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So I was addressing Black Jews when I posted this earlier, but I want to ask white Jews something: How do y’all really feel about legacy Jewish institutions? I know many of y’all hate them, but I also know that most of y’all are deeply invested in these legacy orgs. BE HONEST! https://twitter.com/thespinsterymc/status/1341030805154500609
Because the reason we can’t shift or tear down these white bourgeois behemoths is because White Jewish America keeps feeding them. Even if you don’t personally like ADL or the Federations, you know your bubbe and uncles created a goddamn endowment for that local mofo. Be real.
Your cousin sits on the board of your shul and the local JCC, and your daddy is the shul president who hates that liberal Zionist rabbi because she’s too nice to Black members and Palestinians. And your mama sends out big EoY checks every December to Hillel and Birthright.
And your parents are invested in their shul-JCC-Federation because their newly middle class grandparents founded them back in 1935/1947/1952 to protect their hard-won American whiteness and respectability. Your great-grans remember their immigrant parents and their traumas.
I don’t have access to this legacy. My entire family comes from slaves. My ancestors founded clapboard churches, not major nonprofits and JCCs. There was no white petit bourgeois wealth to invest because we never became white. Not even Anglo Protestantism could make us white.
If I don’t have the family history with an org, or if I can’t buy my way in as a major donor, or I’m not respectable enough to sit on a board, then what am I worth to the Jewish legacy org? What could I possibly offer them that they would actually want?
My unapologetic neo-Bundism? They hate that shit. My Black mama’s misogynoir-induced wisdom? Hell nawl. My visible queerness and radical anti-cisness and fat liberation knowledge? They’re scared of all that shit. What could my poor gerx Black ass ever offer legacy Jewish life?
What could I—a Black queer disabled hard-ass who carries the ancestral power of traumatized sistas and fighting yidden on my back—possibly offer to a legacy Jewish org that they would actually want? Because they don’t care about liberation—they want to maintain whiteness.
