Woke Up This Morning

Over the past few days, there was an interesting series of developments in the Jewish communal world involving a video that lambasted so-called "woke antisemitism". 

The video was put out by a group called the "Combat Antisemitism Movement", a somewhat opaque but sprawling organization that counts a wide number of Jewish communal organizations as "partners" (though what level of connection constitutes a "partner" is obscure). It is different from typical fare attacking left antisemitism in that it doesn't primarily focus on anti-Zionist activity, but rather claims -- in a manner reminiscent of David Bernstein and his JILV* -- that various "woke" concepts, like the idea of systematic oppression, are major sources of contemporary antisemitism. It even strikingly takes some prominent far-right incidents of antisemitism (e.g., claims by the Goyim Defense League that "Kanye is Right", a White supremacist-created flyer arguing that "Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege") and tries to shift blame for them onto left-wing actors.

The video generated backlash. That's not surprising. What is surprising is the scope of it. Several major centrist Jewish players, including the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, announced they were withdrawing from CAM in response to the video. CAM, for its part, has taken the video offline "temporarily" due to "concerns raised by some of our partners, and with the aim of fostering a broad consensus."

That, to me, is noteworthy. It was not that long ago when hippie-punching was essentially a free activity in mainline Jewish institutions. You'd never see them backing off based on concerns that they were being too hostile to their left flank. Groups like CAM would positively revel in liberal tears. Backlash would be ignored, if not taken as proof of some sort of bizarre "evenhandedness", where Jewish groups accounted for the fact that most Jews were liberal by bending over backwards to show they could mock liberals with the best of them.

The response here suggests that things may be changing. As I wrote in Haaretz last week, we're in the unfamiliar situation of the Jewish conversation on antisemitism largely being directed by an alliance of the Jewish center and Jewish left, as opposed to the Jewish center and Jewish right. Certain old presumptions of what was and wasn't permissible, that relied on outdated notions of who the key constituencies were, are no longer present. Groups like CAM, who no doubt assumed that this sort of video would have met with the usual reception -- fulsome praise from the right, tacit acceptance from the center, and easily-ignored criticism from the left -- are now forced to reckon with a new reality. That is a very welcome thing to see.

* Bernstein, who authored a book titled "Woke Antisemitism", said that he had seen an initial script for the video but characterized the final product as something that "could have been stronger and more nuanced." Much of the video has more than coincidental echoes of Bernstein's argument -- including the choice to pin the "Jewish privilege" flyer on the left instead of the right.