Your Questions, Answered: From Critical Race Theory to Israel-Palestine

In which I field reader queries and critiques on everything from CRT to ending anti-Semitism (and other softballs)

Last week, I asked you to send me your comments, ideas, and critiques—and you did not disappoint. I’ve tried to get back to everyone individually, but for this mailbag, I wanted to highlight the most controversial questions. It’d be easy to sidestep these in favor of safer subjects, but precisely because they are so vexing, I thought my answers might be particularly helpful for the broader Deep Shtetl audience. Also, when you spend your time covering Israel-Palestine, everything else feels positively pedestrian by comparison.

First, I wanted to address a smart question that came from Twitter, because the answer gets to the heart of what this newsletter is all about. The tweet comes from the International Crisis Group’s Mairav Zonszein, in response to last month’s profile of Yair Lapid, Israel’s prime minister in waiting, and his drive for Arab equality in the country:

This is a good explainer of Lapid’s political evolution, but I wish @Yair_Rosenberg would have grilled him more on what 2SS he envisions without dividing Jerusalem. https://t.co/kNtjrWvVuC

— Mairav Zonszein מרב זונשיין (@MairavZ) December 22, 2021

For those unaware, since entering politics, Lapid has publicly supported a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also opposed dividing Jerusalem as part of it. For the Palestinian side, this stipulation is a nonstarter. So why not ask him about this tension? There are two reasons.

The first is specific to this story: I’ve found that it is fruitless to press Israeli or Palestinian leaders to negotiate against themselves in the media. No mainline Israeli leader will preemptively agree to divide Jerusalem, just as no Palestinian leader will preemptively agree to give up the right of return to Israel for millions of Palestinian refugees. These are wrenching concessions that will happen at the negotiating table or not at all. (And, according to documents leaked from prior negotiations, they have happened.) Even Shimon Peres, the former head of Israel’s peace camp, who intended to divide Jerusalem, publicly said he didn’t when debating Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. No responsible Palestinian or Israeli leader is going to gift concessions to the press rather than exchange them for tangible returns from their counterparts—and any who’d do so could never get elected by their respective populations. Lapid is a canny politician and has crafted his public positions carefully to avoid this trap. He was not going to reverse course because yet another reporter asked him about it.

Which brings us to the more important reason I didn’t ask this question: Because you didn’t need me to. As I wrote in this newsletter’s intro post:

Deep Shtetl is the stories behind the stories; the people off the beaten track who don’t appear on all your podcasts; the things and communities we think we understand but don’t. This doesn’t mean I’ll avoid the big-ticket items—far from it—but that I’ll try to ask different questions about them.

Lapid, despite disinterest from the international media until recently, is not off the beaten track. This means he gets asked all the usual questions—about Iran, the Palestinians, and so on—by the usual suspects. You don’t need me to ask those questions, because you have the New York Times and Washington Post, which will happily ask them every single time they talk to Lapid. (In fact, they did so the same week as my profile dropped.)

But you’ll notice that none of those outlets has covered Lapid’s dramatic evolution on Arab political participation and civic equality, despite its seismic consequences for Israeli politics. So that’s where I step in. I find asking the same questions as everyone else to be boring, and when I bore myself, I bore my readers. So I try to ask different questions and capture different insights. A journalist only has so many hours to devote to their craft. I work to make them count by covering the things that others aren’t.

And that’s what Deep Shtetl is all about.

---

Okay, now that we’ve dispensed with Israel-Palestine, it’s time to tackle something less controversial: critical race theory.

Rabbi Ron Roth writes:

I just finished an adult education series on Judaism and Critical Race Theory. I found material from many viewpoints: that Jews should embrace it, that Jews should reject it, and that there is a nuanced approach. What do you think?

