Beyond the Critical Framework of Ashkenormativity: Reimagining Jewish Solidarity and Klal Yisrael
Jewish children exercising in the casbah of Tunis, 1954. Source
As we enter the seventh week of demonstrations against racial violence and police brutality sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we are challenged to think beyond established or familiar models of solidarity. People in seats of power have been urged to extend their appeals for diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond mere visual or verbal expressions of support, or what some call “performative allyship.”
Within the Jewish community, appeals for a more diverse and inclusive Judaism have often employed similar semantics. Organizations and activists from all corners of the Jewish world call for the increased visibility of Jews of color (Black, biracial, Mizrahi, Sephardic, etc.) in order to counter Ashkenazi dominance, dubbed ‘Ashkenormativity,’ in Jewish community spaces.
Ashkenormativity refers to “the belief that most Jewish educational institutions, Jewish community centers and Hillels assume that all American Jews are exclusively of Ashkenazi heritage and privilege the Ashkenazi Jewish experience.” However, the critique offered by the term coined in 2015 has also been applied by activists and commentators beyond the context of the US. For example, a recent article in Hey Alma cited it as a rubric through which to understand logics of exclusion and civil rights abuses against Black and Mizrahi populations in Israel, but the phenomenon of “Mizrahi-washed” hasbara demonstrates that dismantling Ashkenormativity alone does not thoroughly address the multifaceted roots of inequality in Israel.
Effectively, the contemporary Ashkenormativity critique has become a popular entry point for speaking about Eurocentrism within Jewish spaces at the cost of failing to address racial dynamics that ultimately operate on a larger scale, beyond the confines of Jewish communities and institutions.
Jewish protesters demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter at a protest in New York City, 2020. Source: Haaretz
Amid recent political and civil unrest, as people across the globe rally against police violence and right wing Israeli officials move to annex East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a deconstruction of Ashkenormativity is necessary, but certainly not enough to urgently address the ways in which the privileges of Jewish people, however conditional they may be, can make us complicit in systems of white supremacy.
What I intend to demonstrate is that a critique of Ashkenormativity alone subsumes the multi-axial differences which, if addressed, could make up a more pluralistic and justice-oriented Klal Yisrael, or Jewish Commons. Moreover, I would suggest that thinking in terms of a Ashkenazi vs. non-Ashkenazi dichotomy prevents us from understanding the complex ways in which Jews of all ethnic backgrounds are positioned and position themselves along a spectrum of differential proximity to whiteness/white privilege, all the while claiming victimhood to white supremacy and antisemitism in the diaspora.
In an effort to step beyond this paradigm, I will attempt to envision a new basis for klal yisrael— one that reflects more thoroughly on complex intra-communal divisions while also bolstering our commitment to inter-communal solidarity efforts. This model draws upon a legacy of historic coalitions built between Jewish and non-Jewish communities in their shared struggle against racialized colonial violence— a history which is eclipsed when Ashkenormativity is applied as the sole diagnostic for divisions in the Jewish world.
The limits of the critical framework of “Ashkenormativity”
One of the main pitfalls of a totalizing critique of Ashkenormativity is that it presumes that Klal Yisrael, or the notion of a unified, pluralistic Jewish Commons, has been divided merely on the basis ethnicity or geographical origin. Not only is this reductive in that Jewish proximity to white privilege is positioned on a spectrum rather than in a rigid dichotomy along Ashkenazi-Sephardi lines, but also because, as it is easy to see, the Jewish community is divided among far many more frontiers— from ideological approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to whether or not one eats Gebruchtz on Passover.
Within the coteries of Syrian-American Jewry, the Ashkenormativity paradigm is completely flipped. I grew up within the Syrian Jewish community of Midwood, Brooklyn— composed primarily of second and third-generation migrants from Syria who came to the US in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Making up a slim minority in our classrooms and temples , Ashkenazis are socially ostracized from our community and furthermore bear the brunt of stigmas about extra-communal marriage. Growing up in the community, I’d consistently hear subliminal invocations of anti-semitic tropes about the provincialized Ashkenazi ‘Shtetl Jew,’ resulting in the slang term “J-Dub”— a piegeoned version of the word Jew, suggesting a backward Jewish essentialism prevalent amongst Ashkenazim.
Meanwhile, in an ever obscured notion of Klal Yisrael, antisemitic violence from the Holocaust to the Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre— both of which primarily affected Ashkenazim— are claimed as part of our collective history as Jews and gestured as justification for our support of the state of Israel or the militarization of our spaces of worship vis a vis close relations with the NYPD.
