I stand by people facing injustice. I am opposed to racism in any form. I empathize with people who have suffered or felt marginalized due to their race, ethnicity, religion or sexuality.
See, I did it. I’m a proud ally.
Not quite.
My first real experience confronting my own whiteness wasn’t until graduate school, in my late twenties. The emphasis of my Counseling Psychology program was on multicultural competency – learning to provide mental health treatment without a Eurocentric lens and with recognition of the impact of culture and identity on one’s approach to treatment.
In course after course on this topic, the white people in the room increasingly seemed stripped down, shrinking into their desks as the people of color in the room proudly claimed their lore, history, traditions and ritual, and beliefs that anyone providing mental health counseling should understand. Whiteness suddenly felt like an absence of culture…but not for me. Not as a Jew.
Then came the reckoning. And again and again and again, I have reckoned.
The first time my professor asked me a question about being a white woman, I bristled a bit. She might as well have called me “Karen,” but I felt misread. No white supremacist would claim me as their own. I am a Jew.
Thankfully, I got over myself pretty quickly.
Reconciling the persecution-riddled Jewish history I claim with the extreme privilege I hold as a white-presenting American was a major step to becoming a real ally. Yet I think for some, the difficulty with being a Jewish ally is that it somehow feels like a minimization or negation of Jewish suffering and anti-Semitism. When a group of people begs to be heard, to have the discrimination and hate they have experienced be recognized, it seems to be unnervingly difficult for many to honor experiences distinct from their own.
Recently, I listened to a talk by Rabbi Saul Berman, a Modern Orthodox Rabbi who inspiringly describes anti-racist activism as a Torah commandment in its own right. Berman described how he and fellow Jewish leaders stayed in Selma, Alabama in 1965 even as they were demanded by others in the Jewish community to leave. Berman and others suffered socially and financially in order to support the cause for justice, because there was no other choice. This is allyship.
So why isn’t it enough to simply denounce racism? In the Guide to Allyship, an open resource, Amelie Lamont defines being an ally as “[taking] on the struggle as your own…[acknowledging] that even though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you….to do the inner work to find out a way to acknowledge how you participate in oppressive systems.” In other words? This isn’t the time for defensiveness or to take a ‘watch and see’ attitude. We must be just as committed to becoming educated on racial injustice as we are to recognizing anti-Semitism.
This is a tough pill to swallow, and the process of educating ourselves and our communities even more difficult and painful. But the adage that ‘injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere’ holds true, and to truly be a light to the nations, we must not miss this moment.
