Abstract
The purpose of this study is to apply intersectionality as an analytic tool to explore the potential for and the problematics of anti-racism movement building amongst the U.S. liberal Jewish community in 2019. This paper focuses on scholarship addressing two primary arenas relating to this inquiry: 1. What are the iterative and commutative processes of narration that construct the social fabric of “groupness” (collective selfhood) for liberal Jews and how do these processes impact anti-racism movement building? 2. How does the social construction of whiteness in the liberal Jewish community in the U.S. inform engagement with anti-racism activism? Though we see ourselves as a socially progressive and egalitarian group, we are also a people who inhabit the paradoxical and concurrently fully integrated contradictory identifiers as both persecuted/more in danger than others as well as chosen/better than others. I posit that this unexamined concurrence directly limits anti-oppression organizing focused on dismantling systemic racial oppression and countering the mainstreaming of the white nationalist social movement. For Jewish social justice movement building to be effective today we must rigorously examine our Jewish social location in order to significantly shift civic engagement with constructive social transformation and guarding against the infliction of further harm as both targets of and complicit participants in U.S. structural racism.
Amelia Mae Paradise 