Jewish Trauma's Double-Edged Sword

Sometimes Jewish trauma is weaponized against Jews. Other times it's raised as a prop for "social justice." Where is the empathy for actual Jewish persons?

A memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem (photo: Eelco Böhtlingk/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Jen Gilman Porat, who writes the newsletter, “The Holy Chutzpah.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Over the last decade, “The New Rules” of social justice were imposed upon those of us in Left-leaning spaces.

Anyone who challenged these rules got cancelled. You needed to know how to act and what to say. What not to do and when to bite your tongue.

Contemporary liberal society, made up of mostly secular persons, manifested its own version of mitzvot (Jewish commandments). If you broke any single commandment, there was a penalty, and I’d argue that the Twitter mob proved scarier than even G-d’s wrath, but that’s a bunch of stories for other days.

For now, let’s revisit some of those rules — the ones every “good liberal” must follow. A few of my favorites include the following:

• Stay in your lane, but if you’re White, stop taking up space altogether. Unless you’re willing to don a keffiyeh. If you cover your face with that black and white pattern, scream and yell as much as you like.

• Listen only to those with real lived experience. It’s time for #OwnVoices. But also, remember that no identity group is a monolith.

• Do anti-racist work. Don’t expect persons from marginalized populations to help you figure it out. And if a person tries to help you understand what you don’t know, never delete their hard work from a comment thread or message board. Do not erase people’s time and effort.

• Check your privilege. Consider intersectionality. Bow out when your misery points add up to less. You are not deserving of help. You are not deserving of acknowledgment.

• Do not appropriate culture. Never borrow recipes or fashion or anything that originated in a group considered more marginalized than your own. Is this a form of erasure? Don’t ask. If you have to ask, you don’t have a right to ask. You should already know better.

• Decolonize everything from your bookshelf to your vocabulary. You cannot undo the reality of the West, and since your (probably) secular path offers no redemption from the slavery and genocide that much of the West was founded upon, project your Original Sin onto Israel. It’s smaller and younger.
  
  Who cares that 20 percent of actual citizens in Israel Proper are Muslim? That there are also Christians and Druze? That Israel is a multicultural population of all colors? That Israel has been a refuge for Jews from all over the world since its founding in 1948? No, we can’t talk about all the good. We need to burn everything to the ground.

• Follow all the above rules and shame anyone who doesn’t. Pile on. This feels like bullying, but hey — that’s what being a good person feels like nowadays. It’s uncomfortable. Tolerate the discomfort.

For the record, when it comes to social issues, I’ve always leaned Left, but I’ve been screaming and shouting about these illiberal mandates for years now — in my social circles, on social media, and in literary spaces. I wasn’t alone. Remember the now infamous “Harper’s Letter” on justice and open debate?

Also for the record: I’ve never been affiliated with either political party in the U.S. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, which is a bit stupid from a practicality standpoint because I live in a closed primary state. However, I believe our current polarization stems from a sports team mentality, one I refuse to participate in.

I’ve already instructed family members what to engrave on my future headstone: “Beloved Independent — She pissed off everyone.”

All of this is to emphasize what should already be obvious: I don’t enjoy the authoritarianism on the Far-Right. Likewise, I don’t enjoy the authoritarianism on the Far-Left — a joyless landscape devoid of all humor.

Also, the Left lacks logic: Even a beginner-level Tic-Tac-Toe player could see the trap as it was constructed in real-time. A trap that would inevitably yield censorship, fragmentation, lack of organization, and the burning down of liberal spaces both real and virtual.

However, while I denounced the growing illiberalism and cancel culture, I did, at the very least, expect leftists to apply their methods across the board when it came to marginalized populations. Alas, I underestimated hypocrisy.

Jews make up a mere 0.2 percent of the world’s population — so tiny! — but I still expected us to count as human. Certainly, I didn’t expect Jews to suffer from renewed blood libel and Holocaust inversion. I didn’t think Jewish persecution would get twisted and weaponized against the sole Jewish state. No f’ing way. Not in my wildest dreams.

