On a sunny day in April 1990, Professor Derek Bell, one of the founding fathers of Critical Race Theory, stood before a small group of Harvard Law students (including the future 44th president of the United States) outside the Harkness student center and resigned his faculty position in protest because Harvard had not yet hired a tenured black female professor. Professor Bell dedicated his speech to a long train of historically marginalized groups (no one yet used the word “identities”) who had experienced the sharp sting of institutional prejudice.
The list began, as most still do, with blacks, Native Americans, LGB people (T and Q, to say nothing of A and +, had not yet earned separate billing), Latinos (there was no “Latinx” in those days), the “undocumented,” the homeless, the disabled, etc. I can’t remember all of the groups that Professor Bell mentioned, but I remember well that he ended with French Canadians, which, for many of us, was the first time we had learned of the sufferings of this beleaguered population to our north.
What struck me, and what struck many other Jewish students listening to Professor Bell’s resignation speech, was his omission of Jews, whose historical marginalization, charitably speaking, rivals that of at least French Canadians.
Today, however, we know why Professor Bell omitted Jews from his list of historically marginalized peoples. An honest history of the Jewish people is simply incompatible with the most foundational premises of critical theory and its direct descendent, wokeism.
According to wokeism, all groups achieve equal outcomes in all human endeavors without oppression, and, conversely, whenever there are unequal outcomes between and among groups, oppression is the cause. The theory is used everywhere today to explain persistent group failure and has acquired the status of a self-evident truth.
There have been many refutations of this theory, including and especially the work of economist Thomas Sowell. But one of the most obvious refutations is the history of the Jews, who undeniably have been oppressed just as severely and for just as long as any of the groups on Professor Bell’s list and yet stubbornly continue to thrive whenever and wherever even the slightest degree of political liberty is allowed to grow.
The history of Jews, therefore, requires critical theorists to make a hard choice. Either revise or abandon critical theory or deny, delegitimize, and rewrite the facts of Jewish history and current events to fit the theory. Unsurprisingly, critical theorists have chosen the latter, which has led to modern leftist antisemitism in three predictable ways.
First, critical theory requires the minimization of Jewish suffering. This explains not only leftist Holocaust denial, from Paul Rassinier to Louis Farrakhan, but also the decline in Holocaust teaching in K–12 classrooms, to say nothing of the soft erasure of Jewish history by activist professors and journalists.
Last January — on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less — a Good Morning Britain anchorwoman described the victims of the Nazi death camps without mentioning Jews: “Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group.” No doubt this was not her intention, and her apology seemed sincere. She was, after all, just a reader of news copy written by others. But that news copy surely was no accident, written, most likely, by some woke journalist who knew what he was doing. Other examples of this soft erasure of Jewish history in woke classrooms and woke media are too numerous to count.
Second, critical theory requires that Jewish achievement be delegitimized. Accusing Jews of cheating is not new. How else to explain Jewish success in the face of millennia of legal restrictions and social animus (to say nothing of murderous pogroms) without implying the failure of other groups who faced neither (or even both) while achieving less?
Critical theory has taken this logic to the next level with the incantation of “white privilege.” According to woke ideology, whiteness is the ultimate form of cheating, and because Jews are white (don’t tell the neo-Nazis), their achievements, together with the achievements of white people generally, are illegitimate. (Never mind that 55% of Israel’s Jewish citizens are dark-skinned Sephardic Jews from North Africa and other parts of the Middle East.) Still, among all variants of white achievement, Jewish achievement is especially embarrassing for the woke left, which is why Jewish success, including and especially the most spectacular of modern Jewish successes — the return of the Jewish People to Zion and the creation of the State of Israel — is so viciously singled out for special delegitimizing.
Third, critical theory requires that Jews be made into oppressors in their own right, which explains the left’s monomaniacal obsession with Israel and its sympathy for Hamas and other terror groups. The International Criminal Court’s grotesque indictments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes is only the latest example of an unbroken chain of perverse condemnations of Israel by international bodies, especially the U.N., which cannot be squared with even the most grudging regard for basic and provable facts.
Today, LGBTQIA+ protesters screech invective at Jewish students on American campuses, raising “Queers for Palestine” placards, betraying a malevolence that cannot comfortably be explained by ignorance alone. Never mind that homosexuality is a crime punished severely throughout the Arab world, whereas the largest pride parade outside San Francisco occurs annually in Tel Aviv. Conceding Israeli tolerance and liberality is simply incompatible with critical theory, which is why the woke bizarrely accuse Israel (those crafty Jews again!) of using inclusive policies as a cynical form of “Pinkwashing” their oppression of others.
Woke antisemitism is not a fringe view. It is, instead, a poison that flows logically from the foundational premises of critical theory. Because Jewish, and especially Israeli, history refutes those premises totally, woke intellectuals must ignore, rewrite, or even erase that history in service of the flimsiest of dogmas. It is not the first time, nor, sadly, will it be the last, when Jews are painted as enemies of a failing utopian ideology.
Jeffrey H. Dean is a retired lawyer in Seattle and a 1992 alumnus of Harvard Law School.
Image: hendricjabs via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Jesus Christ is King
