Why Put Our Face on It?
Beckee Birger • Age 36
Educator and Director of Kumi, Educator and 2024 Pomegranate Prize Winner, Chicago, Illinois
For the seven years I’ve been working with Jewish teens, I’ve asked “What do you think is the biggest issue facing Jewish teens today?” This year, for the first time, essentially every teen named some form of antisemitism. A lot of them understood antisemitism as a power cycle.
One group of teens discussed the way antisemitism often functions: Jews are put as the middlemen between two groups of people. We are meant to be what looks like the face of power. The teens had a frame of reference: that Jews, for example, had historically been used as tax collectors because it made them the face of collecting money for the actual rulers. And the teens started to make the connections: Oh, Jews didn’t just happen to choose this profession. It was the only work that was available to them. That was an intentional choice by people who had more power than the Jews and could use Jews against other communities. I could see the light bulbs going on: “Oh, right. When we say that it’s like conspiracies about power, there has to be someone with actual power.”
I think it really comes down to how we understand antisemitism functioning as a cycle, and as a system. Antisemitism is dependent on noticing the bad things that are happening in the world, and that Jews are suspected to be the shadowy puppeteers behind them. I’m watching that sort of antisemitism happen in the news right now—totally bipartisan—in the number of politicians who have said something like, “I’m doing this to protect the Jews: I’m enacting this legislation. I’m calling in the National Guard.”
Well when these actions become unpopular—or if they’re unpopular to begin with—I do not hear Jewish communities countering with, “When you say you’re doing these unpopular things in our name, that’s actually antisemitic.” And I think this happens in part because the attention gives us that false sense of security and connection: Look, someone’s listening to us. Look, someone cares about us. Look, someone’s thinking about us. And we sometimes will stop the inquiry there, instead of interrogating. Why is this person in power doing a thing and saying that it’s about “us”? Why put our face on it?
We could be asking: how do we build strong relationships with other communities that may fall victim to believing these conspiracy theories and build bridges so they can see that the conspiracy theories are not real? That’s a different way to combat antisemitism.
(as told to Rebecca Katz)
