The Gaza war became the time of reckoning for American Jews. When the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People sided with the antizionist cause, Eli Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, published a statement:
My mother came to the US in the early 50s, after having been a refugee across Europe who narrowly avoided the Nazi death camps. She was a passionate Zionist, and upon seeing the racism that existed in the Jim Crow era, she quickly became a card-carrying NAACP member and began regularly attending civil rights protests.Our family is betrayed beyond words that the NAACP is asking the United States government to end its military support for Israel. The Jewish people are fighting for our lives against an enemy that has raped, butchered and murdered our family members, and has announced it’s intention to do so again and again.Shame, shame, shame on you @NAACP.
This is becoming a watershed moment in American Jewish history. The son of two Holocaust survivors and activists, one of them a Nobel laureate, is not alone in feeling betrayed. According to the latest AJC survey, less than half of American Jews still describe themselves as liberal. To be sure, they didn’t turn conservative overnight, but nearly one-third are now self-identified moderates.
Because the conservative label is still rare, it’s safe to assume that no tectonic ideological shifts occurred. To this point, Wiesel’s statement does not indicate that he is less committed to what he sees as justice and equality. But there is a sense of betrayal, a realization that the contemporary woke Left has little use for such quaint concepts.
With his thoughts appearing on X/Twitter, woke Jew Rafael Shimunov immediately jumped in to scold Wiesel:
Solidarity is not transactional. Shame on you for attempting to turn it into a currency and damage the work of Black liberation instead of trying to understand why so many people, the majority of US Jews, Americans and the world oppose this genocide.
On substance, Shimunov doesn’t have a leg to stand on — the charge of genocide in Gaza is transparently libelous, and the majority of Jews and Americans of all ages support Israel. But it’s telling that he abandoned the central principle of woke solidarity, the promise of allyship.
When Jews marched with blacks against Jim Crow laws, the word was not on anyone’s tongue. It entered the American lexicon at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement during the lockdowns in 2020. I tend to believe that a great many Americans misunderstood its meaning.
The word sounds conspicuous because it seems like those using it are going out of their way to avoid saying friend, perhaps not to give anyone the idea that they can be breaking bread with the cool kids. Perhaps they were looking for a synonym for comrade — that one is forever tainted by the Communist connection.
In the woke view, an ally supports another group’s cause to the point of self-abnegation. Anti-woke writer James Lindsay cited the following social justice definition:
A person who takes action against oppression out of a belief that eliminating oppression will benefit members of targeted groups and advantage groups. Allies acknowledge disadvantage and oppression of other groups than their own, take supportive action on their behalf, commit to reducing their own complicity or collusion in oppression of these groups, and invest in strengthening their own knowledge and awareness of oppression.
According to this model, allies are drafted disproportionately from a background considered adversarial to the woke protagonist. They are expected to continuously educate themselves about their own supposed advantages and work on behalf of others.
Lindsay reminds us that allies are supposed to relinquish any kind of leadership ambitions and follow the diktat of the so-called marginalized group. They are not allowed to do as little as basking in the glory of good allyship — that’s considered performative. It’s hard to imagine this situation not turning abusive. At the peak of BLM, we’ve witnessed all sorts of frankly masochistic behaviors, like white people putting themselves in shackles to act out the black experience. Elsewhere, Lindsay explained how the idea of allyship is a part of woke cult dynamics.
Such relationships contrast directly with the traditional understanding of what it means to be an ally. Political allies form reciprocal relationships based on mutual interests. Interestingly, the Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam-Webster currently define an ally as either a sovereign supporting another sovereign or a helper. Why not a servant or a slave? I suspect that the second definition was added in 2021.
Note how different the two definitions are — the sovereign is not assumed to be entering any treaties in an act of self-abnegation. Alliances between states are often formed out of necessity, for every party’s benefit, and regardless of ideological contradictions. The Allies had to overcome almost irreconcilable differences in World War Two to fight the Axis powers. The union led to victory but didn’t outlive the war.
Woke allyship requires a near-identical worldview and presumes no reciprocity. The Contemporary Left judges everyone by a stringent Marxian measure and leaves no option for difference of opinion. The woke will not help out a staunch supporter—or even try to understand his position—just because he once worked for them. This is why Shimunov declared that “solidarity is not transactional.” But, unlike morality, solidarity should be transactional; a relationship between parties and loyalty is expected.
In a woke understanding, antizionists are a priori morally correct because they defined themselves as colonial victims. In reality, they are neither, but to explain this is to dismantle the comfortable worldview in which today’s Left dwells. Thousands of years of Jewish history prove that it’s possible to be a thriving minority underdog dreaming of returning to the Holy Land. This narrative directly opposes The Communist Manifesto and is nearly impossible to incorporate into a communist cause.
Individual Jews may fare very well within the woke structure, but this will be achieved at the expense of the Jewish community. In the contemporary American political climate, individual rights have given way to group privileges redistributed by the elites. Because Jews are seen as privileged, indeed hyper-white, opportunities like college admissions and job offers will be taken away from Jews as a group.
Four years ago, many people misunderstood what being a woke ally meant. Asians and whites, or even homosexuals, should expect to be on the receiving nod of the allyship stick. The word promises understanding and mutual interest, but to enter this kind of relationship is to commit one’s community to ideologically inspired abuse.
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