RUTHFULLY YOURS

That there is more to identity politics than just preferred pronouns or demanding more culturally sensitive university courses has been amply demonstrated since the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Woke activist groups – including LGBT activists, Black Lives Matter, feminists and eco-zealots – responded to this barbaric event by becoming Hamas cheerleaders. They had no hesitation in communicating their hatred for Israel in a language riddled with anti-Semitic tropes.

The narrative promoted by the identitarians rarely recognises Jews as a historically oppressed people. On the contrary, Jews are frequently cast in the role of oppressors and even as white supremacists. This outlook echoes the age-old trope that asserts that Jews possess vast global power. It fuses this traditional claim about Jewish power with contemporary identitarian obsessions about white privilege and white supremacy.

Since the ascendancy of identity politics, Jewishness has become what sociologist Erving Goffman characterised as a ‘spoiled identity’. A spoiled identity is one that lacks any redeeming moral qualities. It is an identity that invites stigma and scorn.

Since the turn of the century, anti-racist activists have gone to great lengths to associate ‘whiteness’ with negative characteristics and unattractive features. Mention the term ‘white men’ on a university campus or TV show and it will be met with groans and sneers. This negative framing of white identity has also impacted how Jewish identity is perceived and represented. In an interesting account of this development, Pamela Paresky has coined the term the ‘hyper-white Jew’. Jews are often portrayed as a unique, hyper-white community who have far more privileges to check than others – including other white people.

Often this reaction against ‘Jewish privilege’ meshes with hostility to Israel to produce a uniquely 21st-century species of anti-Semitism. This is why even though ‘victims’ are routinely celebrated today, the historical oppression of Jews and even the experience of the Holocaust are not deemed to be legitimate claims to victimhood. Indeed, the Holocaust is often turned against Jews, with Israel depicted as the natural heir to Nazi Germany and its attempts to defend itself cast as genocidal.

That Jewish people are regarded as a hyper-white community was clear in March 2021, when the BBC’s flagship politics programme, Politics Live, featured a bizarre debate on whether or not Jews are an ethnic-minority group. Apparently, this was open to question because some Jews have reached positions of power and influence. Thus, in the eyes of some, Jewish people have joined the ranks of the oppressors. The message communicated by Politics Live was that Jewish identity and the way that Jews perceive themselves should not be taken too seriously because they have little claim to the status of victimhood. The historical experience of the oppression of Jews is viewed as trivial compared with other groups’ experiences of victimisation.

The spoiling of Jewish identity goes a long way to explaining the identitarian left’s response to the 7 October massacre. Numerous celebrities and cultural influencers appeared indifferent to the horrific acts of rape, hostage-taking and murder committed against Israeli civilians, including children. The American actress Susan Sarandon personified this callous sensibility. At a pro-Palestine rally in November 2023, she told the crowd that those people who were feeling afraid of being Jewish right now are ‘getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence’. Sarandon clearly had no idea that Jews had not only faced more than their share of violence in the past – they also make up a disproportionate share of hate-crime victims in the present.

The #MeToo movement, usually quick to ‘believe all women’ when they make allegations of rape, appeared to switch into silent mode in response to the scenes of barbaric sexual violence meted out by Hamas. For many feminist activists, the idea of sisterhood seemingly did not apply to Jewish or Israeli women. Some went as far as to outright deny what had happened, despite there being abundant evidence of these crimes. The director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Centre signed an open letter asserting that calling Hamas terrorists is ‘Islamophobic’ and denying that Israeli women were raped by Hamas fighters on 7 October. Such indifference to the plight of violated Jewish women shows how thoroughly dehumanised Jewish people have become in identitarian circles.

From the standpoint of identity politics, there is little room for empathy towards the predicament of the supposedly hyper-white Jew. As alleged possessors of so much power and privilege, Jewish people have no claim to the status of victimhood, even when they are brutalised in full view of the world. The sins committed by Hamas on 7 October are all too easy to wash away when its victims are no longer considered fully human.