The Cost of Speaking Over Our Own Margins |
In recent years, a familiar claim has taken hold in American Jewish cultural discourse: Jews are powerful. We are wealthy. We are influential. We dominate media, publishing, law, finance, and culture.
From this premise flows a related argument: that Jewish self-conceptions of vulnerability are outdated, even dishonest, and that Jewish writers, thinkers, and institutions must tell new stories, ones that confront Jewish dominance, moral failure, and complicity.
On its face, this call sounds serious, even necessary. But beneath it lies a troubling assumption: that “Jewish power” is a coherent, shared condition, and that those most eager to theorize it are representative of the Jewish people as a whole.
They are not.
When One Jewish Experience Becomes the Whole
Much of today’s conversation about Jewish power is being driven by elite American and Western European Ashkenazi voices, writers, academics, and commentators who enjoy cultural capital, institutional access, and physical distance from the consequences of the realities they analyze.
Their power is real. Their influence is real.
But their vantage point is not neutral. It is privileged. And when it is universalized as the Jewish story, entire Jewish communities are rendered invisible.
This is not an argument about erasing Ashkenazi suffering or denying Jewish trauma. It is an argument about how institutional visibility and cultural authority shape which Jewish experiences come to stand in for the whole.
As an........