The New Politics of Jewish Invisibility

New York City has put out a map of its "immigrant neighborhoods", and some people are complaining that Jewish neighborhoods aren't represented. These complaints, in turn, are generating a counternarrative expressing the irony of insisting on the foreignness of Jews when the Jews in these neighborhoods are, overwhelmingly, not immigrants.

I'm going to try to fall in the middle on this. First, let's highlight the words of one activist quoted in the article, Isaac Choua, a board member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America who specifically flagged a "major Sephardi corridor" in south Brooklyn that was not found on the map:

"This is not a small omission," he went on. "It is one of New York’s most distinctive immigrant-descended Jewish communities, and it gets erased from the story. Weirdly enough, Zohran Mamdani’s office wanted to speak with me about this very issue and has not followed up since the election."

The emphasis is mine, and of course it is a telling descriptor: immigrant-descended. An odd phrase, that, since it raises the question of which neighborhoods in NYC have residents who are not predominantly descended from immigrants (I don't think there's currently a "Little Lenape" in New York). Assuming that the map covers neighborhoods that have large quotients of immigrants (and the article does quote a city official as saying the map is meant to cover neighborhoods with "substantial foreign-born populations"), and assuming further that the Jews in most of the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods are not generally "foreign-born", that could be the end of that.

In terms of this being a scandal, I do think that basically suffices as an explanation (again, assuming the premises are true, which I can't verify). But I also think that lurking behind this is a more legitimate concern that's worth excavating. As in many things, Legitimate Concern + Mamdani Derangement Syndrome = Unnecessary Hysteria, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't figure out what the legitimate concern is.

What's being pushed against here is a sense that Jewish distinctiveness is being erased -- that when we talk about diversity and difference in American politics, Jewishness is elided as a relevant contributor. Obviously, this was a theme of my White Jews article as well as "The Baggage of Whiteness", and it's one reason I think the counter-claim that the protesters here are themselves being antisemitic by presenting Jews as "foreign" is too cute by half. The critique presumes that being associated with "immigrant" is inherently endangering to the targeted community. In certain contexts that might be true, but this map hardly seems one of them. "Immigrant" is a focus of celebration for this map, not a vector of threat. We can imagine a critic lambasting this map as providing a target list for ICE, but that critic is a product of our imagination -- the actual communities listed seem to find security in recognition, which should make it legible why another community, not included, might feel vulnerable for the omission. It is not the case now (if it ever was) that highlighting a minority group's distinctiveness (or even "foreign" roots) is necessarily a harbinger of discrimination, and there's no reason why Jews must be different in this respect.

So while at first blush this debate (in the Jewish case) may seem to be another iteration of the age-old assimilation vs. differentiation contretemps, I actually think it's a somewhat novel and mutant version of it. In its original form, assimilation vs. differentiation was a debate over what would keep Jews most safe as against antisemitism. But, despite the claim that Jew-as-immigrant-as-"foreign" = antisemitism, I don't really think the argument being made here is about maximizing Jewish safety. Those who push back most aggressively on Jewish attempts to highlight our differentiation, these days, tend to treat Jewish assimilation not as a normative goal but as a descriptive reality, and then treat those Jews who resist that description as engaging in a sort of stolen valor. We're not actually different from the White American majority, and when we pretend otherwise we're trying to unfairly claim a share of the diversity spoils from communities actually entitled to it. I flagged this dynamic in my White Jews article:

As one Jewish feminist [Joyce Antler] related being told (at a conference that featured presentations by Black, Latina, and Irish Catholic women), “Jewish women are just White middle-class women.” Consequently, her interlocutor went on, “There is nothing that differentiates them from the ruling majority. There is no reason to treat them as a specialized minority or to devote any of our time to their particular experience.” To demand significant time and attention be devoted to the Jewish case is little different from demanding still more resources and consideration be accorded to White people—that is, an insistence from those who already have so much that they should be given yet more.

That style of argument -- one which treats Jewish efforts to mark out Jewish difference as a form of cheating -- is one that will rightfully chafe many Jews who recoil at the notion that highlighting our community's distinctiveness is an illegitimate move, particularly in political contexts that for other groups treat such highlighting as constitutive of social inclusion.

If we go back to Mr. Choua's complaint, it seems pretty clear that something like this is playing a role (and the last sentence, where he indicates that Mamdani initially did express interest in highlighting the distinctive NYC Sephardi story but then ghosted them, is a further clue unlocking this particular reaction). The American Sephardic community, in particular, is very sensitive (and appropriately so) to how its narrative and history is regularly elided both when speaking of "Jewish" history but also "ethnic" history (see also: the California Ethnic Studies curriculum controversy). They feel like they are perpetually rendered invisible, and that stings. They feel as if the same people perpetuating their invisible status are too often those who are -- at the very same moment they suppress Jewish difference -- proudly in the midst of highlighting the diversity of others, and that stings more. They want representation. That's a legitimate want. And to reduce it to a sort of self-inflicted antisemitism attributable to Islamophobic ressentiment is I think profoundly disrespectful (in addition to completely missing the mark as to what's happening).

So there's a real, legitimate sore spot here, that extends well beyond this particular map project.  To be clear, I have no doubt that this real sore spot is being mixed with a healthy dose of Mamdani-hate to bring matters to a frothy boil. Again, it is perfectly appropriate that a map of immigrant neighborhoods not include neighborhoods whose residents are predominantly non-immigrant (Jewish or otherwise).

But it is true, and it has been true for a while, that many Jews feel as if Jewish distinctiveness is systematically occluded when we as a society purport to celebrate difference. And that rawness that exclusion engenders won't go away until it's made clear not just that Jews are welcome, but that Jews are welcome as Jews -- as a distinct group, with a distinct history and distinct triumphs and tribulations, and it isn't treated as cheating when that distinctiveness is explicitly claimed.