This is a remarkable statement made by a very senior scholar of American Jewish history, Jonathan Sarna. It does not shock me; it seems only liberals continue to react with horror when other liberals reveal the white supremacy that structures and frames their thinking.

Sarna's overwhelmingly obvious ignorance of the work of Du Bois, a scion of Black historiography, combined with his totally self-assured condemnation signals the liberal whiteness in which his scholarship is invested.

The Forward's morally vacuous leadership, editorial stupidity, n anti-Black posturing is well-documented n not of direct interest to me here. What is of interest is how Sarna's apologia for white supremacy reflects on the discipline of JS, n the field of American Jewish history.

At the very least, we can easily conclude that Sarna has not read Du Bois' work nor is familiar with his life. Period. There is simply no way to write such a ridiculous sentence otherwise. For a historian of American history—a historian who wrote a book on the civil war and...

...General Grant—to have *not* read "Black Reconstruction" is so wildly pitiful and damning that it is hard not to feel even a little sorry for Sarna; it's simply so humiliating for him! It raises major questions about the broad poverty of research n reading behind Sarna's work.

And, to put it more bluntly, it reveals the profound whiteness n WS at the heart of the field in which he is considered a senior scholar. Indeed, the segregation of JS from Black Studies, n the implicit alignment of the former w the white Academy, could not be more apparent.

I have my own critical thoughts abt the institutional turn towards cosmetic solutions, such as removing names. But what is clear in Sarna's framing here is that Jewish Americans (on the whole; no Black Jews in sight, of course) are presumptively aligned with Woodrow Wilson...

...—who was a "hero" to 'us'—in total opposition to Black Americans, for whom Wilson represents a "villain." Leaving aside Sarna's juvenile, moralizing binary, and leaving aside his antiquated reliance on the hackneyed logic of "Black-Jewish relations," what is buried in his...

framing is, of course, whiteness. As Derrida so aptly noted, whiteness "has effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains, active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible drawing covered over in the palimpsest."

It is whiteness' invisibility and normativity that continuously shores up its power and Jewish Studies has, in my experience and surely on display in this article, worked as a willing mercenary in this process.

. @barnor_hesse recently wrote that in virtually every academic discipline "an unspoken epistemological foundation assumes everything is knowable only through the white gaze." Sarna's article, in which the word "white" does not appear once (!), makes clear two essential points:

(1) Jewish Studies does not escape this indictment and (2) it is precisely the ethnic marker of Jewishness that provides a mask for the field's investment in white supremacy.

It all so utterly damning...