I avoid terms like “critical race theory” (and “cancel culture” and other such buzzwords) because they are so politicized that they tend to obscure more than they inform. “Critical race theory,” for example, can refer to the academic approaches to racial inequality formulated by scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw; to the bogeyman of right-wing activists opposed to basic literacy about our country’s racial history; or to a popularized politics in many progressive spaces that bears little resemblance to its academic antecedents and makes dubious claims that the scholarship does not support. (See DiAngelo, Robin.)

People bring so many outside assumptions to terms like “CRT” that I can’t control, and so as a writer, I try to avoid such words and instead speak more specifically about whatever I mean. With that caveat, I’d say briefly that structural theories of racism can be quite useful for understanding the world around us. In particular, they help explain why bigotry persists in a society even when many individuals reject it. I’ve personally learned a lot from these insights, and careful viewers of my video series on anti-Semitism will notice their influence on my work.

There is an actual graphic of a building in the first video. It’s not subtle.

To me, the problem is not the theory. The problem is that in practice, these ideas are often selectively applied, and employed by those who do not extend their implications to Jews, instead reading us out of the conversation. What’s needed is a serious attempt to apply concepts like intersectionality and structural racism to Jews and anti-Semitism, rather than erroneously writing all Jews off as just privileged white people. (In actuality, many Jews are not white or wealthy, and all of them are targeted by white supremacists, unlike other white people.) Until that happens, many Jews will be understandably uncomfortable with a discourse that does not seem to include them or reflect their full experience. But it doesn’t have to be this way, as academics like David Schraub and Mia Brett—who apply these theories to Jews—have shown.

For those interested, I talked a little more about this dynamic on a 2018 panel with Bari Weiss and Batya Ungar-Sargon, two critics of intersectionality and its extended ideological universe.

---

Susan writes:

I don’t have a bone to pick or a criticism, but more something I’m struggling with—finding my place to fit in as a Jewish convert. So much of our lives are shaped by our childhood and mine was one of lackadaisical trips to Sunday School at the Methodist church near our home. I became interested in Judaism in college when I took a religion class (taught by a sardonic rabbi) to fulfill a humanities requirement. As often happens in the universe, when you are interested in something, things start coming at you. One of those things was my future husband, who was Jewish. I made the decision to convert about a year into our relationship before we became engaged. We’ve been divorced for over 20 years, although still friends. Our kids are grown and one has kids of their own.

During our marriage of 14 years, we kept a Jewish home and I loved it. I missed some of my traditions around the Christmas holidays, but it was a small price to pay. I was involved in our temple; our children went to Hebrew school. When we got divorced, my link to Judaism broke. I didn’t have enough of a base to sustain me. I didn’t go back to Methodist, because that was always shaky. A few years ago I took an Intro to Judaism class to refresh my knowledge. I still don’t understand Hebrew and I still find services incomprehensible. My most Jewish thing this year was to throw a Hanukkah party at the condo building I live in.

If we are the sum of our experiences, where does that leave the convert? We aren’t a blank slate when we come to Judaism, but maybe others don’t wrestle with this like I do. I read every book about converts I can get my hands on, because there must be some sort of secret I’m missing.

I feel qualified to answer many questions, but this is not one of them. So I turned to someone who is: Nellie Bowles, former New York Times reporter, current convert, and the author of the singular Substack Chosen by Choice. Here’s what she said:

Susan, what a beautiful and hard question. It sounds like to me what you’re asking is how to feel Jewish still without your husband.

The quick and best answer is: rejoin Jewish community. If services leave you feeling lost, find different parts of shul life that are more accessible. Or find a different shul, if your town has more than one. Being physically in Jewish community is the best way to feel that base return. Do Jewish life and the feeling of belonging will return, husband or not.

And be gentle with yourself. It’s OK to not speak Hebrew! Judging from this essay and that you raised your children Jewish, I think you’re holding yourself to a very high bar here.

But of course this doesn’t answer the real question, which is “What of the convert after divorce?” Was your Judaism always tied to his? There’s an idea that people convert for a partner. And sometimes they do. But more often is someone like you, someone who fell in love with a man and with Judaism both.

