The Cost of Speaking Over Our Own Margins

Why Jewish moral conversations must widen their frame

In recent years, a familiar claim has taken hold in American Jewish cultural discourse: Jews are powerful. We are wealthy. We are influential. We dominate media, publishing, law, finance, and culture.

From this premise flows a related argument: that Jewish self-conceptions of vulnerability are outdated, even dishonest, and that Jewish writers, thinkers, and institutions must tell new stories, ones that confront Jewish dominance, moral failure, and complicity.

On its face, this call sounds serious, even necessary. But beneath it lies a troubling assumption: that “Jewish power” is a coherent, shared condition, and that those most eager to theorize it are representative of the Jewish people as a whole.

They are not.

When One Jewish Experience Becomes the Whole

Much of today’s conversation about Jewish power is being driven by elite American and Western European Ashkenazi voices, writers, academics, and commentators who enjoy cultural capital, institutional access, and physical distance from the consequences of the realities they analyze.

Their power is real. Their influence is real.

But their vantage point is not neutral. It is privileged. And when it is universalized as the Jewish story, entire Jewish communities are rendered invisible.

This is not an argument about erasing Ashkenazi suffering or denying Jewish trauma. It is an argument about how institutional visibility and cultural authority shape which Jewish experiences come to stand in for the whole.

As an Israeli-American writer who has lived between diaspora and Israeli Jewish worlds, and who comes from a family shaped by both migration and uneven privilege, I am acutely aware that Jewish power is not experienced uniformly. Within my own family history, there are strands of institutional security alongside histories of illiteracy, gendered constraint, and ethnic marginalization. That complexity makes it impossible for me to accept any account of Jewish power that treats it as singular or universally held.

The Problem Isn’t Acknowledging Power. It’s Who Gets Counted.

Not all Jews are powerful. Not all Jews are white. Not all Jews are wealthy, secure, or institutionally protected.

Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. Ethiopian Jews. Indian and Persian Jews. Jews of color, many of whom live with economic precarity, cultural marginalization, or racial discrimination, disappear entirely in this discourse.

They are rarely cited. Rarely centered. Rarely quoted. Rarely imagined.

When American Jewish writers declare “we hold power,” they are often speaking accurately about their own cohort and inaccurately about the Jewish people as a whole.

This is not merely an oversight. It is a form of internal silencing.

The Irony No One Wants to Name

Much of this discourse is animated by a desire to stand against oppression. To avoid moral exceptionalism. To reject narratives of perpetual victimhood.

But in flattening Jewish experience into a story of elite success, it reproduces the very harm it claims to critique.

It replaces complexity with abstraction. It replaces lived diversity with symbolic usefulness. It replaces minority voices with a cleaner, more legible story.

And crucially, it does so while claiming moral authority.

There is something deeply ironic about condemning systems of domination while speaking over the Jews least represented in those systems.

Diaspora Discourse and the Cost of Distance

A more honest American Jewish discourse would begin with a simple acknowledgment: Jewish power is unevenly distributed.

And those who benefit from it are not entitled to universalize their experience.

Distance does not disqualify moral reflection. It does, however, demand greater humility about whose realities are being interpreted, framed, and spoken for.

A widened discourse would ask: Whose voices are missing from this narrative? Whose success is being counted? Who is being spoken for, rather than listened to?

It would recognize that moral clarity achieved through omission is not clarity at all.

And it would resist the temptation to use Jewish identity as a stand-in for Western power while ignoring Jews whose lives do not fit that frame.

Why Silence Is Misread as Consensus

It is also worth asking why so many Jewish voices remain unheard in these conversations.

Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and other non-elite Jewish communities have historically had less access to English-language cultural platforms, less incentive to engage in prestige literary discourse, and less patience for theory divorced from lived reality.

Silence, in this case, does not signal consensus. It signals whose voices are missing.

Toward a Wider Jewish Moral Imagination

None of this is an argument against moral self-examination. Jewish tradition demands it. Literature demands it. History demands it.

Holding space for internal complexity does not weaken Jewish solidarity. It strengthens it by grounding moral speech in lived truth rather than conceptual distance.

This essay is not an attempt to replace one dominant Jewish narrative with another. It is an attempt to resist any account that claims universality while excluding lived complexity.

Jewish storytelling is due for expansion, but not another recalibration of the same elite canon. It requires widening whose Jewish lives, histories, and moral worlds are treated as representative.

That means listening to Jews who do not experience power as secure.
To Jews whose relationship to Israel is shaped by refuge, not theory.
To Jews whose stories are told in accents, languages, and registers Western institutions have not learned to hear.

I am writing to insist that no ethical discourse can fully claim legitimacy while erasing its own minorities.

If we are serious about justice, then our conversations about power must be grounded not in ideas alone, but in who actually holds power and who does not.

Anything less is not self-critique.

It is simply another way of speaking over the margins.