racism in Jewish spaces, Zionism and Palestinian self-determination. If relationship survives only by avoiding the subjects most likely to divide us, what has been built is fragile.

The goal is not a polite middle position that leaves everyone comfortable. Sometimes consistency will require saying something our own community does not want to hear. Reconciliation becomes real when people can tell one another the truth, listen when that truth is uncomfortable, and remain in relationship long enough to discover where their own account is incomplete. A position capable of surviving that process will not satisfy every room. Its test is whether the principles remain recognizable when the room changes.

Selected Sources and Research Notes

• ADL summary of FBI 2025 anti-Jewish hate-crime data — https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/2025-marked-third-highest-year-record-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-fbi-reports
• FBI, 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation — https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2025-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics
• JewishBoston, Yavilah McCoy on Queen Esther and overlapping privilege/vulnerability — https://www.jewishboston.com/read/yavilah-mccoy-on-racial-justice-the-womens-march-and-queen-esther/
• Jews of Color Initiative, Beyond the Count — https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BEYONDTHECOUNT.FINAL_.8.12.21.pdf
• Jews of Color Initiative, Top 5 Teachings from Beyond the Count — https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/newsletter/top-5-teachings-from-beyond-the-count/
• Reuters, Harris’s Michigan loss and Democratic coalition strains, Nov. 10, 2024 — https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-michigan-loss-highlights-democrats-many-weak-spots-2024-11-10/
• Interfaith America, 2026 Black–Jewish Alliance convening — https://www.interfaithamerica.org/article/seat-table-pluralism-memory-rebirth-black-jewish-alliance/