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Using Schwerner and Goodman and the Nazis to deny the Jewish moment (privilege)

Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman's images from poster when they were missing in 1964
Images of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman from FBI poster when they were missing in 1964

Maybe you’ve heard about this, but an angry piece defending privilege has gone viral. Tal Fortgang is a Princeton freshman who wrote a piece for a conservative school magazine that objects to the left’s scrutiny of privilege.

“Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.

Time and Gawker refer to the piece as a defense of “white privilege” — and it is — but I also see the Jewish angle. Fortgang several times refers to his Jewishness in often angry ways, citing his ancestors who fled the Nazis and wound up in Displaced Persons camps, and those who didn’t too:

Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

But Fortgang says his grandfather became an entrepreneur in the U.S. That’s code for, he made a lot of money. The family flourished, he says. He grew up in New Rochelle.

In other words, his ancestors were persecuted, but maybe Fortgang really is privileged?

You can see the same ancestral Jewish claim in the response to the Donald Sterling flap. Howard Megdal is the reporter who asked NBA commissioner Adam Silver at his press conference ten days ago if he was disciplining Sterling for his racism “as a Jew.”

Silver said he was doing it “as a human being,” but Megdal insists on linking Silver to those Jews who died in the civil rights movement.

It was, as I saw it, a very Jewish moment for Adam Silver. It was one man’s tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning “to repair the world”….Schwerner and Goodman died for what mattered. Two years later, Texas Western’s all-African-American starting lineup beat the racist Adolph Rupp and Kentucky. My grandfather marched on Washington to support civil rights. Bill Russell became the first African-American NBA coach.

But the civil rights movement was a long time ago. Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney, too — he was black– were martyred 50 years ago next month!

And Josh Nathan-Kazis writes at the Forward that the Megdal moment was “awkward” because it pointed up the large number of Jews in sports ownership, including Donald Sterling.

Yet nearly half the principal owners of NBA teams are Jewish, as are the league’s current commissioner and its immediate past commissioner.

I think Megdal and Fortgang are citing Jewish history because they’re uncomfortable with the fact that Jews are so privileged right now. They are in denial of the changing Jewish image in America. Increasingly, we are associated with the Establishment, with the people who “pull most of the strings in the world,” in Fortgang’s phrase. We’re the richest group by religion in this country, and Donald Sterling is not the only arrogant powerful prick in our number. Gawker says that Fortgang’s piece was promoted by a network that includes neocons John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Bill Kristol’s son-in-law Matt Continetti (of the Washington Free Beacon), and the neocon funders of the Shalem Center, the rightwing thinktank in Israel. Lovely people. And P.S., Donald Sterling defended his racism by citing Israeli racism.

The Jewish brand is changing before our eyes. Increasingly we’re associated with rich fools like Donald Sterling, and a militant rightwing state in the Middle East and its rightwing lobby here. Rabbi Michael Lerner says it’s all connected:

Israel today presents the Jews as one of the more arrogant nations on the planet….

In order to defend Israeli policies, Jews around the world insist on the need for the Jewish people to have power and dominate others, because that’s “the real world” in which we live. This is the logic of Roman imperialism, Christian colonialism, Hitler and Stalin and all those who have opposed Jews through history.

That’s one reason I’m proud of this site. You read progressive Jews here who oppose those attitudes and policies.

But I won’t tell you I’m not privileged. I’m looking out my window at the woods right now; I live in a beautiful part of the world. And dealing with privilege is difficult. It means sorting out one’s personal relationship to the powers that be, and sorting out one’s individual responsibility in the context of identity politics. For me that means confronting the Jewish and American relationship with the people Jews have dispossessed, Palestinians, and granting Palestinians a leadership role, and honoring their narrative. Because I lead a good life, it means struggling honestly with my own investments in the west, even as I work on justice questions as a liberal. I don’t know how Jewish that struggle is, and it certainly isn’t about Schwerner and Cheney and Goodman or the Nazis. But as Hillel said, If not now when?

Thanks to Annie Robbins.

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I read Fortgang’s essay. I viewed his referenced to his Jewishness as two-fold:

First, to soften the inevitable counter-attacks. Being a white Jew is easier than being a WASP in an America where people’s cultural privilege in left-wing discussions are based on the collective appraisal of their victimhood. In other words, if he were a WASP, he’d have a snowball’s chance in hell. As a Jew, and referencing the Holocaust, he has a slim chance, but at least a chance. People will still write him off as a white guy with too much privilege, but there’s that moment of hesitation because of his Jewishness, because of past persecution.

And this gets to your point, that our role has changed. 30 years ago, there wouldn’t be that hesitation. As a Jew you could almost identify yourself with PoC and nobody would bat an eye. The vast majority of Jews are Ashkenazi so that’s out of the question now.

The second reason why I think he referenced his Jewishness is that is his mind, at least, there is still that divide. He’s an Orthodox Jew, so he comes from a milieu which is far less connected than most Jews either on this site or indeed in America overall, where we’re by and large secular, which is a byword for assimiliated and cultural insiders.

“But I won’t tell you I’m not privileged. I’m looking out my window at the woods right now; I live in a beautiful part of the world. And dealing with privilege is difficult. It means sorting out one’s personal relationship to the powers that be, and sorting out one’s individual responsibility in the context of identity politics. For me that means confronting the Jewish and American relationship with the people Jews have dispossessed, Palestinians, and granting Palestinians a leadership role, and honoring their narrative. Because I lead a good life, it means struggling honestly with my own investments in the west, even as I work on justice questions as a liberal. I don’t know how Jewish that struggle is, and it certainly isn’t about Schwerner and Cheney and Goodman or the Nazis. But as Hillel said, If not now when?

Thanks to Annie Robbins.”

Amen.

Yes! This is a brilliant post, Phil.

I imagine there will come a day where like Schwerner and Goodman every one will identify with Phil Weiss and claim to have supported him all along.

Schwerner and Goodman were on the right side of history. Not everyone was.

Now it seems everyone like Tal Fortgang rode on the bus with Rosa Parks. They were sitting right up in front with her.

Being a member of any group based on ethnic/racial origin, religion, gender etc. does not automatically rule out the possibility that a person is privileged in the most decisive area, that is, in economic terms. It depends on the conditions of time and place. However, even in an extreme situation like the Holocaust wealth significantly increases your chance of surviving (in Hungary 1944 you could buy a ticket on Kastner’s train).

By contrast, your class position does automatically give an approximate idea of your privilege or lack of it. If you are a member of the capitalist class then you are privileged by definition, because unlike the vast majority you do not have to sell your working time to others. You are your own man or woman. That is why a left politics based primarily on class is less deceptive than a “left” politics based on all these other “identities.” It also has the advantage of at least potentially uniting the large majority of society in a common cause.