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Text of the page (random words):
ave never observed casual anti semitism in conversation the way i have seen white people make casual racist comments in the company of only other whites i can think of innumerable instances of white people making racist comments in my presence so many that they kind of blend together many that i did not see as racist at the time some that i recognized but did little about and some that i actively challenged yet in all that same time of being white on sight yet not visibly jewish i can think of only one maybe two instances of comparable anti semitism perhaps most surprisingly i see that perhaps the greatest amount of anti semitism i have experienced is that which i have personally internalized and developed over my lifetime the southern united states environment that i grew up provided for a nuanced subtle or passive jewish identity one that was far removed from the imposing temples friday night services and bar mitzvahs of my mother s and grandmother s youth thus at an early age i came to associate judaism with these foreign or northern pieces along with a more aggressive cultural style of my northern relatives raised in a different environment by jews like my mother grandmother and godfather it was hard for me to see that their forwardness and attention to religious tradition were really about love for me and love for judaism these mixed feelings towards jewish culture and jewish religion were exacerbated by a few isolated negative experiences in local jewish organizations underlying all of this was an unfortunate discontinuity between these cumulative representations of judaism and a lifetime of independent personal development that always sought to avoid tension and conflict in daily interactions when i arrived at college in the north i again encountered a similar highly visible minority of culturally and religiously jewish individuals who reminded me of my northern relatives and the forwardness and tension that i feared i recall intentionally not checking off the jewish box on the student life form and i recall telling an orthodox jewish recruiter on the street that i was not jewish and as my own politics developed around justice and social change the issue of israel loomed i found that the same highly visible pro israel culturally northern judaism continued to play a silencing role for me i was afraid to even begin such conversations because of the fervency and inflexibility of the challenges around middle east politics and so it seemed easier to remain silent to a lesser extent i also felt silenced by many of the same conversations on the left which were most visibly rooted in sectarian socialist organizations whose organizing tactics i found fundamentally flawed and whose personalities were annoying as hell the importance of this silence would periodically be reconfirmed for me by various interactions in the following years a well founded yet casual comparison between israel and the south african apartheid state sprung a surprising response from a co worker an off hand observation on the politics of the middle east triggered a harsh response from a teammate thus i found these stereotypes of judaism and i don t want to lose sight of the fact that they are still stereotypes created a latent internalized anti semitism or at least anti jewishness that affected the way i presented my jewish identity to the world it was a variation on satre s over determination of the self where he writes that jews have allowed themselves to be poisoned by a certain representation that others have of them and they live in fear that their acts might conform to it thus we may say that their behavior is perpetually over determined from the inside i have allowed myself to be over determined by stereotypes and cultural experiences that were not an accurate or complete representation of what jewish culture and religion are and can be it is not the only thing that i have over determined on not being a hyper nerd being masculine and not queering myself come to mind but this was the single biggest over determination that reacted to a core truth to my identity i want to argue that my sort of internalized anti semitism is dangerous for at least three important reasons and incidentally not the same ones that the right wing pro israel lobby cites in their derision of self hating jews first silencing my own jewish ness grants other individuals and groups the space to represent jews in ways that are destructive oppressive and fundamentally unjust the loosely organized quasi secular jewish left in the united states is overshadowed by a right center jewish establishment that dominates and silences debate in this country around middle east politics critical perspectives that are routinely expressed on the pages of major israeli newspapers are absent from the pages of most united states newspapers largely because the influence and power of the israeli right precludes the debate from even happening non jewish writers or politicians critical of israeli policy broadly are accused of anti semitism thus weakening our ability to call out real anti semitism jewish writers are accused of being self hating jews or phony jews such that for both groups the perceived and real costs of speaking out create hesitation or silence just as with my experiences as an undergraduate the dialogue is over before it begins secondly being silent about my jewish identity contributes to the century old project of jews gradually and intentionally becoming white people in the united states by allowing myself to exist in the public arena with a white identity rather than realistically at this point a white and a jewish identity again silence and non action becomes complicity this time in the larger united states project of racism and oppression towards non white people in fact in the united states the process of jews becoming white folk includes the need to remove the very stigmas that satre writes about in the post world war two time period because they are inconsistent with a normative whiteness which probably has a lot to do with my lack of experienced anti semitism at the end of the 20 th century as someone wrote as jews became white the stereotypes and pseudo science that followed them was sloughed off and subsumed into a general whiteness where superiority is the norm and thus there can be no room for negative stereotypes within whiteness it is not that being open or more visible about my jewishness intrinsically confronts whiteness since there are many ways that people promote jewishness and whiteness as part of the same oppressive political and racist project being open about jewishness is only a small piece of a larger struggle against oppression defined by whiteness but i believes it moves us forward in small ways from drawing upon the historical and biblical jewish image as fighters for justice to partially precluding the easy and lazy trap of appropriating pieces of other people s culture as my own it s a start finally and most personally allowing my jewish identity to remain hidden erases my own cultures and traditions and dishonors my ancestors for whom jewish culture and judaism were absolutely central to their identity it dishonors my great great grandparents who helped found the temple in new brunswick new jersey the same temple that my great granfather and my grandmother and my mother grew up in it dishonors my other great great grandfather a wandering rabbi in