But here we are.

Which brings me to the Bibas family.

If you don’t know who they are or what happened to them, you are definitely not Israeli and probably not Jewish. Unlike many of my Jewish friends, I am somehow lucky enough to have a handful of non-Jewish allies who shared my grief and horror when we learned the devastating fate of the mother Shiri, 4-year-old Ariel, and 10-month-old Kfir. No, these friends did not just share my misery. They felt it for themselves. As any human being ought to. As any human being should.

The brutal murders of the Bibas family should not be a source of pain only for Jews and/or Israelis. It should cause all humans to feel something.

When I’d mention my sadness for the Bibas family, someone would inevitably try to negate my sorrow by citing the thousands of deaths in Gaza.

I cannot understand constraints upon human empathy. What kind of math did these people study? Were they not introduced to the concept of infinity? Or even of addition? How much empathy can a human heart hold?

I always thought it could expand, so much so, that trying to keep score on human love was a fatal error reminiscent of King Lear. (Of course, somebody somewhere will reject my mention of Shakespeare for being too colonialist — G-d f’ing help us all.)

The fact that the Bibas deaths were not mourned across Western societies and that the brutality of what happened to them was not denounced by every living person — this is a phenomenon I cannot understand. It’s not that performative empathy means much; it often doesn’t. However, the lack of it is silently screaming: “Jews don’t matter!”

Thankfully, cities and local communities around the world did show up in a great big orange way. (The Bibas children were gingers). Cities illuminated their iconic features with orange light while smaller towns sent orange balloons soaring into the sky.

I’m grateful that the world payed tribute to the Bibas family. This is the kind of solidarity I had expected in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.

I hope these memorial tributes have raised awareness because, prior to these orange lights, I witnessed non-Jewish persons complaining about us. I saw ugliness on multiple occasions, but I’ll provide just one example in order to demonstrate the bigotry with greater specificity.

It was after midnight earlier this week. I intended to go to bed, but because I am a stubborn fool who hasn’t yet learned to put the phone away long before bedtime, I happened upon a Facebook post.

The post was a question. The question had been asked by a Black woman. The Black woman is a person of some significance in my local community. In my local community, she runs a school based on kindness and social justice. Her kindness platform has even earned her multiple monetary grants.

At first, I took her question in good faith. I cannot quote it verbatim since she took down the entire post, but I can paraphrase from memory.

She’d wanted to know: Where is the Jewish outrage over the Nazi salutes? Why aren’t the Jews upset about Elon Musk and Steve Bannon?

Already, I felt a bit like she was breaking “The New Rules.” Did she not remember that no marginalized population should be treated as a monolith?

Moreover, she asked for answers from her community, but not from actual Jewish persons. It was more along the lines of, “What kinds of conversations are happening in Jewish spaces? Do any of you know a Jew? If yes, can you report back?”

As my Gen Z daughter says: “How cringe.”

I remained cool. Remember: I’m not a fan of “The New Rules” in the first place, so I don’t subscribe to those commandments. I believe in asking for help. And I believe in offering it when asked. So, I did.

I explained that Jews are not a monolith. That within Jewish spaces, there is debate over whether Elon Musk made a Nazi salute or not; that, while many Jews were grateful toward U.S. President Donald Trump for expediting the release of more hostages, some fear the Trump Administration. Other Jews support it. But more than anything, I explained that many of us, if not most of us, weren’t crying over Right-wing Nazi salutes because we were busy crying over the Bibas family.

We are all connected. Everyone has lost loved ones or has loved ones who have lost loved ones. The Bibas boys, the youngest hostages, were stolen not by Hamas militants, but by regular Gazan civilians. They were murdered with bare hands. Little babies.

We are gutted.

