"What if your oppressor is a Jew?" Thoughts on the current state of an old problem

There is one social group in recent world history that has, with some notable exceptions, quite typically been the object of oppression and hatred, not, or not only, because of the effects on them of the normal working of systems run by the powerful and wealthy, but because they were associated with those systems and thus with the oppression of others who were less lucky. That group is, of course, the Jews.

The situation did and does pose a challenge to Judaism in the form of a politics. The only answer that has yet been proposed is socialism, conceived of as a positive social order that is a priori not oppressive. With that possibility absented, the situation remains what it was.

The challenge, theoretically, is simply to formulate a 'Jewish' response to social domination and oppression. Such theories exist in abundance but easily shipwreck on one problem: in societies where they are able to, like America and for the most part modern Europe since the war, many Jews are highly successful professionals. They will most naturally believe and do the things they are expected to in their professions and in the public norms guiding private life. This has to be seen as a problem.

A person in a professional job whose profession is set up partly to dominate, exploit, or oppress other people, and many professions are -- company boss, banker, prosecutor or judge, psychiatrist or therapist, and many other things -- will, if he or she is a just person, cultivate and engage an active will to resist this oppression. A radical left Jewish professional ethics would address this problem. Anyone (of any faith or other orientation) who does not engage in this resistance is complicit, a collaborator in a system that we know today to be selectively fascist. (It is selective because the oppression mainly only affects people in certain classes, and for the more successful, there is quite a bit of freedom and a good life materially.).

This is indeed a major challenge. I cannot see how it could happen on a large scale without something like a mass anti-systemic left-wing social movement. Otherwise and until then, it must be admitted that the Jewish world will be divided like the Christians and everything else, and basically been left and right, with the center coalescing, always, with the right. This is indeed how the Jewish world is divided today. It is not divided between Orthodox and Reform or other theological liberalism (or by "levels of religious observance"); and it is also not divided between religious and secular. It is divided, especially in America, over Israel, and in America the major Jewish institutions almost all are on the conservative side, more so than the members of the congregations, and the religious more so than the secular. If there is anything like a religious/secular division, the lines of division are not over religion; they are over what religion might be replaced with or have added to it. In this respect, I note that in intellectual life today the lingua franca for some time now has been European (largely French, since German culture's role in this was violently destroyed) and has to do with social theories and their application to the arts. But Judaism does not seem to know this.

This is both shown by and mirrored in the divide between religious and secular Jewish philosophy. In the religious camp, there is Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Heschel, Soloveitchik, and others, while on the 'secular' side, which is political and aesthetic and not religious, there is Walter Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and some others, along with Kafka and a number of literary writers. The difference between the two kinds of Jewish philosophy is remarkable in this way: the second group are philosophers, usually by profession, and their thinking is rigorous and responds and belongs to the philosophical tradition as developed in the modern European languages. The "religious" Jewish philosophers mostly are not philosophers by profession or formation at all, and it certainly shows. Their books are 300 page homiletical sermons, uplifting to read perhaps, inspiring, like some of the many rabbis who are popular writers, basically part of the psycho-spiritual and business self-help publishing industry, a popular market, engaging none of the scholarship and logical rigor of philosophy proper.

I don't know if this school of thinking could rescue the Jewish world from its perhaps terminal conservatism. I only that it will not, because rabbis don't know it, and religious Jews rarely read it. To them, it would not be "Jewish." But of course their idea of what that is is very narrow. It basically is popular ethics and religious texts read often with illuminating interpretive commentaries, but in ways that are epistemically naive. The reason is no doubt in part because Reform Judaism in Germany and the larger Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, never engaged very much in the astonishing developments of philosophy in the German language. Why not? I think it is because their motives were those of the bourgeoisie that they were almost exclusively part of. What Reform Jews in Germany after Napoleon mostly wanted was social acceptance by the goyim as people whose Jewishness consists of going to a synagogue, where the services should be inspiring and "nice." This is still said in their favor by many enthusiastic participants. Their political program consisted mainly of political liberalism and opposition to "prejudice." That's why liberal American Jews played so heavy a role in the American Civil Rights Movement to free the blacks from Jim Crow. There is not much radical left politics in Reform or any other form of Judaism today, and there are interesting reasons for this. In Eastern Europe, the situation was quite different, as the mostly poor Jews often joined socialist and left-wing movements. But there the old medieval religiosity continued unchanged, and this meant that the religious/secular split was generally maintained, and that at least meant that with Judaism as such, the political left really went unrecognized; its discovery was largely a story that almost happened. Then the Jewish state veered gradually from the left wing to the far right where it remains today, and the grandchildren of socialist immigrant poor Jews entered the universities and professions, where they can now celebrate their success. Class conflict explains much of this. This should shock us more and surprise us less perhaps than it does. In any case, Judaism as such is conservative and most Jews know it. If it dies out, I think ultimately that will be why.

While it is in fact true that historically most Jews were themselves among the economically oppressed poor, just observing that does not provide a solution to this problem. It is easy enough for people who are not among the wealthiest or most powerful to be made to suffer in the name of those who are.

Meanwhile, if you resent your boss and he's a Jew, your problem is probably less that he is Jewish than that he's the boss. Now, if he thinks that his being the boss is legitimated by his being Jewish, then one or both of you has a problem, and it's still because he's the boss. It's left vs. right and that still is the only game in town.

Is it impossible to be anti-capitalist without risking anti-semitism? There are two possible answers to this question. One is: No, but that only means that risk will have to be taken. The other is to ask "who" (what interests) will pose this question? Obviously, Jews and others who have an interest in defending and preserving capitalism. Perhaps because they are among its beneficiaries or its functionaries. Could Polish peasants have rebelled against their landlords without hating the Jews who were the landlord's local representatives and enforcers? The answer is surely an uneasy and uncertain 'yes'. Except that in fact they didn't. History is a difficult and painful business.