Who's "woke" now? Or, The Structural Empowerment of Empathy for Minority Populations and Its Countermovements

If you are Black, gay, Jewish, or even a woman, it is ok. I recognize you have experience and trauma that I can not understand. Well, maybe because I am Jewish I understand that one a bit, with my Jewish experiences that is. Are all my experiences Jewish experiences? I see that empathy must become structural, something more than jsut my personal feeling. The only problem is, how does this happen?

People seem to not like Israel lately, I don’t know if you have noticed, but with my keen Jewish senses, I have begun to notice people are not liking the structural raising up of the empathy towards Jewish people. Some people even seem to think Israel should not exist. This is to say, one of the biggest collective efforts to prevent antisemitism is now being in political discourses seen as evil.

Suddenly, there is a fusion of reactionary and progressive politics within the anti-Israel discourse. Those who do not think Jewish people and what they want should matter much and people who care about the immediate suffering of Palestinian people are joined together, often in the same person.

Israeli actions needs to be critiqued, but there is one position that will never be able to be totally actualized, which is to say Israel no longer becoming a specifically Jewish countermeasure to antisemitism. Freddie deBoer recently wrote an article entitled “This Is Zion” which is a great article that you should read, but to me, it comes across fundamentally condescending to Jewish people (in a tasteful way). It is condescending for Jewish people due to the zero-ing of the fact that Israel is the largest anti-antisemitism creation ever made, and will not simply be destroyed because of various protest tactics.

It is not a realistic solution for Jewish people for America to create a general exception for Jews (which Freddie suggests it would do easily, calling on the general argument of the article that Jews are wealthy and well off) it talks about Jewish people as wealthy and well of in a generalistic way. This reminds me of scientific racism. Sure, you collected some data, but you are missing the point, which is a rationalistic not an empiricist point. You should not be racist, you should not be antisemitic. What a boring and idealist notion! But this is actually quite important to understand, because if you understand that you are critiquing the structure of the core Actualization of efforts against racism and antisemitism, you would know that the baby will not simply be chucked out with the bathwater.

Israel not just should remain a Jewish state, let’s be Hegelian. It will remain a Jewish state because it is the largest structure dedicated to fighting against antisemitism in the world. Jews escaping from the holocaust and persecution around the world (in addition to American Jews who in previous generations escaped pogroms in Europe and elsewhere) have made their homes in Israel.

Critiquing Israel today and critiquing “woke” politics have the same structural force: people disagree with the material structural efforts of anti-racism and antisemitism. Do not quickly dismiss this notion as too idealistic, it is in fact causal for the situation today. The structural actualizations of antiracism and antisemitism are being critiqued, and there is a question of what will come out of these critiques.