Virtue Signaling, Jewish Identity, and the Blind Spot in Plain Sight |
The Exception to Everything We Thought We Learned About DEI
As a child of Holocaust survivors, I know, in my bones, what it costs a people to be erased.
Over the years I have served as Chair of the Jewish Community Relations Council and as diversity training vendor for private firms and public agencies — roles that put me in rooms where bias was named and accountability was expected. I have seen what it looks like when a community is targeted and the people around them look the other way.
So I want to be thoughtful here. I have never been comfortable with competitive victimhood — the idea that suffering is a currency to be traded, that your pain grants you standing only if it ranks high enough on someone else’s scale. I reject that framing. I refuse to participate in the “victim olympics” however prevalent those narratives have become.
But I am watching and experiencing something happen right now that I cannot stay quiet about.
Over the past year, I have watched colleagues — people I respect, people who have marched and organized and put their careers on the line for justice — quietly scrape their Jewish identity off their public profiles. Not because they’ve stopped being Jewish. Because they are weighing the cost.
What makes this especially painful is where the pressure is coming from. This is not the old antisemitism........