White Jewish Pride

From the Toronto Star:

The University of Toronto is being criticized by Jewish groups, a prominent historian and Holocaust survivors for accepting a master’s thesis that calls two Holocaust education programs “racist.”

The thesis, titled “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education,” was written by Jenny Peto, a Jewish activist with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid. It denounces the March of Remembrance and Hope, for which young adults of diverse backgrounds travel with Holocaust survivors to sites of Nazi atrocities in Poland, and March of the Living Canada, which takes young Jews with survivors to Poland and Israel.

Peto argues that the two programs cause Jews to falsely believe they are innocent victims. In reality, she writes, they are privileged white people who “cannot see their own racism.” The “construction of a victimized Jewish identity,” she argues, is intentional: It produces “effects that are extremely beneficial to the organized Jewish community” and to “apartheid” Israel.

Peto contends that “Zionist politics” are hidden behind the “liberal-sounding goals” of the March of Remembrance and Hope. She writes that there are “questions about the implications of white Jews taking it upon themselves to educate people of colour about genocide, racism and intolerance.”

According to Nicholas Wade in the New York Times:

Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives. . . .

Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with most of the rest from the Middle East, the two surveys find. The two communities seem very similar to each other genetically, which is unexpected because they have been separated for so long.

One explanation is that they come from the same Jewish source population in Europe. The Atzmon-Ostrer team found that the genomic signature of Ashkenazim and Sephardim was very similar to that of Italian Jews, suggesting that an ancient population in northern Italy of Jews intermarried with Italians could have been the common origin. The Ashkenazim first appear in Northern Europe around A.D. 800, but historians suspect that they arrived there from Italy.

"White Jews" like myself are basically Euro-Semites. Yet I cannot forget the observation made by Hannah Arendt:

One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself.

If I am attacked as a white Jew, I will defend myself as a white Jew. My light complexion does not make me responsible for slavery, colonialism or imperialism. Furthermore, I subscribe to the Hebraic moral code, according to which, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin" (Deuteronomy 24:16). Ergo, I do not believe any white person is automatically guilty for the sins of his fathers.

I once had a roommate who said her grandparents were probably Nazis. I believe she still has the right to educate a Sudanese Arab given to massacring black animists and Christians "about genocide, racism and intolerance." Again, as a follower of the Hebraic moral code, I'd rather educate the Sudanese Arab with the rod, but to each their own. We white Jews are not a sinless bunch, but as the possible Euro-Semite (his father may have been a Roman soldier garrisoned in Galilee) Yeshua once said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."