Bari Weiss: Wokeness, DEI, Target Jewish Community

Iranian women hold anti-Israeli placards at a protest after Friday prayer service in Tehra
AP/Vahid Salemi
Neil Munro

Jewish groups should unite against the establishment’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” woke policies that wreck the American ideals of merit, science, and debate, says Bari Weiss, a journalist who quit the New York Times because of woke policies.

The Jewish community should not try to appease the DEI ideology, or maneuver to get to the top of the woke hierarchy, she wrote in Tablet magazine:

The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity, but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans.

The DEI ideology — also called “wokeness” — has been attacking American ideals for 20 years, she wrote:

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Colorblindness with race-obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

…

[Wokeness] claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

The anti-conservative DEI ideology threatens Jews because Jews are particularly successful in many endeavors, she wrote:

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege.

The Tablet magazine has already charted the displacement of Jews by DEI policies:

You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.

But the same logic hits any other people who prioritize merit over identity politics, she wrote: “It isn’t only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class.”

The woke rethink — and the new convergence with mainstream conservative thinkers — comes after the Jewish community saw how their former woke allies are backing Hamas as the supposed victim of Israeli occupation.

Absolutely Sick — Man Rips Posters Down of Israeli Hostages Taken by Hamas

storyful via storyful

They “are not marching with us now,” Steve Leder, Senior Rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, told CNN on November 9:

I don’t have a good answer for you, other than to say, sadly, that Jew-hatred is trumping, is subverting and subordinating the [liberal] values they claim to stand for and live by. There’s a blindness that comes with [identity politics] groupthink, there’s a blindness that comes with Jew-hatred, and you end up subordinating all the values you say you stand for.

There are many pro-merit, pro-American activists eager to build a coalition against woke identity politics and “Critical Race Theory” [CRT].

“This [anti-Jewish] fabrication, straight from the oppressor-oppressed revolutionary ideology of critical-race theory, is equally weaponizable against any meritocratically earned success story: America, Israel, Jews, Asians.” wrote Wai Wah Chin, the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York.

The Democratic Party is the ultimate purveyor of CRT; it is its core ideology, with teachers unions playing eager partners.

Whenever Democrats spout all-too-familiar racial dog-whistles like “underrepresented,” “marginalized,” “inequity,” “privilege,” “systemic” and the latest, a real juggernaut, “reparations,” we recognize the toxic marks of CRT.

However, many liberal and progressive Democrats are — so far — unwilling to break from woke identity politics.

A huge part of that refusal is that the party has allied with business groups to accelerate the inflow of migrants and many identity groups — into Americans’ elections.

For example, Rep. Pramilla Jayapal (D-Wa), is the Indian-born head of the Democrats’ Progressive Caucus on the Hill. She is calling for an Israeli stand-down, and declared on October 26:

I called for an immediate ceasefire, or at minimum, a cessation of hostilities, and I reiterated my call for Israel to follow international humanitarian law. Unfortunately, these Israeli airstrikes have continued unabated and they’ve actually intensified. Since October 7, the death toll in Gaza has risen to at least 5,700 innocent civilians. One of the most stunning numbers to me is that in just the first six days of bombing in Gaza, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, killing at that time 1,400 Palestinians. Six thousand  bombs is almost as many bombs as were dropped in Afghanistan in the entire year of 2019.

Her caucus has roughly 100 members, which is almost half of the Democrats’ membership on Capitol Hill.

Worse, for many liberals, former President Donald Trump is also connecting the dots between migration and anti-Semitism.

Pro-Palestinian Protesters Occupy Federal Office Building on Capitol Hill

IfNotNow via Storyful

“The same people that attacked Israel are coming into our country, and there are a lot of them,” Trump told the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in October. “You know where they’re coming in from also … all over the Middle East.”

“Crooked Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to the greatest outbreak of anti-Semitism in American history,” Trump added.

 

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