russia who emigrated with his pregnant wife to the united states in 1890 only to die before the boat reached new york city and in some even deeper and more historical ways it dishonors the ancestors of my religious tradition for whom biblical struggle against injustice and oppression are defining characteristics being open about my jewish traditions does not mean that i have to conform to them indeed part of jewish culture is that of ideas and of debate and interpretation my grandmother and mother both were definite critics of the temple and family they grew up especially the oppressive patriarchy that still exists today i like my mother can strongly criticize the israeli government those who seek to speak for jews or judaism or even those who walk ultimately untenable lines between silence and complicity overall i think there is a lot to work with here i write this as someone without little background of the literature of identity politics or assimilation or internalized oppression i suspect there are a lot of parallels in other ethnic and racial groups both those that continue to hold outsider status and those who have been welcomed into the normative white blanket in a way jewishness may provide a contradictory comparative analytical place for a lot of identity experiences in history going back thousands of years through experiences as a people who survived and a people who oppressed the germans the other side of my family do not tend to find themselves in this same interstitial point of history i know there is a fair bit of emerging scholarship of how jews became white folk in a historical sense and also work out there on the comparisons interactions and inter connections between jews and blacks in the 20 th century in the united states from anti lynching and suffrage to leftist political movements to the civil rights movement to crown heights but a lot of this is historically based i wonder if there has been work around where things are at the present particularly in regards to the way that jews have embraced whiteness almost completely and ways in which the gains of the civil rights movement have opened class divisions around levels of oppression within the african american community thoughts one response whiteness and my community saturday oct 20 2007 uncategorized azzurrocorvo 3 17 pm placeholder leave a response about me saturday oct 20 2007 uncategorized azzurrocorvo 3 16 pm a little bit about me i am a late twenty something white man born and raised in north carolina most times i am a public school teacher and a community organizer but am blessed and privileged to be taking a personal study year in florence italy where i am living with my amazing and inspiring life partner and fiancée who is following her own study path formal and personal i grew up with roots in durham and the south and feel a deep connection and obligation to explore the complex brutal heartrending yet inspirational histories and legacies that surround us i love working with young people and have almost infinite patience with the youth especially in high school i believe in a sense of place and community and relationships and see them as foundational for the pursuit of justice in our world i come from a long line of teachers and preachers rabbis and writers i am jewish and lutheran by ancestry though not by significant formal religious training part of my year of study is about reconnecting with these ancestors and traditions reaching back into time and drawing their threads forward to the present it is about understanding where i come from in part so that i have a better sense of where i am going i have spent much of the last four years thinking in different ways on organic and potentially transformative intersections within communities of education of justice of faith of neighborhoods of social movements of youth i have learned from and worked with a wide range of schools and community organizations locally and nationally and continue to piece together overlapping visions of community leave a response september monday sep 17 2007 uncategorized azzurrocorvo 6 45 am september marks the beginning of a time of personal reflection and study in my life i am blessed and privileged to have the opportunity to leave north carolina for almost 10 months to leave formal public school teaching and informal community organizing to step back from daily routines it is an opportunity to be in a different space physically and to be in a different space personally spiritually and mentally it is also an obligation as well to the students and families still in north carolina to my communities that continue the daily struggles for justice but most importantly i believe there is a loving obligation to myself on this journey to grow and reflect and practice in ways deeper than i have experienced before increasingly i think about the world less in terms of the building blocks of organization or movement or the personal desires and sins of achievement rather i am struggling to envision worlds and communities built around transformative relationships of revolutionary beloved community filled with the loving kindness that stokes deep fires of compassion and justice and the divine in these days of crisp september mornings and warm afternoons i play with these puzzle pieces in my mind scrawling them out on journal pages tying threads together into webs of interconnectedness designed unbreakable by the common oppression i dig deep into the words of my people into their covenants and their relationships and their responsibilities to god this god of justice and right one who will go down with the people into egypt and one who will surely bring them up again and i begin this year with self reflection penitence and an examination of my own relationships and responsibilities writ large what would it take for such a world what would it take for such a community if another way is possible how is it lived how do i live how do we continue to stitch together this great quilt of transformative beloved moral revolution there is no destination for this train this much i have arrived at the destination is the journey as it is the struggle that we live in a thousand different ways each day there is no instruction manual no gandhi pill no paint by numbers if it is indeed a quilt we stitch it together by hand patches of sacred cloth from old trunks and colorful swatches of newness covering the gaps held together by the threads that run through all our lives where do we find these threads that hold us together what are they made of perhaps these threads are our histories passed down in words writing or pictures they are the stories of great great grandparents fleeing oppression and traveling great distances through hardship to deliver us today they are our grandparents laboring in ways that are new to them and our parents whose struggles make us possible perhaps these threads are the words of our prophets of long ago and yesterday and today that hold us together i think not just of the biblical prophets but also to our revolutionary and literary prophets large and small whose words and actions guide us and hold our pieces perhaps finally coming full circle these threads are the threads of our communities themselves that we hold one another up and down together and accountable lovingly visibly powerfully inclusively respectfully safely truthfully and deeply in ways that tell the truth while judging and silencing no one i am challenged and invigorated by the words that s...