A few weeks ago, I said to a close family member that radical feminists are hurting their own cause. “You are a white privileged male,” was the response I got in return. This new curse took me by complete surprise, as I have never considered myself either privileged or white.
Concerning privileges, if I have them, I don’t know about it. What I do know is that the little I have in this world didn’t come through privilege.
In fact, since Israel got into the business of affirmative action, being a male Ashkenazi Jew, as I am, has become a serious disadvantage. Universities and government offices choose their candidates according to non-professional criteria of gender and origin. This is why females and Arabs will find it easier than “white” Ashkenazi males to get into medical school. Just visit our hospitals if you don’t believe me.
But what really struck me was this new accusation of being “white.”
I don’t know when this post-colonial derogatory phrase entered our society, but Israeli lefties are now using it to defame any unfortunate enough to disagree with them. Jews have forever been considered oriental Semites (anti-Semite, remember?), but this little fact seems to disrupt the progressive liberal agenda, much of which was hatched in Jewish minds.
To be fair, many Ashkenazi Jews entrenched within a secular liberal worldview no longer know, or believe, that they are of Semitic origin.
This is the impression one gets from Sarah Ruiz-Grossman‘s Huffington Post article “White Jews Have A Duty To Stand With Muslims And People Of Color.” This sanctimonious rant, filled as it is with liberal clichés, is embarrassing, to say the least. While repeatedly using the term anti-Semitism, Ruiz-Grossman refuses to herself identify as Semitic. “As a white Jew,” she writes, “I have the ultimate privilege when it comes to fearing hate: skin privilege. I can walk the streets and no one can identify me as ‘other’.”
This, it should be remembered, is how German Jews felt even as Hitler’s axe had already been raised. They, too, saw themselves as “privileged” and “white” enough to escape the coming wrath. They, too, thought all that was needed was to strip away their Jewish garb and speak good German. And they, like Ruiz-Grossman, failed to realize that their identity runs much deeper than the yarmulke and the Star of David.
Secular liberal Jews failed to understand that ideology never had the power to save even the most devout among them. Be as enlightened and liberal as you want, the Semitic stain can’t be erased. Like Cain’s mysterious mark, for better or worse, Jews are inescapably marked for the sake of our divine destiny. And like Cain’s mark, as much as Jews try to hide it, it is visible for all to see.
Ruiz-Grossman is representative of where millions of Jews are at. They have attempted to trade their God-given identity for an idealism run amok. An idealism that somehow equates anti-Semitism with anti-Muslim sentiment, as if the two share a common source.
Like an old grandma trying to dress “young,” hard as they may try to blur their identity, attempts by those like Ruiz-Grossman to “look good” only turns them into a caricature.
PHOTO: Where was “white” privilege when Semitic Jews were marched to the death camps by white Nazis?