Another divide that defines one’s place within the socio-economic strata of the Syrian-Jewish community is immigration history. In true xenophobic fashion, descendants from the original, earlier wave of Syrian migration to the US are socially and institutionally prioritized over more recent generations of Syrian Jews who have sought asylum in the US after Israel’s establishment exacerbated tensions between gentiles and Jews in Syria. Within the community, new immigrants are referred to in SY slang by the pejorative ‘banana boat,’ a riff on the ‘straight off the boat’ dictum.
Outside the Deal Synagogue, a Syrian congregation in New Jersey. Source: The Forward
I use the example of my own community not to further wedge divides already at play within but a small sample of diasporic Jewry, but to demonstrate how its dominant metric for the stratification of Jewish identity does not allow for a fundamentally inclusive imagination of Klal Yisrael. The various indexes for social worth and belonging within my community are determined on the basis of degrees of assimilation, class, gender and sexuality— in other words, who is most proximate to cisgender, heterosexual, white male privilege. With a single-axial critique offered through the framework of ‘Ashkenormativity,’ immigration history, class divide, ideological difference, sexual orientation, and differential levels of religious observance are all issues eclipsed by a geopolitical rubric that is already too narrowly carved.
“Negating the diaspora”: Zionism, Territorialism, and the question of diasporic unity
It is not difficult, then, to understand why the notion of a pluralistic and racially inclusive Klal Yisrael in 2020 can sometimes feel like an idealistic fantasy: because the only major solution Jews have been offered to combat the tides that divide them on a global scale is Zionism – a political ideology, which since it’s relatively recent conception, has not only sought to erase the cultures of Mizrahim as they existed in the diaspora, but also the traditions of Ashkenazi Jews, all in favor of a constructed secular Euro-nationalist identity.
This tendency is not only at play in Israel; it is arguably also descriptive of the reality of American Jewry, as well. As the Sephardic history scholar Devin Naar explained in an article for Jewish Currents: “... a nuanced exploration of the history reveals that we do not have an Ashkenormativity problem in the American Jewish community— or not only; like the country as a whole, we have a white supremacy problem.” Given such, it’s important to continue to challenge and complicate the Ashkenormativity paradigm— not only in an effort to imagine how a true sense of Klal Yisrael can be attained intra-communally, but more broadly, to further parse the ways in which our Jewishness does not exempt us from participating in and benefitting from systems of injustice.
Israel’s history of civil rights abuse against Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, Yemini, and Ethiopian populations proves that the Zionist maxim of Kibutz Galuyot, or “the ingathering of the exiles,” was a fictitious narrative of unity— one that still remains unrealized today. Let’s look back to how early debates within the Zionist movement similarly fixated on this very thorny syllogism: that territorial nationalism would somehow inevitably yield a sense of transnational unity.
In his critical examination of the key ideological rifts between The Zionist Congress and the ITO (Jewish Territorial Organization), Gur Alroey analyzes the aims and implications of early political Zionist thought. He focuses on the ideological rift between dominant Zionist factions and on under-represented positions of Terroritorialist Zionists of the ITO, whose primary aim was “[t]o obtain territory on an autonomous basis for those among the Jews who could not or would not remain in the countries in which they were living” and thus “[were] not prepared to bind the fate of the Jewish people to one single territory [Israel], the acquisition of which was not assured.”
He suggests that in order to differentiate their aims from those of the ITO and affirm that the land of Israel was the only land upon which a Jewish state could be built, the Zionist Congress extended its work beyond the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine: “[Zionism] promote[d] national activity in the diaspora” and advocated for its proponents to “act energetically within Jewish communities to enhance their status and protect their rights.” Commenting on the movement’s dominant strain of ideology after the Seventh Zionist Congress, Alorey characterizes post-Herzlian Zionism as “a synthesis of practical work in the Land of Israel and cultural and political work in the diaspora.”
The official postcard of the Seventh Zionist Congress, 1905. Source
By this line of thinking, the purpose of Zionism would not only be to build a nation-state in the British Mandate of Palestine, but to protect the sociopolitical status of Jewish communities in the diaspora. The State of Israel, then, would function less as a geographical safe-zone for Jews persecuted throughout the world and more like an elixir, a source of Jewish vitality that would positively transform the political status of Jews worldwide within modernity.
