The horseshoe theory of politics seemingly begins and ends with the hatred and erasure of the Jewish identity.
Reporting on the Women’s March leadership and its open hatred of Jews has finally broken into the mainstream, putting them in good company with David Duke and Richard Spencer.
Building off a stunning Tablet article reporting that founders Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory promulgated the conspiracy theory that “Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” the New York Times finally published an expose of the so-called “intersectional” organization. According to journalist Farah Stockman, the current leaders of the March ousted original organizer Vanessa Wruble specifically due to her Jewish heritage.
Wruble says that Mallory and Perez pushed back on her assertion that her Jewish heritage motivated her activism against the Trump presidency, insisting that “Jews needed to confront their own role in racism.” Mallory, Perez, and fellow leader Linda Sarsour have been criticized by conservatives for years, but with the New York Times article, they had a chance to respond to allegations with a fairly centrist arbiter reporting their statements.
Now consider, if you were being accused of anti-Semitism, would you deny the charges and explain that you understand the lengthy and pervasive history of the systemic hatred for Jews? Would you deny the charges and explain that the reported facts were incorrect? Or would you apologize and say that you understand the error of your past transgressions?
If you’re the leaders of the Women’s March, you do none of these. You double down and cast Jewish women as oppressors equivalent to the white supremacists who colonized Africa and justified the transatlantic slave trade.
“Since that conversation,” said Mallory of Wruble’s allegations, “we’ve all learned a lot about how while white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy, ALL Jews are targeted by it.”
The lens of intersectionality doesn’t lend itself to nuance. Instead, white people all look the same to them. Oppressors and the oppressed are treated according to their skin color without any deeper thought. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who stuck Japanese Americans in internment camps, shares the same tier as the much-maligned Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine.
Through that lens, Jews don’t fit in comfortably. They don’t fit the optical structure of the lazy bigotry of intersectionality. Thanks to European bigotry of the Middle Ages, Jews have historically been relegated to the financial industry — a field of work formerly seen as inferior to others — and they’ve persevered time and time again over institutionalized and genocidal racism.
Anti-Semitism, just like any other strain of bigotry, cannot be lumped in with other forms of racism. Racism against the Koreans and Chinese has run rampant in Japan. Pakistani and Indian nationalists have historically levied racist tropes to fight each other. Anti-Black bigotry can be directly traced back to the transatlantic slave trade beginning in the 16th century. Anti-Semitism began in classical antiquity in Hellenistic Egypt.
But of course, that level of complexity doesn’t fit into the myopic and infantile mindset of intersectionality. To actually study history, empires, and the ceaseless wars of power plays as old as humanity itself would require the Women’s March to look at the world though a lens slightly more textured than just through skin color.
If I were a progressive activist, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. A resistance, especially one invoking the names of those who fought for the Jews and not against them, requires something much bigger than the bigots at the helm of the Women’s March.
