Precarious Pasts and Jewish Collective Memory: "Trapped in History" in 2017 America

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1953)

The past does not exist independently of the present.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1994)

An alarming wave of antisemitism kicked off 2017, leaving many American Jews longing for stability, for a sense of identitarian coherence amidst mayhem. The Anti-Defamation League documented an 86 percent increase in antisemitic incidents—including bomb threats, cemetery and synagogue desecrations, and general harassment—compared to the same period in 2016. White nationalist and neo-Nazi mobilization has become increasingly visible nationwide.¹ Against this menacing backdrop, enter DC-Comics inspired Wonder Woman—the first major superhero movie directed by a woman and featuring a female lead—in June 2017. The title character, played by Israeli beauty queen and former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Gal Gadot, was everything one could want in a twenty-first-century Jewish action figure: intelligent, righteous, beautiful, and more powerful than any man. It was easy to imagine Wonder Woman's appearance in American movie theaters as an answer to many prayers: as a beacon of justice and defender of the innocent in a troubled world; as a figure of feminine power and self-determination after the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton by a man who bragged about his non-consensual exploits with women; as a symbol of Jewish strength and dignity amidst a disquieting surge of antisemitism.

Wonder Woman's arrival in movie theaters and the spike in antisemitism together sparked often heated discussions over the nature of Jewish identity, with commentators from a variety of social media and news outlets debating Gadot's race, and Jewish race identity more generally.² Some insisted on Jewish whiteness and racial privilege, while others asserted that Jewish people are anything but white. In response to criticism that the film's producers did not cast a non-white lead, comic book authority Matthew Mueller insisted that Gadot, as an Israeli, is in fact a "person of color."³ Others took this argument further, claiming that Jewish people—regardless of nationality—should not be characterized as white. In Forward, Joel Finkelstein and blogger Dani Ishai Behan argued that to call Jewish people "white" is to deny their historical subjugation and to downplay the persistence of antisemitism. According to Finkelstein, "the poisonous narrative [of Jewish whiteness] forcibly decouples Jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color."⁴ Others countered that, while American Jews have been and continue to be targeted by antisemitism, they are often beneficiaries of racial privilege. Noah Berlatsky, also writing in the Forward, pointed to the contemporary visibility and acceptance of Jewish actors as leads in mainstream films, compared to the relative scarcity of lead roles for black actors.⁵ Feminist theologian Sarah Emanuel opined, "even if we recognize the racialized Otherness of Jews historically, Jews with light-toned skin have still, in many instances, benefitted from systems of white supremacy, particularly in the United States."⁶ While Berlatsky's and Emanuel's arguments emphasize current privileges and access to representational power, Finkelstein and Behan address a past of "legitimate suffering" that creates a natural alliance between Jewish people and other "oppressed persons of color."⁷ Both insights carry ethical weight and historical resonance, but they stand at odds regarding Jewish access to race privilege, as if racial identities were fixed in time, or race privilege—and the relative security that comes with it—could not coexist with "legitimate suffering," past or present.

What might appear at first blush an argument over semantics offers a lens on the role histories of subjugation play in the contemporary construction of Jewish coherence. Amidst a backdrop of rampant antisemitism, growing militarization of American culture, and persistent assaults on racial justice, arguments exempting Jews from white privilege often embrace the similarities between antisemitism and other systems of exclusion without closely interrogating their points of divergence. Fifty years ago, James Baldwin, novelist and social critic wrote in a controversial New York Times essay, "One does not wish...