In practice, however, the political realities of 1947-48, 1967 and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention the systematic erasure levied against the multifarious cultures of Israeli Jews themselves, have marred that idealistic vision. In establishing a highly militarized, ethnonationalist state wherein Jewish settlement has rested on Palestinian displacement, Israel transfixed the metaphor of Zion into a concrete and highly contested political struggle for land. The Zionist Congresses of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not consider the perspectives of my Arab Jewish ancestors in the ideological or legal discussion of the Zionist project even if they were marginally represented at Congress conventions. And when civil rights protests broke out in Wadi Salib in 1959, Israel responded with reforms that still did not address the racial logics at bedrock of the state.
I raise the example of Alorey’s analysis not to suggest that there exists a more ethically pure version of Zionism unmarked by the historic erasure and continued violation of Palestinian livelihood, but rather to track the ways in which the Zionists project’s ties to diasporic communities have shifted over time. Particularly, I’d argue that what was once envisioned by the 7th Zionist Congress as a strategic project to ensure the political protection of diasporic Jews has transformed into a more oblique undertaking by Zionists across the globe to attain Whiteness in the eyes of the West. For instance, in evaluating the way in which many Jewish Americans make political and fiscal investments in Israel with no intention of ever living there, I posit that their present support for the Israeli State rivals and often supersedes their material efforts to defend their political status in the diaspora. Perhaps this is because, in the eyes of Zionists in the diaspora, Zionism does not solely signify an investment in the conditions of the Jewish state in world relations, but in the socio-economic position of Jewish people within the post-colonial world.
With such, I don’t mean to pander about skeptical ‘dual-loyalties’ nor ignore the fact that Jewish access to white privilege, especially amongst Mizrahim and other Jews of color, is stymied by colorism and highly differential abilities to pass as white. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that even while rising antisemitic violence in the US makes it clear that Jewish Americans are also a primary target of white supremacists, many of us still prioritize our support for the state of Israel before working concretely to confront systems of white supremacy at home (under the assumption that most BLM protestors oppose Zionism).
Any threat to US support for Israel or the pro-Israel lobby is not only a subversion of neo-imperialist American interests in the Middle East, but an exposure of pro-Israel Jewish individuals to their own fragile and conditional whiteness— an existential debacle to which I respond: How did you think you could hold your Israeli Flag in one hand and your “I can’t breathe” poster in the other in the first place?
Donald Trump speaking at AIPAC, 2016. Source
In my own experience, this phenomenon of white aspirationalism is mirrored by the fact that members of my Jewish community speak Arabic and call themselves ‘Syrian’ while denying their Arab ethnicity at all costs. While Mizrahi scholars like Ella Shohat suggest that the ‘Arabness’ of Israeli Mizrahim was made “taboo” with the imposition of legal terms for belonging grafted by the Israeli-Arab conflict, I’d contend that my American community’s disavowal of their Arabness was a strategic attempt to self-actualize as Whiter than their Christian and Muslim counterparts.
Ship-records from my great-grandparents’ voyage from Aleppo to Ellis Island prove that my ancestors were naturalized as ‘Hebrew migrants’ while their gentile shipmates were naturalized under their geographical origins (Armenian, Syrian, etc). Effectively, their Jewishness was a boon for an attenuated Whiteness that eventually morphed into a more concrete political reality over the course of a century.
Toward a new Jewish Commons
With all such considerations, thinking outside the framework of Ashkenormativity and the inadequate solution offered by Zionism leads me to consider alternative ways to cultivate a new Klal Yisrael unfixed by internal or external racial reservations. My call for a reimagining of a Jewish Commons is based in a faith that it is possible to build a more inclusive Jewish community by unifying us through a different collective struggle, not one steeped in loyalties to the secular construct of the nation state. Rather, the unifying struggle I suggest we turn toward is the ever-pertinent undertaking to uphold ideals of pursuing justice or tikkun olam within the Jewish community and beyond.
This thinking is not to deny histories of exile, the pervasiveness of diasporic antisemitism, or the everlasting and essential diasporic yearning Jews have always had for Zion (both as a physical place and as a theological concept), but to reconceptualize how the landscape of the diaspora can be more unifying than it is divisive. While notions like ‘tikkun olam’ and ‘diasporic yearning’ are arguably nebulized by their attachments to a vague, depoliticized, and flowery sort of idealism, the work of scholars and activists of Black transnational liberation has already addressed such ideological quandaries and sowed the seeds of an integral reimagination of the concept of justice as it can exist within the structure of the diaspora.
