Finding a place for Jews in the politics of intersectionality

Intersectionality is an analytical instrument for critically understanding the multidimensionality of power relations. It emerged first in the 1970s, in debates on Black Feminism and signalled an intersectional struggle, i.e. a struggle on two fronts: against sexism within the Civil Rights Movement and against racism within the Women’s Movement.

Jews are often excluded from feminist anti-racist social movements that claim to be guided by intersectionality. The vehement anti-Zionist orientation of some of these movements, be it Women’s March on Washington, Chicago Dyke March or Black Lives Matter, poses the question: why does the intersectionality framework routinely exclude antisemitism?

Many intersectional feminist movements that stand up against racism have great difficulty in grasping how antisemitism works. They understand antisemitism as only a form of racism, while they reduce racism itself to the dichotomy of White and Black, with Jews implicitly or explicitly identified with ‘Whiteness’.

This is analytically disabling because antisemitism does not run along the colour line, and consequently not along the binary divide ‘privileged/non-privileged’. Jews are not ‘Whites’. However, both ‘Whiteness’ and ‘privileged/non-privileged' are central to the concept of racism that is prevalent today in academic discourse and in the discourse of intersectional political practice.

The Whiteness frame, as a tool for making structural racism visible, not only proves to be completely unsuitable for antisemitism, but can even confirm antisemitism, as David Schraub has pointed out. The privileges associated with Whiteness include power, influence, money, property, education, dominance, participation, being heard and having a voice, cliques and networks, and positions inherited over generations.