Shema Session: Why We Don't Define Antisemitism

And so maybe what comes up also a lot is the idea that even though we are an antisemitism education organization, we don't actually define antisemitism beyond understanding it as harm to Jews, and we really wanna pull people to think more deeply about what does it mean to talk about harm.

Um, and so we're gonna start today with, like, why? Why is that? Why, why is that our stance?

Why, Oren?

Why? I'll give you the TLDR, and then we can dive wherever you want.

Number one, you don't actually need a definition to demonstrate curiosity and empathy when somebody Jewish says, "Ouch." Number two, the average Jewish person is not looking at a formal definition to decide whether the thing you said or some politician said or someone on Twitter said is antisemitic.

They're not, like, looking at line 2.A of definition X. They're just...

You know, they're having a visceral reaction.

And number three, we, we think the central issue in this entire conversation starts with the fact that most people don't understand Jewish identity.

They think Jews are just a religious group, so they think antisemitism is just religious bigotry, so they're, like, looking for the wrong thing, and I don't need to, I don't need to shift them into a definition.

I need to help them, to your point, think about what does it mean to cause harm.

That's the TLDR.

Well, just picking up on that, I wanna go back to that kind of, like, ouch idea, which is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately and, like, Kara, you know, like, the operative word I think that you were using is harm, and it's like things can be harmful without rising to a technical definitional level of antisemitism.

We were having a conversation yesterday in a webinar with Tikva Womack, who's a Black Orthodox Jewish trauma therapist, and talking about, like, you can be traumatized by things.

You can be re-traumatized by things, and, like, it doesn't mean it's antisemitism, but if you are an institution or just, like, you care about human beings, you have to have a particular kind of reaction and a particular kind of empathy, bring a particular kind of empathy into an interaction with someone who's saying something like that or making a claim that they've been affected in that way.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think especially if you think about the American Jewish experience specifically, obviously there's plenty of Jews in America who had family and friends directly impacted by October 7th.

There's also, I think, many Jews for whom the piece of the post-October 7th reality that's been the most, the most traumatizing, triggering, harmful has been so many people in so many relationships that they had when they said ouch didn't care to go further and often just pushed back on the ouch.

And so it makes you feel super alone, super isolated, like nobody actually really cares about Jews, push comes to shove.

So I think even just the, the lack of curiosity and empathy from people you have longstanding relationship with may be, you know, I don't know what is the most traumatizing piece of it, but it's certainly up there.

Well, we, I mean, we, we looked at some research recently.

Yael Silverstein, who's finishing her...

I think she finished her doctorate at NYU.

So one of the things that she looks about is sort of taxonomies of microaggression, right? Like, different ways of, which, like, again, may or may not be antisemitism according to a formal definition of antisemitism, but one of the things that she...

Sort of my key takeaway from her research that she shared with us is that one of the categories that she has this broken down into is microinvalidation, which I think is sort of a way of describing the pheno- a, a sort of scientific word for the phenomenon that you're describing, Oren, of, like, I said something hurt me or was problematic, and you were like, "No, it didn't." But the conclusion is that that sort of interaction creates a greater sense of othering in people than physical attacks.

And so if you're, like, in an institution where the norm is to invalidate the harm of anyone, Jew or otherwise, that that is going to lead to less welcoming for them than physical attacks, you know, perpetrated against them