To only briefly touch upon the “Islamophobia” aspect, both Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory are deeply invested in the support for Palestine, by which is more specifically meant the utter destruction of Israel and anti-Zionism. Even the Queer Theorists are in on this.
Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory sees that the existence of Israel at all is a colonial conquest of Palestine, thus a last lingering full-blown move of Western colonialism into “brown” and Eastern (read: Islamic) territory, thus intolerable.
Theory across the board protects Islamist anti-Seminism (and other horrors, like Muslim grooming gangs that target white women for sex abuses), because it would be “racist” and “colonialist” to denounce these horrors because that requires a “white, Western” perspective.
Light-skinned (and often other) Jews are Theorized as having been granted the status of “whiteness,” with this being extremely obvious with Jews whose skin is actually quite pale. This means that Jews, in CRT, have an intolerable privilege they need to check. But, Jews have a history of legitimate oppression, including imperial destruction, diaspora, enslavement, and a literal genocide in the Holocaust. They are victims historically, including of “the West.”
As with the related concept of “brown privilege,” which assigns to “brown” people a very uncomfortable position of being Theoretically “anti-Black” and yet “not white,” Jews are Theoretically assigned whiteness with a HUGE, defensible claim on legitimate systemic oppression.
This combination is intolerable to CRT. CRT would demand that Jews atone of their whiteness by recognizing it and critiquing it and submitting to CRT, which identifies them indelibly as white (including by success), yet their legitimate claim to systemic oppression prevents it.
Jewish people therefore fall into a very dangerous spot within Theory: they have a legitimate reason not to “do the work” while “enjoying the benefits” of whiteness, in many respects more than most other people. This is an intolerable contradiction that will demand resolution.
The Critical Whiteness aspect of CRT holds that Jews have been granted Whiteness by whites but bc they retain their historical victimhood statuses, they enjoy an even further privilege of getting a kind of “false” victimhood status as well.
his set of contradictions has also led some (fringe) elements within Social Justice to begin to deny the Holocaust entirely, which cannot be seen as a welcome development, especially in a broader context where the far right has been doing the same and muddying those waters.
More commonly, it has led Theorists to say things (as went quite viral earlier this year) that Anne Frank is only relevant because of her Whiteness and wouldn’t be an interesting story (or part of the Western canon) if she hadn’t been white.
So, add in the stuff where they elevate Muslims to a highly protected status and their protectionism for Palestine, they also tend to see Zionism as a colonialist movement (at best) that has been literally infected with (literal) Nazi ideology (at worst), and it’s truly scary.
The anti-Semitism in Critical Race Theory isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when terrible identity-based Theory rooted in victimhood can’t resolve real-world contradictions, and it currently bears every unmistakable sign of being a real threat to Jews everywhere.
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