Also in Jewish spaces (at least in mine): We felt like our trauma was getting used like a prop. When friends on the Left posted the debated Elon Musk salute all over Facebook but remained silent about the Bibas boys — well, we noticed. It felt like there was outrage over antisemitism only when it served someone else’s cause. In this way, our community became objectified, not humanized. Antisemitism is a threat to us, but seemed a convenient prop for everyone else.

And when I tell you that I did a solid five hours of work explaining the long history of antisemitism and why many of the comments that arose upon the aforementioned Facebook thread were problematic, I tried to do it with grace.

I did not receive grace back. Some other woman kept pushing the blood libel and the demonization of Israel and Jews. Another actual Jewish woman had already chimed in with her real lived experience, but nobody listened to her. Not really. Someone claimed they were “by no means trying to diminish the Holocaust, but…”

I was dealing with severe ignorance and false information. I wanted to educate.

Exhausted but fueled by concern, I kept writing until I saw the sun rising outside my window. It was going to be an exhausting day, but I consoled myself that if, in the morning, at least one person learned something they didn’t already know, then it had been worth it. Especially as this heated exchange had taken place on the Facebook page of a Black woman known for her commitment to “social justice.”

Blacks and Jews were once joined in their march toward civil rights in America; this current split is not healthy. Moreover, a little known fact is that there are Black Jews. Really — it’s true! I worried the original poster wouldn’t believe me because I’m White, so I started to fantasize about introducing her to some Black Jews. Maybe some Ethiopian Israelis for starters.

But this was not to be. Within hours of sunrise, the post was taken down. I had some screenshots, so I was able to friend request the other Jewish woman who’d also invested time and effort on the thread. She ultimately reached out to the original poster via private message to inquire as to why all our work was suddenly gone. The original poster responded that she’d made the whole thing private since it was stuffed with ugly Jewish tropes.

This was true, but I couldn’t imagine the same thing happening had the thread been about another form of bigotry. If a White woman had asked a question about Black suffering, and multiple people had made racist remarks while actual Black women spent time on education, and then the original poster removed all that work — well, I’m pretty sure this would count as breaking “The New Rules.”

I was super pissed. And whereas I initially afforded the original poster the benefit of my doubt, I now felt cynical. Had she framed a judgment against Jews as a question — “Where was our outrage against Elon Musk and Steve Bannon?” — not out of authentic curiosity, but because she’d sought to blame us without assuming any personal responsibility for that blame?

I don’t know. I’m not a mind reader. What I do know is how I felt, and feeling is often an indicator of what is really happening within relational exchanges. There’s the content of what is being communicated — the actual words — and then, there’s always the implicit communication expressed beneath the words themselves.

One of the problems with “The New Rules” is how they operate devoid of any relational sense. Instead of learning to listen to our actual feelings, we’ve been taught to interact according to identity politics and mathematical calculations of who holds more privilege points in a given human interaction. (The one with more is supposed to be submissive.)

I reject all of this. I want to bring back some awareness of shared humanity with an emphasis on actual feeling for living and breathing persons — not abstract concepts of personhood.

What feels wrong often is wrong, but the Left often points to discomfort as proof of too much privilege.

If you feel like crap when someone interacts with you, it’s likely because the interaction is unkind. If you witness a nasty pile on and feel awful about it, it’s probably because what you watched was bullying — not social progress.

I constantly hear grown White women complain how they felt uncomfortable while witnessing a social media cancellation — and yet, they stayed silent. White women participate in this self-silencing under “The New Rules.”

I refuse to participate in this nonsense; in fact, this type of fracturing of marginalized persons — and all women are subject to oppression under Far-Right authoritarianism — only adds strength to our collective oppression.

The misery Olympics is set up to fail. It creates fragmentation. Power is always shifting between marginalized persons. The very academic concepts of oppressor/oppressed binaries, which already lack nuance in much of academia, get projected onto living humans.

And that projection has failed.

“The New Rules” potentially harm everyone — not just Jews.

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