Thread by @skjask

A THREAD on Jews, trauma, narratives and the insidious denial of our collective history and individual experiences:

Are Jews are white, white passing or POC? Dare Jews claim suffering or must we acknowledge privilege?
Are we victims of racism or do we uphold racist systems? Do we support Israel or do we see it as evil?

The language is wrong. The dichotomy forced. It is test we cannot pass and remain true to ourselves. No Jew is free of trauma. We carry it in in our DNA. We hold it in our collective memory. This trauma shapes who we are, what we think & how we behave.

Though we come in all colors, backgrounds, & ethnicities, none of us are free from a shared history of persecution. It’s a national trauma we share, a collective history we are never allowed to forget. Whether the year 2, 1492, or 1942, we share in this suffering our people.

Blond, blue eyed Russian Jews carry the trauma of having to hide, deny, relinquish, and then reprove their Jewishness. Today, Chinese Jews must hide their Jewishness and desire to move to Israel. Indian Jews make aliya together & reconvert here to join their people.

African & Middle Eastern Jews suffered as Dhimmis, 2nd class under Muslim rule, always under suspicion, always careful. 850,000 lost their wealth & property when forced out of their homes & are now accused of appropriating the foods of the lands they lived in for centuries.

European Jews suffered pogroms, blood libels, ghettos, loss of property, special taxes, humiliations & the murder of 6 million in the Holocaust. Survivors no one wanted returned to the land they prayed to for 2,000 years to be attacked & called foreign occupiers.

Jews who never left the Holy Land from Temple times lived through foreign occupation, famine & poverty, watched their holy places turned into idolatry, their holy objects looted & carried away, their people taken as slaves, & their homeland renamed for enemies long vanquished.

Ethiopian Jews held fast to 1st Temple Judaism. Some were forced to take the cross, others lived as Jewish outcasts, waiting, waiting to return to Zion, finally taking the arduous journey where many died, only to find the Promised Land far from their dreams. Some still wait.

Descendants of conversos, forced to convert or die by Spanish Inquisition & expulsions, harbor generations of trauma​ & secrets they don’t understand. Converts to Judaism today throw their lot in with a nation always hated, and often they struggle to be accepted.

Yet today, Jews around the world are forced to choose between love of a homeland, the knowledge that Jews deserve a place of their own & “modern values” that say this idea is evil, their quest to have a place to belong, racist.

Instead of being allowed our own narrative, our own trauma & story, we are forced to deny it, dissect it in language where people are divided by color & victim/oppressor.

In this black and white world where one is always wrong and the other always right, where one is privileged, and the other oppressed, the Jew’s story- individual & collective- cannot exist. There is no space for it. It is denied by the rules of the game.

We don’t fit the color gauge, the oppressor rules or the privilege test. (One might argue that no one truly does.) I for one refuse to engage in these conversations, to play by these rules, to force our people to give up one identification for another.

I refuse to be told Zionism is racism, that supporting Israel means supporting oppression. I refuse to be saddled with other people’s sins, to let others define our story. We have a history, we have a present, and if we want a future, we cannot let it be denied.