Racialization, Rights, and Resistance: Zionism and white supremacy as entanglements for resistance to Islamophobia

• In Event: Feminist, Queer and Jewish Responses to Zionism

Abstract

Zionism has become a racial project in which the US state, and populations within the US, including Jews, Muslims, Arabs, queers and others, are deeply entangled. Building on Steven Salaita’s work on presumptions in public discourse about Israel’s “soul”, and critical race theory on constructions of whiteness and colorblind equity, this paper explores how Zionism has become a medium for producing white supremacy and structures of feeling about rights and entitlement to citizenship in general, particularly in the context of liberal political discource.

Scholarship on homonationalism by Jasbir Puar, and others, has already begun to explore how Western queer identity is complicated and problematized. As a platform for claiming standing to pursue human rights, Western queer subject positions produce Islamophobia inside the US and in US foreign policy and entangle with white supremacy. This paper considers how Jewish identity (both mainstream and “alternative”) particularly when mobilized as a platform to claim the authority to challenge Zionism and advocate for human rights, is similarly complicated by relatively new connections to white supremacy.

The paper uses materials and events produced by “MJOs” (major Jewish organizations) and alternative Jewish groups, from Yiddish revivalists to anti-Zionists, to trace the cultural production of modern “Jewishness,” and follows their paths to Jewish voicing of ideas about race and security around Israel and Islam. It locates those voices as the context within which Palestinian, Muslim and other groups’ voices are interpreted or obscured in public discourse, and examines the permissions and restrictions applied to each by the lenses of race and state.

Author

• Emmaia Gelman, New York University (NY)