Museums Respond, Sort Of

An open letter to Laura Mandel of JArts.

Camille Pissarro, Orchard in Bloom,1872 (source)

Dear Ms. Mandel,

Thank you for the recent missive describing your time at the “Museums Respond: Strategies for Countering Antisemitism and Hate” summit in Washington, D.C. While I support such efforts in a general sense, and the White House’s recognition of your organization merits congratulation, I have concerns about the conclusions you formed.

Any response from the museums at this point will be made in light of their neglect to say anything about the October 7 massacres promptly, if at all. Having established precedent by making high-profile public statements on behalf of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and Ukraine in 2022, their silence after the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust sent an unmistakable message to Jews and Jew-haters alike, that Jewish lives don’t matter. It would have been best if they had also made no statements about BLM or Ukraine. But they did, and their decision not to communicate with their audiences commensurately regarding October 7 was an abdication of responsibility. Their rediscovery of moral neutrality was identical to the rediscovery of legal neutrality regarding free speech at the universities, for which a galled public rightly excoriated the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT in December, as it was contradicted by recent institutional history and quickly re-implemented at the expense of Jewish comfort, safety, and expectation of equal treatment.

Your first takeaway, “We need to be clearer in sharing and messaging what Jewish culture is,” is agreeable. It depends on receptive audiences that we may not have, but someone must attempt it. The same goes for your third takeaway, “We need more Jewish learning opportunities in public spaces.” Your fourth, “We need more ways to talk to kids about antisemitism so that they understand how it appears in their lives and feel confident in their ability to combat it,” is inarguable.

Your second takeaway, “Exposure to Jewish diversity is critical,” threatens to undermine the other three.

Antisemitism is based on age-old Jewish conspiracy theories that intentionally paint Jews as white colonizers. Therefore, exposure to Jewish diversity is necessary to debunk this myth and to illustrate the reality of our diasporic people. As my colleague Rabbi Kendell Pinkney said, “We Jewish artists of color can act as bridges across communities.” JArts has long been committed to exploring Jewish diversity, and now is the moment to double down as we recognize that this is not yet common enough in this field and our community.

The problem with this is apparent if you aim it the other way, politically: imagine the proposal that we Jews should build bridges to white supremacists with demonstrations that we exemplify whiteness and good white values. Progressive Jew-hatred is as you describe it, characterizing Jews as white colonizers. Conservative Jew-hatred is premised on the notion of Jews as imposter whites. Both regard us as objectionably white, but the objections are opposite. The conservative antisemites believe that we are polluting whiteness with non-whiteness. The progressive antisemites believe that we participate in the irreparable failings of white culture, cannot help but oppress non-whites, and do so with particular vigor. As the global response to October 7 demonstrated, one of these is not less pernicious than the other.

The solution is not to explain to the progressives that we are good practitioners of diversity and that a subset of our population is “of color,” but to defy illiberal progressive race politics with the same energy that we defy illiberal conservative race politics. Even if we convinced white supremacists that we were good whites, they would continue to regard other races as inferior. Likewise, illiberal progressives might be softened by outreach from “Jewish artists of color” but that won’t remedy their beliefs about Jews or anyone else not “of color.”

Instead, we must insist on liberal race politics, in which race, however consequential, is subordinate to the multifaceted nature of individual personhood. Liberal race politics also holds that race, as such, is a convenience of taxonomy and not something more substantive. (Race, to paraphrase Bret Weinstein, is a weak approximation of phenotype.) Liberalism is more interested in ethnicity, which is a flexible but real organizing principle with somatic and cultural components, than race, which at its base is pseudo-biology. Liberalism assumes and emphasizes common humanity. It esteems tolerance, reason, and dialogue. It recognizes that every culture of the earth has done both wonderful and terrible things, but assumes in each case that the latter are aberrant and the former are true to its best nature. The art of that liberalism should reflect those values.

Pace Rabbi Pinkney, the designation “of color” ought to be regarded similarly to “quadroon,” indicating something wrong with the soul of the person using it. In the 19th century, an English scientist named John Beddoe worked out an “index of nigrescence” upon which Jews scored 100%. This wasn’t a political designation; the author was a medical expert on melanin. From that standpoint, all Jews are “of color.” From this one can conclude that some whites are people of color, or more sensibly, that the distinction between the two—however it may comport with observation—is tendentious hogwash and we ought to find better ways to regard one another. Jews, especially, should not use it regarding themselves. It is an artifact of what amounts to a progressive analogue of Aryanism.

Lastly, it behooves all concerned with this problem to admit that illiberal progressive race politics are embedded in the arts institutions, perhaps even your own to some degree. So long as that remains the case, an organization implementing measures to combat antisemitism will be like a car with one wheel rolling forward while the other three spin in reverse. Eliminating those politics and returning to premises of universalism will do more to combat antisemitism than an express war on antisemitism will accomplish with destructive assumptions in place.

Best,

Franklin Einspruch

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

Our next book for the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito. Obtain your copy and jump in. For more information see the ASBC schedule.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.