Judaism’s Hole In The Head Race Rift

This attitude toward the largest category of Jews parallels that of race-based leftist politics (as opposed to Marxism’s traditionally class-based politics) concerning Hispanics and Asians. For example in 2018 a 26 year-old named Esteban Santiago went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport. Suddenly every description of him included the label “white Hispanic”. George Zimmerman, the half-Peruvian man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin in 2012, was also called white by many commentators. Because of the rash of lawsuits by opponents of affirmative action on behalf of Asian-American plaintiffs, in 2018 The Atlantic wrote about “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans”. This is despite a Harvard Business Review article that same year that found that Asians are the least likely group in the US to be promoted.

Putting the problem back into the Jewish perspective, it’s not as if there had not been negative periods and episodes in the history of relations between Ashkenaz Jews and the other ethnic groups. Such tensions played a painful role in the early years of the State of Israel. In 1959 a riot broke out in the Wadi Salib neighbourhood of Haifa where North African immigrants were being housed in relatively poorer conditions compared to the more prosperous Hadar HaCarmel area after a Moroccan immigrant was wounded by police and rumoured to have died. In the early 1970s a new group of radical Mizrahi youth in the Musrara neighbourhood of Jerusalem were radicalized and created the “Black Panthers” modeled after the black American movement founded in Oakland a few years earlier. It won a seat in the Knesset in 1977 but ultimately, the majority of Mizrahi Jews didn’t want revolution but rather opportunity.

At the time Mizrahi Israelis remained several leagues behind their Ashkenaz peers in metrics of education, health, employment, and social standing. In a nation only a couple decades old with a large population of recent immigrants from all over the world and during several regional conflicts, in the early stages those that were considered the wrong type of Jew were excluded from the elite of society. Since then, while no prime minister has as of yet been of non-Ashkenaz descent, nearly every other senior cabinet position has been occupied by one.

More importantly, in everyday life the interaction between the different groups is much stronger. And as mentioned, inter-ethnic marriages and families are no longer unusual. New racial tensions have developed concerning other immigrant communities like Ethiopians and Russians, and the secular-Orthodox divide has always existed. There still are stores, places of worship, and neighbourhoods that are predominantly used or affiliated with one ethnic group simply due to the tradition of the members such as the Tunisian synagogue a block away from my aunt’s house in Acre where I used to pray when visiting. To put this into perspective, it is no more unusual than the various Little Italys, Greektowns, and Chinatowns found in many urban centers in North America. Inter-ethnic relations are not yet at the point where they are a forgotten issue but are definitely on the backburner.

We should bear this process that continues to happen in Israel in mind while assessing the state of modern American Jewry. Do small slights and snarky remarks really mean that our social circles are hopelessly intolerant? American Mizrahi Jews are by no means being held back by an Ashkenaz hegemony. There will always be those that focus on reopening old wounds and causing new strife where there is none, but it would be foolish to trust that they seek to actually improve the lives of the people they are pitting against one another.