Pulling On The Threads Of Jewish Exceptionalism

Forty or so years ago, far enough in the past that I won’t even try to pinpoint exactly where or when, I had an argument about antisemitism with two white men who weren’t Jewish. I remember nothing about them except that the one with red hair got so worked up that he started yelling at me loudly enough that I could see his neck muscles straining. We’d been talking about Israel and Palestine, and we’d come to what is still the inescapable moment in that discussion when the question arose of whether criticism of Israel and/or Zionism is inherently antisemitic. We agreed that, in principle, it was not, but when I suggested that sometimes such criticism could become antisemitic or that it could be made with antisemitic intent, my red-headed interlocutor brought up the 1975 United Nations resolution that defined Zionism as a form of racism and, while citing scholars and activists whose names he clearly thought I should have known, asserted that since antisemitism too was a form of racism, to fight Zionism was by definition to fight antisemitism as well.

I responded that, regardless of what one thought about Zionism, Jew-hatred was a phenomenon in its own right and that it ought, therefore, to be understood on its own terms. I did not think of this as an argument for a “hierarchy of hatreds,” so to speak, but the men I was talking to clearly heard it that way because the one who started yelling at me accused me of being “one of those Jews” who believed we deserved special treatment simply because we were Jewish. He didn’t use the term “Jewish exceptionalism,” but it was what he meant.

Not too many years later, I was sitting in a conference room at a meeting of my campus’ task force on Holocaust education. Our group included faculty from several different departments, as well as members of the community, one of whom was the minister of a local Black church. Almost as soon as we finished introducing ourselves, the minister asked why our task force was supposed to focus exclusively on Holocaust education. After all, he reasoned—and I am paraphrasing his argument here—respected scholars had put the number of Africans forced into slavery at somewhere between 9,000,000 and 12,000,000. Surely, he insisted, that level of atrocity deserved at least an equal amount of attention.

The room went silent as people tried to figure out how to respond. Or, to be more precise, and more honest, since the minister was the only person of color in the room: as the white people—most, but not all of us, Jews—tried to figure out how to respond without being accused of racism. The only correct answer, of course, was that the minister was right. Slavery and, by extension, the history of Black people did deserve the kind of institutional attention being given to the Holocaust.

As a junior member of the faculty, and since I had not been involved in creating the task force, I did not think it was my place to speak first, but when no one else responded, I suggested that broadening our focus in the way he was proposing would dilute the value to be gained from learning about the specifics of each group’s experience—in the case of our task force, the Jews. Regardless of how legitimate the minister’s question was, I went on—and however accurate in raising the specter of the institutional racism that all too often gives short shrift to Black issues and concerns—not only was it not the discussion we were there to have, it potentially pitted Jewish and Black interests against each other. We would be hard-pressed not to become a space where the histories of the two peoples would end up competing for attention and where the very important distinction would have been elided between what a Nazi success would have meant for the Jews and what the continued success of the slave trade would have meant for African Americans.

To put it plainly—and to restate an idea I began to explore in a previous post—if the Nazis had fully succeeded in implementing their Final Solution, the world right now would be empty of Jews. I would not be here writing this essay and some of you would not be here reading it. On the other hand, the continued success of slavery would by its very nature have required the continued existence of an enslaved Black people. In drawing this contrast, I do not mean to imply that the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews was somehow worse than slavery. I do think, however, that the impact of the Final Solution, understood as the ultimate operationalization of antisemitism, and the impact of the African slave trade, understood broadly speaking as the inciting moment of race relations in the United States, continue to position Jewish and Black Americans, respectively, in very different relationships to the structures of oppression that continue to shape the world we live in.

I do not remember if the minister answered me. Perhaps because of my response, though, we did attempt to address at a subsequent meeting the question of whether and how to incorporate other genocides into Holocaust education. Central to that discussion was the idea that the potential for genocidal violence exists in all groups because it exists in each of us as individuals. In that context, I suggested it would be irresponsible not to include the fact that there is a divine command to commit genocide within Judaism itself, first in Deuteronomy 25:19 when God commands the Israelites to “blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens,” and second, in I Samuel 15:3, when God, through Samuel, commands King Saul to “kill alike [the Amalekite] men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys!”

Almost immediately, another member of the group, a Holocaust survivor, interrupted me. Jewish tradition, he said, had long ago wrenched those texts away from their genocidal meanings. He was not wrong. Starting as far back as the Talmud, a thread of legal reasoning has declared the commandment to wipe out Amalek if not precisely defunct, then at least impracticable, since no one can now identify Amalek’s descendants; and, spiritually speaking, Amalek has been largely transformed within mainstream Jewish tradition from the name of an actual people into a metaphor for the evil we must eradicate within ourselves. Nonetheless, the survivor’s point actually made my argument for me, since it would not have been necessary to backpedal had the genocidal impulse not been there to backpedal from in the first place. After all, the fact that God did not mean his command metaphorically is clear. He removes Saul as king for not killing Agag, the Amalekite king, and for keeping alive “the best of the sheep, the oxen, the second-born, the lambs, and all else that was of value” (I Samuel 15:9).

Significant as it is, though, and it is significant that the rabbis found ways of reading genocide out of a genocidal text—especially one that they understood could not be altered because it was divinely given—the text itself, in its plain meaning, remains, so to speak, available for use. Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrated this several times after October 7, 2023, when he invoked the biblical command to remember Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17) in reference both to Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, framing each as an existential threat to Israel, and by extension, the Jewish people as a whole. The response was predictable. Critics pounced on Netanyahu’s statement as clear evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent towards the Palestinians, and the Israeli government bobbed and weaved around that accusation, insisting that Netanyahu was referring only to the command to remember Amalek and not the genocidal directive that followed. As if the simple act of asserting that distinction simultaneously negated the full context in which Netanyahu’s call to remember was rooted and rendered invalid any reading which insisted that, protestations to the contrary, this context was meaningful and had to be taken into account.