Even before Civil-Rights Era figures like Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and leaders of the Black Panther Party put forth a vision of Black Liberation outside of the well-established fulcrum of Pan-Africanism, early African-American historians laid the ideological grounds for an emerging relation between the terms of nation and diaspora. Robin D.G. Kelley roots the question of ‘diasporic nationalism’ within the early African-American historiographical archive, as he says:
“…most of those early black historians were engaged in a different sort of nation-building project. Whether it was deliberate or not, they contributed to the formation of a collective identity…They identified with a larger black world in which New World Negroes were inheritors of African as well as European civilizations… Thus, in assessing the political basis for black historians' peculiar internationalism, one manifestation of a kind of ‘nationalism’ or rather a diasporic identity that might be best described as "imagined community."
The scholar Alex Lubin, in his book Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary, reveals the way in which the formulation of an “imagined community” during the late twentieth century was guided by principles of political solidarity and intercommunalism with other populations worldwide— populations which were also bound in struggles against racial and colonial violence. He explains: “Intercommunalism… was a political imaginary that recognized the shared conditions of racial capitalism and possibilities for anti-imperialism among local communities across the world. ”
Highlighting the period of solidarity between the Black Freedom movement in the US, Palestinian nationalist factions, and the civil rights struggle of Mizrahi Jews within Israel following the Six-Day War, Lubin explains: “Israeli Black Panthers recognized how Israeli colonialism, a formation similar to US settler colonialism in North America, created colonial differences, especially on a Jewish/Arab axis. [Israeli Black Panther leader Reuven Abergel] knew that Arab Jews comprised a majority of the Israeli population and that they had more in common with Palestinian Arabs than with European Jews. Hence he produced a new imaginary of his belonging that linked the Arab Islamic world, North Africa, and the Jewish diaspora.”
Israeli Black Panther rally, 1971. Source
The story of the Mizrahi Black Panthers is but one of many historical examples of extra-communal solidarity efforts effectuated by Jewish people who viewed their political struggles to be bound with those facing the brunt of white supremacist violence. Mizrahi Feminist writers like Ella Shohat and Ariella Azoulay have provided powerful and intelligible models for contextualizing their experiences of marginality within a transnational anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle.
Not only is Shohat’s work a response to Israel’s history of institutionalized discrimination against Mizrahim and a rebuke of Zionism’s effective erasure of the history and cultural memory of Jews from Arab lands; she also emphasizes that “the same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands, and national-political rights was intimately linked to the process that affected the dispossession of Arab-Jews from their property, lands, and rootedness in Arab countries, as well as their uprootedness from that history and culture within Israel itself.”
In her more recent work, genealogically mapping over a century of discourse surrounding the Arab-Jew, she reiterates: “Without engaging the consequences of nationalism for Arab Jews, the recent campaign for ‘justice for the forgotten Jewish refugees from Arab countries’ silences the violent dispossession of Palestinians summed up in the word Nakba, as if one event annulled the ethical-political implications of the other.” In addressing the multifarious injustices faced by Arab Jews, she makes clear that their struggle is but a shadow of the larger mechanics of white-ascendant settler colonial oppression both Arab Jews and Palestinians are subject to. She emphasizes that calls for Arab-Jewish justice, like calls for diversity within Jewish spaces, are restrictive, if not defeating their own purpose, when they don’t also call for a greater reckoning with nationalist architectures guided by a principle of white supremacy, or what she would qualify as “Eurocentrism” or “Occidentalism.”
In identifying as an Arab Jew, Shohat embraces terms that evade the standard Israeli lexicon, asking us to reverse the analytics through which we tend to understand race, place, and responsibility in the post-colonial world. She demonstrates that building a more inclusive and sustainable Jewish Commons is not about dissolving difference, but about multiplying the terms of Jewish identification in the hopes of cultivating a klal yisrael steeped in an awareness of the underlying principles of the project of tikkun olam.
In the present moment, this project has been given a clear and explicit course, sounded by the calls of BIPOC within and outside of our Jewish communities and by anti-colonial voices across the globe. As an ever-changing, multifaceted Jewish collectivity, it is our duty to heed their calls. But beyond that, it’s time we show that our allyship is deeper than responding prescriptively to external calls to action. It’s time we think beyond the framework of Ashkenormativity and use our differential struggles to build networks of solidarity against racial and colonial violence within our communities and beyond.