On Valentine's Day, DEI, and, yes, antisemitism
I am trying to lure you into reading under false pretenses
We’re back!
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With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
This week on the podcast, we talked about the BJP’s victory in Delhi’s recent elections and what it means for Indian opposition politics.
From CNN: “US officials kept around 100 deported Indian migrants in shackles for their 40-hour flight home, including during bathroom breaks, in the latest incident to spark anger overseas at President Donald Trump’s migration crackdown.”
From ProPublica: “The president’s sweeping clemency for Capitol rioters and his administration’s ongoing removal of career national security specialists foretell a permissive new climate for extremist movements, say current and former officials and researchers.”
From the Guardian: “A Polish court has ordered a retrial in the case of an activist found guilty of helping a woman to terminate her pregnancy in a symbolic moment for Poland’s abortion rights movement.”
Everyone should read this piece by Gaby Del Valle on immigration history and what assimilation is and isn’t.
I’m a couple of weeks late to this but this is a lovely interview with Anoushka Shankar.
A new Jhumpa Lahiri excerpt(!) in The Dial.
And an Iga Świątek interview! (From before she lost the semi-finals in Qatar, but what can you do.)
MY VIEWS ON…
…DEI and antisemitism!
It’s Valentine’s Day, so let’s kick this off in a thematically appropriate way:
“Roses are red
Violets are blue
Attacks on DEI
End up as attacks on Jewish education, too”
Okay, now that that’s out of the way:
There is a line that one sometimes comes across in Jewish spaces or communities that goes like this: DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs are bad for Jews because they end up teaching hierarchies of oppression, according to which Jews, who are, in the United States, thought of as mostly white and well off, don’t count, and so DEI teaches people not to take antisemitism seriously. Some take it a step further and say that it also wrongly teaches that Israel is all white, and that that’s why young people are unsympathetic to Israel. To this, I would say that, while I know there are people who mistakenly believe that, and who project America’s own conception of race and racism onto other countries, I think those who make this argument are confusing where people take issue, which is not whiteness per se, itself a mutable concept, but racism and power.
But back to DEI. I am sure that, in this vast and varied country of ours, there have been curricula that have taught in a Jewish identity in a way that was sloppy, or not nuanced, or simply untrue, or that left Jewishness out of DEI entirely. It is, or at least can be, a tricky needle to thread: It is both true that most Jews in the United States have legally been considered white, with all of the rights and privileges that that implies, and that the Jewish experience, historically and presently, in this country is not the same as, say, the Black American experience, and also that Jews are an ethnic, cultural, and religious minority that has faced discrimination. I understand that there are those who are upset by one half of that sentence or the other, but that doesn’t make either untrue.
Anyway all this is to say that there are some who think that attacking DEI, as the Trump administration is now doing, is somehow conducive to the fight against antisemitism. These people are, to use the vernacular, wrong.
It should have been obvious that this position was incorrect several years ago when an administration in Southlake, Texas told teachers that they needed to present books with “opposing” views on the Holocaust shortly after a school board voted to reprimand a teacher who had an “anti-racism” book in her class. You can’t actually teach the history of the Holocaust without acknowledging that racism is real. You certainly can’t teach young people about antisemitism without also explaining xenophobia. And so between the logical extension and the chilling effect, in going after DEI, you end up going after Jewish education, too. We’re seeing that now play out more plainly in this administration: the Pentagon’s intelligence arm sent around a memo pausing activities related to Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth and Pride Month and also Holocaust Remembrance. Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, has, in his infinite wisdom, reportedly flagged as an example of “woke DEI” a grant that goes over the linguistic differences between English and Hebrew (the team flagged it because of the focus on gender, because the grant mentioned that Hebrew, like many languages, has gendered nouns). Google Calendar no longer observes Pride Month or Black History Month — or Jewish American Heritage Month or International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I guess the irony, to me, of people who were against DEI because they felt it said that Jews don’t count is that they themselves ended up taking the position that diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t or couldn’t include Jews and Jewishness. But all of those things are, I think, inextricably intertwined. Perhaps we can see that more clearly now that they’re under attack.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From JTA: “Dozens of liberal Jewish groups have signed a letter defending Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at a time when such efforts are under fire from the Trump administration, and after some Jews have accused DEI programs of fueling antisemitism.”
The co-writer of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, who was in a Super Bowl ad on antisemitism last year, wrote an op-Ed basically saying that he fears that Black Americans have received the message from American Jews that support for the fight against racism is contingent on support for Israel.
From the Guardian: “Israeli police raided the leading Palestinian-owned bookshop in Jerusalem and arrested two of its owners, citing a children’s colouring book as evidence of incitement to terrorism after using Google translate to examine their stock.”
Also from the Guardian: “More than 350 rabbis, alongside additional signatories including Jewish creatives and activists, have signed an ad in the New York Times in which they condemn Donald Trump’s proposal for the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.”
The American Jewish Committee is out with its 2024 study on antisemitism here. I wrote a little Bluesky thread on it here.
-ET
"vintage valentine: tiger and hearts" by karen horton is licensed under CC BY 2.0.