The New Ideological Gatekeepers of American Judaism

A couple of months ago, I spoke to a group of about 60 people at a Friday evening Shabbat dinner in the Washington, DC area, on the topic of my new book, Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews (recently excerpted in Quillette). I’m always a bit apprehensive before I speak to mainstream Jewish audiences about my book’s thesis—not because I fear the majority will disagree with me, but because many congregations feature one or two highly assertive ideological watchdogs who tend to attend this kind of event with a view toward angrily deligitimizing the speaker.

The Rabbi of the community in question, whom I have known for many years, interviewed me in front of the audience. Then the congregants in attendance, not a heckler among them, asked a series of thoughtful questions. Phew, I thought, controversy averted. But a few days later, I received an email from the Rabbi. “Apparently you have some detractors,” he wrote. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I thought to myself.

The Rabbi—call him Rabbi One—had apparently been on a call with other Rabbis from the area, discussing how to respond to rising antisemitism. My book came up, at which point the Rabbi facilitating the discussion (Rabbi Two) said he adamantly refused to discuss either my book or my ideas about the ideological underpinnings of antisemitism. Another Rabbi agreed the book was beyond the pale. They did not, mind you, express disagreement with any specific arguments I made in the book. In fact, I doubt either one of them had read it.

Woke Antisemitism, which begins with a foreword from the great Soviet Refusenik Natan Sharansky, argues that the emergence of a specific kind of highly progressive ideology—it goes by many names, but I choose to call it “critical social justice”—endangers the Jewish community. I make the case that the Manichean oppressor-versus-oppressed idea that animates this movement casts groups that are, on average, sociologically successful within American society (including Jews and Asians) as not only presumed oppressors but also “complicit in white supremacy.” I fully appreciate that some people think that I overstate this phenomenon and the potential it has to fuel antisemitism. Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, believes that I “overstate” the case. I made sure to publish his comments, critique and all, in my book, because I genuinely want to have a real discussion about whether critical social justice ideology foments antisemitism.

I grew up in a Jewish community that relished debate about ideas. At three of the well-known American Jewish organizations I’ve worked for over the course of 30 years, members often debated fine points of policy into the wee hours of the night. Today, on the other hand, when it comes to some of the most important issues facing our communities (and the country as a whole), these same organizations are under pressure to skip debate altogether, and simply summarily embrace whatever the ideologically approved position happens to be. Any deviation from script often elicits charges of “racist,” or at least “privileged.” So most people just keep their opinions to themselves—the very opposite of that old joke about “two Jews with three opinions.” Now it’s more like a whole roomful of Jews sharing a single outlook.

The Rabbis who shut down the discussion on that conference call are what I call “the gatekeepers.” They exist in nearly every Jewish organization (including conservative ones, I should add—gatekeeping is a problem on both sides of the political spectrum), as in just about every other American institution I’ve had a chance to observe. They are a small minority pretending to be the protectors of the public good.

When I first started publicly challenging critical social justice, I assumed these gatekeepers were all hardened ideologues. But I realized that they frequently had other motives for striking radical postures. Some were simply trying to protect their institutions from internal acrimony—i.e., they were seeking to pre-empt a fight with the younger, uncompromising social justice warriors who’d been recently hired on to the professional staff. There’s also the fear that progressive financial donors might withhold their dollars. Some gatekeepers fear losing the next generation of Jews to assimilation if these young Jews aren’t constantly assured that Jewish institutions are fully up to date on whatever’s trending on social-justice Twitter.

Another type of gatekeeper, while not explicitly ideological, is motivated by a desire to remain connected with the political Left, with whom he or she has built a network of social and professional relationships. Numerous Jewish institutional leaders have spent decades developing alliances with progressives and fear losing their sunk costs. They sense—correctly—that if large swathes of the mainstream Jewish community begin to air concerns about progressive ideology, Jewish organizations will then have to navigate an institutional realignment, with some longstanding political allies falling away (never mind that it’s these progressive allies whose politics were the ones that shifted radically in the first place). In short, these leaders see me and other heterodox voices as threats to cozy arrangements they’ve spent years cultivating.

And yes, there are true believers among the gatekeepers—people who genuinely seek to close off any discussion because they think that doing so really does strike a blow against “white supremacy culture” or what not.

Standing up to the Social-Justice Mobs Within the Jewish Community

Sydney. London. Toronto.

QuilletteDavid Bernstein

Having been in this fight for nearly two years now, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to get around the gatekeepers, and am sensing that some are starting to lose their grip on their organizations. Waging this fight, I’ve learned, requires sponsors—people within an organization who will fight for the principle of intellectual pluralism. Sponsors are internal stakeholders—board members and congregants, donors and friends—who agree there’s a problem and are willing to run interference for you, even if it means depleting their own capital. Using this strategy, we often don’t need to knock down the door in order to open up the conversation. We can just ring the doorbell, confident that someone inside will answer it. The strategy doesn’t always work, but it often does.

Such tactics tend to be ineffective, unfortunately, once the leadership of an institution has made an explicit written commitment to defer to “marginalized voices” on all matters, and has DEI-trained themselves out of any ability for independent thought. By that time, it’s too late, and efforts to engage in discussion end up being repaid with glassy-eyed stares and robotically repeated mantras about social justice.

But many organizations, I’ve learned, remain in play despite having flirted publicly with critical social justice dogmatism. Such institutions hang in the balance between classical liberal ideals and anti-liberal wokeism. My goal is to accentuate the obvious contradiction between the two, and hope that the age-old Jewish tendency toward debate and disputation eventually reasserts itself.