Is CRT Antisemitic?

Jews are also oppressed by the racial structures endemic to Western society. Leftist activists on American college campuses fail to appreciate how their radical, liberatory movements reproduce white supremacy’s own hatred of Jews by articulating ideas about collective liberation that do not include us. “Collective liberation,” the radical dream of an end to all forms of supremacy and hierarchy, does not include Jews because it in fact blames Jews and reproduces antisemitic behaviors.

My activist-intellectual, radically leftist classmates at Stanford University acted in ways that projected their rage at the state of Israel directly onto me, as the only Jew in their periphery. The Nexus Document, written by scholars in 2021, offers a nuanced definition of antisemitism responsive to the limitations of the IHRA’s. The Nexus Document authors articulate in their White Paper:

Antisemitism fulfills a social function: It provides an explanation for social disorders. People use it to demonize and fuel the oppression of any minority and all minorities, while fomenting division between Jews and other minorities.

Antisemitism “fomented division” between myself, a Jew, and my classmates— predominantly students with Latina/o, Southeast Asian, Black, and/or Asian heritage—when I became the target for their anti-Zionist activism.

I need these campus activists to appreciate that I am part of a marginalized minority. I come from a people the world has hated for so long. I deserve trauma-informed pedagogy, too, because I can neither learn nor feel safe in a classroom that regards me as a white oppressor absent any effort to consider Jewish heritage, history, literature, or lived experiences.

White supremacy has never accepted Jews, and never will. European racial antisemitism climaxed with the Shoah (Holocaust), but a hatred of Jews so deep an entire society wanted to kill us did not just ‘appear’ one day sometime in the 1930s. The industrialized extermination of six million Jews in Europe was a genocide that grew from a deep-seated, historically violent belief that Jews could never assimilate and constituted a plague on society so villainous we needed to be eradicated.

Antisemitism predates modern racism. The European white supremacy from which Nazism arose solidified its deep-seated, core antisemitic restrictions on identity and belonging in Western society hundreds of years, if not thousands, before it invented modern racism with colonialism and globalized racial capitalism.

Scholars of critical race theory (CRT) accept that differences in skin color existed for a very long time. However, they argue the ‘hierarchy of races’ as a system of privileges and ascriptions of human worth built into a country’s legal code (to uphold the ideological system of racism), came about with European colonialism: the mass theft, enslavement, and forced labor of Black bodies, and the mass theft of land and genocides of Indigenous peoples.

The founding scholars of critical race theory articulate an idea that contemporary racism was developed the moment a legal system was drawn and upheld that specifically enabled oppressing non-white people by writing a racial code into law. According to their framework, the residue of European racial capitalism during the era of conquest persists in the social structures and institutions of the United States today: in our carceral, judicial, educational, housing, and healthcare systems; that BIPOC, especially in the U.S., are specifically and prejudicially biased against in white society. But a hatred of Jews and state-sponsored antisemitism was built into dominant European ideas about power well before either 1492 or 1619.

The form of Christianity that invented the Doctrine of Discovery and enabled territorial conquest (through colonialism) and the monopolization of capital gains for one group (through enslavement) has been antisemitic since its advent. Early Christianity originally rooted itself in a theological accusation of Jewish deicide: that the Jewish people killed Jesus and are responsible for committing the ultimate sin of history. Under the doctrine of ‘witness theology,’ Jewish communities should be ‘preserved’ in Christendom only insofar as their existence in Diaspora serves as the evidence of their punishment from God.

Many Ashkenazi Jews have assimilated into white America, yeah. I will not get pulled over for driving because of the color of my skin. But this country is not my home; I am in Diaspora. My whiteness is conditional; I did not choose it, and I do not control it. My privileges exist only so long as a given society allows my assimilation. As a student of Jewish history and antisemitism studies, I know for a fact that Jews have tried in nearly every place and time that we have lived to assimilate into our host societies, to achieve belonging and equal rights in nations that forever understood us as ‘foreigners,’ no matter how many hundreds or thousands of generations living there passed.

Now Israel exists on this international stage and is a globalized proxy for the understanding that Jews are ‘foreigners.’ Just as individual Jews were forbidden to own private land or live beyond the Pale of Settlement, so too are the Jewish people characterized as not allowed to own land on any part of the globe as a Jewish entity.

And what is more, even if a Jewish person does not agree with the actions of the Israeli government—and openly critiques the mechanisms of violence in Zionist political and military practices—activists and scholars on the radical left still perceive it as evil for a Jew to want a Jewish state to continue existing. They do not recognize the fear, pain, trauma, or eternal loneliness of my people, Am Yisrael. Apparently, the Jewish state’s existence, not its actions, is the true ‘crime against humanity.’

You can listen to a podcast of this editorial (read by me, the author) on Substack: Is CRT Antisemitic? – by Zahava Feldstein