Poet & Writer, Tamar Ashdot, parses through their family legacy to unpack to the legacy of fear that has led American Jewish communities to stay loyal to Zionism while others have rejected it.
In early 2024, two major magazines, The Atlantic and TIME, published “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” and “The New Antisemitism,” respectively, both speaking to an ever-present, post-October 7th, 2023 topic – antisemitism. The latter ran as TIME’s cover story for its print edition, the front of the magazine plastered with an oversized, minimalist, white Star of David. Online, the web versions of both published articles used similarly telling cover images. The Atlantic with a collage of famous Jewish Americans overlayed with Yiddish text in red and blue vintage-style typography – which begs the question of what percentage of their audience can read Hebrew script – and TIME with a photograph of the words “Never Again is Now” and a Star of David projected on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
My maternal grandfather escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, on the last boat from Hamburg. At the young age of 10, he witnessed Kristallnacht. A shattered and bloody harbinger of the violence and hatred that occurs when the fear of others festers and mutates. My grandfather never spoke of his life before and during Nazism. His family shed their given German names and German tongue upon arriving in the United States. My grandfather served in the United States Army.
The web version for “The New Antisemitism” displays a cover photo of Berlin in November 2023, depicting that the projected uppercase text and Star of David are both in dark, royal blue. My favorite color is blue. As a kid in the US, I always loved that Chanukah was perceived, mass commodified as blue. That ‘Jewish things are blue.’ This is certainly true historically, and biblically. In Numbers chapter 15, verse 38, Moses is instructed by God to teach the Israelites about the sanctity of blue, how it must be attached “throughout the ages” to the corners and fringes of all prayer garments.
The Zionist movement exploited this ritual of including blue, known specifically as “t’khelet” – selecting it as the color of the Israeli flag, two parallel blue stripes framing a blue Star of David. Later in life, I moved away from blue as my favorite and opted more often for green, even greener shades of blue – hues that wouldn’t resemble that flag, Zionism’s violent coopting of Judaism and its traditions. I had already shed the Star of David long before, growing up in fear of its ‘power,’ vowing never to wear it on a necklace, unlike my other Jewish friends. I thought that the choice to distinguish oneself as Jewish could be dangerous.
My grandfather’s silence about his youth was so large that my mother didn’t know until twelve years old that he was born in Germany. This second generation, the children of survivors, received the burden of atrocity differently. Some never knowing more than the unavoidably evident – physical numbers inked on forearms, others knowing all – even the eye color of a concentration camp guard.
Fear is transmittable between the generations. These children were predisposed to becoming self-hating, to acquiring a perverted understanding of identity and otherness, taking on a subliminal desire to overcompensate for what their parents weren’t viewed as – digestible, assimilated. In other words, Aryan. White.
In “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” the article’s author, Franklin Foer writes, “if America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.” This perspective prompts one to wonder if this ‘Golden Age,’ this ‘nurturing’ became more available to Jews in the United States, solely because they abandoned their religiosity and traditions for the sake of whiteness and assimilation. For the sake of using a harmful system that could benefit them. The title of Foer’s piece actually wants to say: “The Golden Age of American Jews Exploiting White Supremacy is Ending.”
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Once a teenager, a few years after emigrating to Washington Heights from Hamburg, my grandfather joined a Jewish community of young adults passionate about Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Here, he met my maternal grandmother, a Bronx-born daughter to Russian immigrants, who had escaped pogroms in Mogilev. My great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother, both born in the shtetl, were shaken by their emigration to the US, each dying of cancer at younger than 40 years old. On these women’s citizenship and immigration documents from the first half of the 20th century, they are racially categorized as Hebrew, or Other. My grandmother, the first-generation born in New York City, is the first to be categorized as White. It’s in the second half of the century that my family is marked only as White going forward.
Some Jewish immigrants, unlike my family, were able to move out of the port city through which they emigrated, ultimately reaching some sense of socioeconomic ascension – life in the suburbs and generational wealth. It is here that Zionism and White supremacy took root in the American Jewish psyche, preying on the vulnerability and internalized fear American Jews inherited from displaced ancestors, goaded on by ever-present white supremacist segregation efforts and racial restrictions. The generation born into a post-WWII world were the first to be fully immersed in experiences of American Whiteness, a ‘supposed shield’ from the bigotry immigrant Jews once knew. An easing out of fear – forgetting stories of Ellis Island, tenement buildings, memories of mistreatment.
What is the fate of the third generation, the children born unto new American Jews, the grandchildren of survivors?
Some grandchildren inherit deep fear of Judaism. Others pride. Some grandchildren go to the camps with their grandparents, photos framing the family in its generations and multitudes, every little finger touching a different tattooed number. There are even grandchildren who choose to tattoo this inheritance, inking the same number on their forearms.
Other grandchildren never see Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belson, or Theresienstadt. Other grandchildren learn to be afraid: of hatred, or even worse, murder. Some choose never to show their Judaism, developing a deep fear of their identity and an even deeper fear of others around them. Suspect of violence at almost every turn. Untrusting.
Some grandchildren become over prideful. Supremacist. It is here that Zionism and ethno-supremacy infiltrate. In a contradictory way, the American Jewish psyche inflates Judaism as much as Whiteness – equal parts American (read: white) and equal parts Jewish. In a nation where the racial hierarchy is central, where whiteness is safety, American Jews are faced with a weaponization of their own history and heritage.
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While Zionism’s claim is that the antidote to global antisemitism and threat to Jewish life is a Jewish State in Palestine, overarching feelings of uncertainty for survival and safety have infiltrated Israeli and Jewish American societies. In recent years, American and Israeli Jews have pursued secondary passports, many through Germany’s process of re-naturalization for those persecuted under the Nazi Regime. In 2023, Germany changed this process for re-naturalization applicants, requiring that all who apply also assert Israel’s right to exist.
