Thread by @gbyehuda

I've been discussing the uptick in #antisemitism w/ my kids. If yours are asking, you can tell them: #Judaism rejects the essentialism & hierarchies of the right + the relativism & universality of the left. We are existential threats to people who believe in these shibboleths.🧵

In "Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate" @MinnaStern wrote that every group in the US alt-right has two things in common: antipathy towards feminism and Judaism. Why? What do these two have in common?

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567137/p…

The right-wing in every country depends upon and thus demands both a rigid hierarchy and essentialism of identities. In the US, the hierarchy puts white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied men at the top. Every deviation from that moves a person down in the hierarchy.

Both feminism and Judaism explicitly refute not only that particular hierarchy, but all hierarchies. Just as feminism does not teach that women are superior to men, Judaism does not teach that Jews are superior to non-Jews.

One of the ways in which detractors of both feminism and Judaism tip their hands is by their misunderstanding of each as a ~different~ kind of hierarchy rather than a rejection of all hierarchies.

White supremacy rules by threats and violence and white supremist cannot understand any system that rejects the very concept of violence and coercion. In contrast, Judaism (for at least the past few centuries) neither proselytizes nor prohibits members from leaving the community.

The right is also violently essentialist. Witness right-wingers' insistence that there are only two genders, tied directly to observable sex characteristics. Judaism (and feminism) reject this essentialism and that stabs at the heart of right-wing weltanschauung.

Essentialism in any form is rejected by Judaism. Nationality? Jews pray in English, Russian, Greek, Spanish and sometimes even Hebrew. Race? There are Black Jews, Hispanic Jews and Black Hispanic Jews.

Judaism even rejects the essentialism of Judaism. Within Jewish communities there are atheists, orthodox, cloistered and cosmopolitan Jews. Both the convert and those who are born Jewish are equally Jewish. There is no one way to be Jewish and anyone can join the faith.

While the right cannot abide Judaism's rejection of hierarchies & essentialism, the left often takes issue with Judaism stubbornly holding to our particular history, beliefs, and identity. We frustrate universalists by refusing to assimilate.

As a Jew who understands the history of my people as they traveled through nations and ages, I do understand why we can frighten certain people: we are a people who have, time and again, been brought to the precipice of non-existence and each time have outlived our adversaries.

Where now is the world-spanning Holy Roman Empire that destroyed our temple in 70 CE? Where is the Spanish Empire that launched its inquisition against us? Where are the Nazis? The USSR? How many times have our faith and practices been outlawed on pain of exile or death?

And yet: we're still here. Jews are, in this way, an affront to the power of nations, to the will of strongmen, and even the decrees of the 'infallible' church, which at times has deemed our very existence a contravention of God's will.

We're also an affront to history itself. Our sacred text hasn't changed by as much as a letter in centuries. At the same time, Jewish practice & philosophy is constantly renewing itself as each generation breathes life into that unchanging text. (see: the excellent @TheRaDR)

I tell my kids that Judaism is a vital refutation to those whose identities are tied to the moribund philosophies of essentialism & social hierarchies, or of universality and ahistoricism. Anti-Semites hate us because our vitality demonstrates the weakness of their worldview.