Mick Hartley

I posted last week on the case of April Powers, the black Jewish women who was forced to resign after she wrote a Facebook post condemning antisemitism, on behalf of her employer, The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, acknowledging that Jews “have the right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear”, and lamenting the current rise in antisemitic violence. She failed to mention Islamophobia, or the suffering of the Palestinian people, so she had to go.

Kat Rosenfield goes through the details of the whole ridiculous saga. Her conclusion:

What happened to April Powers demonstrates how high-minded ideals about intersectionality and social justice now operate in practice. Jews are not seen as a marginalized group in need of protection, nor as the victims of violence fueled by bigotry, or even as voices worth listening to on the topic of antisemitic hate. In a culture obsessed with locating every group in a hierarchy of oppression, Jews simply do not count.

According to the tenets of social justice, Powers’s lived experience and multiple minority status should have made her unassailable on the topic of her own people’s oppression, and anyone who tried to use Powers’s identity to discredit her should have been roundly condemned. According to the tenets of social justice, the continuing violence — vandalism, harassment, a rabbi stabbed in broad daylight just the other day — means that we should be listening to the community now more than ever. But when that community is Jewish, progressives suddenly have very different ideas about who deserves to be heard. 

For the moment, at least, Jews are Schrodinger’s victims; they may or may not be deserving of sympathy, depending on who’s doing the victimizing. When a group of tiki torch-wielding white nationalists chant “Jews will not replace us!,” the condemnation is swift. But replace the tiki torch with a Palestinian flag, and call the Jews “settler colonialists,” and the equivocations roll in: Maybe that guy who threw a firebomb at a group of innocent people on the street in New York was punching up, actually? 

April Powers naively believed that American Jews should get the same full-throated defense as any other minority group in the wake of a vicious attack, without ambivalence, caveats and whataboutism. That belief cost her the security of a job.

Jerry Coyne comments:

Palestinians and Muslims have cowed the American Left to the extent that no denunciation of anti-Semitic violence is possible without including a mention of “Islamophobia”. Asians, Hispanics, and other minorities don’t have the same power.

Why is that? You know the answer. It’s the same reason why two dozen writers belonging to PEN America denounced the organization’s conferring its Freedom of Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo in 2015. It’s fear, Jake: fear of physical harm, fear of demonization, fear of hurting people’s feelings by standing up for what is right. and, above all, fear of looking like a racist for not explicitly mentioning one group considered “people of color.”

It's little better here.