American Jews are raised in a world where the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust looms and is extensively reproduced. In 2018, the Museum of National Jewish Heritage: A Living Testament to the Holocaust produced an exhibit titled “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.” The need to remember forces youth to gain clouded perceptions that if safety wasn’t given to their ancestors, then it’s not guaranteed now, either.
The grandchild must “Never Forget.” The grandchildren must always remain suspicious of others and ever alert of injustices – though, often, the emphasis is only on injustices against Jews. In other words – antisemitism.
In his controversial 1967 New York Times article, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” James Baldwin writes: “In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man–for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it.”
I can understand why American Jews, immigrants and Holocaust survivors, descendants, children have fear. But past suffering does not absolve them or us. Not then or now are we free of the responsibility and duty to protect against and prevent injustice.
What might have happened if instead of indulging in a false safety of ‘whiteness,’ 20th century American Jews chose to interrogate their own privilege? American Jews knew, like Baldwin writes, “just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.” In other words, held the difficult knowledge of discrimination, suffering, non-whiteness. What if American Jews chose equality rather than comfort? Collective liberation rather than convenient protection?
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In an open letter published by Here4thekids, titled “Dear Jewish Friends,” an anonymous Black writer conveys her own fear. She shares, “my fear is that with so little nuance around what is criticism of Israel and its actions versus the terrifying and genuine Nazism that has found a home in white supremacist circles, we are unable to create allegiances to defeat what is truly harmful and hateful as opposed to what is a reaction to an asymmetric and genocidal, U.S.-funded war on innocent civilians.”
Nuance, from the Latin nubes, cloud, the French nuer, to shade (or to make shades of color), and the modern French nuance, shade or subtlety, has been used loosely a lot in the last year. I appreciate the Merriam-Webster definition: a subtle distinction or variation, a sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as meaning, feeling or value).
Truths contain multitudes, copious delicate shadings and subtle distinctions.
It is long overdue –and as Israel wages an ongoing genocide – for American Jews to comprehend the nuance in dismantling antisemitism, what is urgently required to bring down systems of oppression. White American Jews cannot contribute to and perpetuate the collective liberation movement if they do not interrogate their own privilege in the fabric of American history and society. We are required to acknowledge how whiteness has been protective and to recognize the incentives to be seen as such. We must notice the recurring tropes of fear, fragility, uncertain safety, a need for vigilance and readiness for elsewhere.
American Jewish youth are taught a false narrative, greatly lacking in nuance; their lives and safety are not only connected, but reliant upon the existence of Israel, a Jewish state. Zionists understand how fear can be weaponized, how trauma can be repeated to the point of violence. In coopting the horrors and history of the Nazi Holocaust, centering the murder of 6 million Jews and genocide’s inherent absurdity and absence of logic, American Jews are deceived to act out of fear and survival instincts, and undertake anything to ensure Israel’s sustained existence.
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Since 2006, the United States has commemorated May as Jewish American Heritage month. Public school programs, like New York City’s Department of Education, share messaging on marking the month across grades. Founded by President George W. Bush, his Presidential Proclamation notes the month of May as the first time “Jewish settlers” reached America, arriving in 1654. However, other records reflect that the ship with Jews aboard docked in September, and that these passengers were trying to return to Amsterdam from Caribbean islands, rather than join the New Amsterdam colonies. Ironically, the “Jewish settlers” were Sephardi, exiled during Spain’s Inquisition a century earlier, and were initially turned away from permanently docking by Peter Stuyvesant, concerned they would be a burden on the colony.
The obfuscation of this true history is a further example of how American Jewry is muddled with Zionism. Unlike most of the US Department of State’s “Heritage and History” Months with historically accurate correlations to their respective calendar months, it isn’t clear why May is Jewish American Heritage Month. However, those familiar with the calendar Israel observes, know that May most often aligns with Iyyar in the Hebrew lunar calendar. Iyyar contains three most crucial dates for Zionists and Israeli society: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism), and Yom Ha’atsmaut (Independence Day). In a sense, these days represent the trifecta of Zionist ideology – the Nazi Holocaust, collective memory, terrorism, and expansionism.
It is no coincidence to align the most crucial Hebrew month for Zionists with Jewish American Heritage month. Blurring Jewish American heritage with the brief ‘heritage’ of Zionism collapses the true depth of Jewish history and culture, separate from American imperialism. Distinguishing Judaism from Zionism is a central part of the work American Jews must do to dismantle their internalized supremacism and perception of whiteness.
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Almost fifteen months have passed and Israel continues to perpetuate a genocide against Palestinians with full funding and immunity from the United States. A hellish, violent campaign spearheaded by children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors enacting inherited stories of Nazi atrocities.
As more days pass, and the Star of David continues to represent the actions and decisions of fascism and genocide, the true values of Judaism and Jewish rituals will be further perverted and exploited. The recreation and resurgence of trauma-minded violence, actions and images from survivors’ testimony, will further destroy the depth of Jewish faith and the potential for its survival beyond Zionism, and fascism at large.
American Jews, especially, whose nation sends billions of domestic taxpayer money to Israel, will be inextricably associated with hate, violence, and genocide. This affiliation will spark fear in others. But, American Jews, and Jewish communities globally, must resist the very real urge to be reactionary about perceived danger, and instead, trust in the wisdom of retrospect.
Dismantle and remedy the fear others have; prove to be otherwise. Begin to unlearn and release. Heed history’s lessons. Believe Palestinians. As James Baldwin concludes in his 1967 article, “if people did learn from history, history would be very different.”
