An Appeal to Jewish Women to Support the 2019 Women’s March and Its Leaders

people have asked me what i think of the women’s march and charges of antisemitism. here is an excellent response by Rosalind Petchesky. pls give it a read and also look at Katherine Franke’s thoughtful assessment in the comments.

‘For the past nine months, controversy and obfuscation concerning allegations of anti-Semitism and complicity with Louis Farrakhan have surrounded the 2019 Women’s March and its Women of Color leaders, especially Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour. The complaints rage on, leaving a trail of divisiveness and malice in their wake. This is an appeal to the white Jewish women who have participated in this barrage, or stood idly by while it happened, to step back, hit pause, and think more clearly about what fears lie behind your anger, or your silence.

Others have recounted these sorry events with great precision, none more eloquently than Linda Sarsour writing on Nov. 18. It is past time for progressive Jewish women to step up and say, enough. Tamika’s denunciation of anti-Semitism and her honest explanation of how the Nation of Islam supported her as a single mom in Harlem when other resources were lacking should have sufficed. Who among us has not had to reckon with the contradictions and messiness in our own communities and families? My grandmother—a Jewish refugee in the early 20th century who escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and a patriarchal father who burned her books—was the first person I heard utter the derogatory Yiddish word “schwarze.”

For too many in that generation of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants, acquiring whiteness was tied to class status and racism. It’s a legacy we, their grandchildren, have to face honestly. When will the white Jewish feminists who rail against Mallory and Sarsour publicly and loudly denounce the Sheldon Adelsons and other wealthy right-wing Jewish donors who support the racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, militarist policies of the Trump and Netanyahu regimes?’ More here.

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