I don’t know that I would have converted if I hadn’t met my wife, but falling in love with her, I also fell in love with Judaism. Becoming Jewish has been a gift the relationship has given me.

Your ex-husband helped bring you into something that you clearly still treasure. He doesn’t own Judaism. You aren’t demoted in your Judaism because of a divorce. And you can call yourself a convert—or you can just call yourself Jewish.

---

Terry writes:

We are very aware of the rise in anti-Semitism. It’s been written about over and over again and seems to be cyclical in history. What action should we take? I don’t see large Jewish organizations making headway. What would make a difference?

This is it, folks. We are going to solve anti-Semitism here in 500 words or less. In all seriousness, this is a very important question, and it’s the premise of my video series on anti-Jewish bigotry. Simply put: If so many of us agree that anti-Semitism is bad, why are we still so bad at fighting it?

Here’s what I think we could be doing better:

1. Stop substituting Holocaust education for anti-Semitism education, because they are not the same thing. Reducing anti-Semitism to the Holocaust leads many people to miss or dismiss the majority of contemporary and historical anti-Semitism, just as reducing racism to slavery and segregation leads many to presume anti-Black bigotry is an irrelevant relic of a bygone era rather than a living force today. As Dara Horn has written in The Atlantic:

Doxxing Jewish journalists is definitely not the Holocaust. Harassing Jewish college students is also not the Holocaust. Trolling Jews on social media is not the Holocaust either ... Even hounding ancient Jewish communities out of entire countries and seizing all their assets—which happened in a dozen Muslim nations whose Jewish communities predated the Islamic conquest, countries that are now all almost entirely Judenrein—is emphatically not the Holocaust. It is quite amazing how many things are not the Holocaust.

When you set the bar for bigotry so high, you end up missing most of it. The Holocaust is what happens when more common manifestations of anti-Semitism go unchecked, and it should be taught in that broader context.

2. Organized Jewish communal responses to anti-Semitism should be more proactive and less reactive. Most efforts to counter anti-Semitism respond to problems after they’ve already occurred, rather than preempting the currents that create the problems. But when you’re reacting, you’re usually losing—once an anti-Semitic statement or incident has happened, it’s hard to do much about it besides perhaps punishing the offender. The real trick is to reduce the forces that create offenders and incidents in the first place.

3. The basic formula for avoiding the above pitfalls is this:

(a) full-spectrum anti-Semitism education and curricula that incorporate the Holocaust but do not reduce anti-Semitism to genocide;

(b) proactive efforts to humanize Jewish people and explain Judaism to non-Jewish communities and schools, so that they are less susceptible to anti-Jewish demonization and caricatures when they encounter them, because they know actual Jews; and

(c) bottom-up approaches to countering anti-Semitism and the ignorance that causes it, rather than just top-down efforts to work with elites and people in power to punish it. The latter has an unfortunate tendency to rebound upon the Jewish community, as it can come across as powerful Jews intervening from above to squash their opposition. By contrast, working with grassroots populations and everyday people in their communities and schools prevents problems before they occur, and is not susceptible to this anti-Semitic dynamic.

To give just one example of this in practice: For decades, the Jewish Community Relations Council in St. Louis has been running a program called Student to Student. It trains Jewish students to go to non-Jewish high schools and field questions about their lives and Judaism, demystifying the community for outsiders while also strengthening the Jewish students’ own identities. A similar program recently launched in Germany. This is the sort of effort that can and should be scaled up.

Along related lines, we need many more mainstream cultural representations of Jewish people that go beyond the usual empty Seinfeld stereotypes and Holocaust movies, as more complex portraits of Jewish people and experiences would similarly inoculate society against demonic caricatures of Jews. But that’s a story for another newsletter …

---

This is a subscriber-only edition of Deep Shtetl, so if you were forwarded this email, found the conversation valuable, and want to join it, please subscribe to The Atlantic. We’d love to have you.