returnofthejudai:

From @schraubd, who I strongly recommend following. 

On another level, however, the claimed befuddlement as to why Jews care about leftists – out-of-power, comparatively marginal – praising Farrakhan is sadly revealing regarding how some on the left conceptualize Jews. For there is an obvious reason why Jews might take it extra hard when persons on the left endorse the rank bigotry of Louis Farrakhan.

It’s because most of us are of the left too. And there’s nothing strange about feeling extra hurt when members of your own community are the one’s causing the wound.

This reason is so obvious that it’s worth dwelling on why it is so often overlooked. And here we begin to see the real stakes of the controversy: whether Jews are indeed recognized as members of this left-liberal community.

While both left- and right-wing anti-Semitism matter to Jews, they affect us along very different vectors.

Put bluntly, in the United States the anti-Semitism that is most likely to put a bullet in my brain emanates from the right. That matters, and nobody should be in denial about that raw and sobering fact.

But on a day-to-day basis, left-wing anti-Semitism is far more likely to obstruct Jews from joining movements we want to join, or force us out of communities and spaces which are very much ours.

Deeply embedded in the puzzlement over Jewish concern in cases like this is the assumption that the left is not our home; that Jews come to this controversy as strangers. The Jewish presence on the left is always at best probationary, and so any time Jews criticize the left we prove we are unworthy of membership. Those who would self-identify as left are denied that label. We are infiltrators, rabble-rousers, coming in under false pretenses.

…

The only reason it’s hard to understand why Jews care about left-wing anti-Semitism is if one implicitly doesn’t believe Jews should care about the goings on of the left, because one does not see Jews as fundamentally part of the left.

But many – most – of us are. So when I watch conservatives play footsie with Holocaust deniers and alt-right neo-Nazis it is simultaneously more worrisome, because conservatives currently control the levers of American power, and less worrisome because I’m not a conservative. I have no ties to them. I have no expectations from them. And I certainly have no desire to become one.

When the left partakes in anti-Semitism, by contrast, it is infecting the political community and project that embody my hopes for the future. I have every right to care about that. I have every right to stake my claim to this space, to participate in the development of this project as an equal member. I do not come to this cause as a stranger.

Which should I care more about: that the powerful people I consider my adversaries hate me, or that the people who are alongside me organizing the resistance to that power don’t care about me?

It is a question that only makes sense if one thinks Jews don’t already come with political attachments that matter to us. It is a question that, upon being asked, answers why even Jews on the left know they will never be acknowledged to be at home on the left.

As a rule, I only post excerpts of articles to protect writers who depend upon clicks for their livelihoods, so please read the entire article on Ha’aretz.

No one who praises an anti-Semite like Louis Farrakhan can call herself ‘progressive’