Are Jews the Punchline?

Antisemitism comes for my progressive think tank

I promised to send the DJ a list of our favorite karaoke songs, but forgot. 

I’d returned to work ahead of schedule, following a car crash and traumatic brain injury, to write a book for my think tank. After my co-author left to run the Biden transition team, I shepherded the book to publication, organized a book tour, and spent a year on zoom promoting the book.

My brain, which had recovered enough to work, was coming undone. I slipped on ice and broke my wrist, requiring a surgeon to screw my bones together with plastic bolts. My father-in-law was nearing death following a long and brutal illness. My father was months from entering hospice. We were amidst another Covid wave. And now the DJ was setting up. 

Covid Blizzard Bat Mitzvah with Sling

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I got you.”

He surveyed the guests as they dripped into the party, slushy from the morning’s snow, hungry from a Kiddush we’d foolishly skimped on. (Never skimp on a Kiddush, FFS, what was I thinking?)

“You like Frank Sinatra, right?”

“Oh, no,” I laughed. “Those are Italians. We’re Jews. This is at Bat Mitzvah.” Except I left out everything after “oh no.”

My personal life was a tornado — not only had I forgotten to send the song list, I’d accidentally booked two DJs. But I had my dream job, finally drawing a salary as a writer. I wanted to stay with my think tank forever and ever, writing and thinking about technology, systems and humanity.

We’d been covering the Covid response at work, and I was in overdrive. My team held a press conference explaining why vaccine websites were terrible. We studied whether exposure notification apps worked. We covered stories about Covid-related success where we could find them. In Alaska, the vaccine traveled to indigenous towns by dogsled.

And in Israel, in the early days of the pandemic, the vaccination rate was nearly 100%.

“But they didn’t vaccinate the Palestinians,” my co-Director messaged, when I pointed to Israel as another story we could cover.

This conversation happened over Slack, obviously.

“You mean Palestinian Israelis or Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank?” I asked. 

“Israel is an apartheid state,” she replied, helpfully sharing links that said Israel Is An Apartheid State. 

“That is a weird distortion of facts. I have family in Israel, and have spent a lot of time there,” I replied. “You have been so helpful in sharing your lived experience with me. I’d love to share my story with you.”

No response. My lived experience was not interesting. I didn’t know then that I was getting a preview of future Jewish life.

We’d jointly taken over leadership of the team from our boss months earlier. I’d been running the team for a while, she’d been running a smaller program in the same space — why not join forces?

We checked in weekly, often overstaying our allotted time to discuss the latest horrible story in the news. I was reading a lot about immigration policy at the time, and must have mentioned something about Jewish immigrants arriving with a different history than Italians or Irish.

“So there are different kinds of White people?” she asked. 

“I’m not White.” It was silly, all these people misunderstanding who I was in a place and time where identity was everything.

“What do you think you are, if you’re not White?” she asked. 

I chose to overlook the condescension. “I’m Jewish.” 

“But Jews are White.”

“Not in my experience.” I still thought I could explain Jews then.

The truth was, I knew my own experience, but not much about my family’s history. As Jews, we talked about absolutely everything all the time, except the Holocaust and Pogroms, which were never mentioned. I knew only hand-wavy trauma, saw the numbers on my cousins’ wrinkled forearms, felt the undercurrent of sadness running through every Jewish holiday. 

I was thinking a lot about Jews and Jewish American history, and how we didn’t fit into the whole White/POC binary my think tank was suddenly pushing. It seemed like a good time to research and write about my Jewish family.

“Jews are always the punchline, aren’t they?” asked CoDirector.

The first image you get when you search for “funny Jews,” because all Jews are Hassidic men with large pinky rings.

Were Jews always the punchline? 

“What do you mean?” I gave her the chance to clarify, to explain that she was not saying something offensive and racist. 

“I mean they’re always the punchline.”

I repeated the sentence to my husband, hoping he would explain how this was a totally normal comment.

“Sounds pretty antisemitic,”he said. “What does that even mean?”

In our weekly check-ins, I slowly got more Jewish. She pushed back by asking me to explain Jared Kushner.

“Wut,” I said. 

Was this progressive think tank Director, with whom I exchanged furious texts about the right’s mischaracterization of Critical Race Theory, asking me to account for a garbage human with whom I happened to share an ethnic background?

“How do you explain Clarence Thomas?” I winced. I hoped she’d find the question painful and idiotic enough to rethink the one she’d posed to me.

Instead, she considered the question and shrugged. “I don’t know how you explain Clarence Thomas.” In her world, I should be able to explain Jared Kushner, she should be able to explain Clarence Thomas, and those were valid questions one might ask a person based solely on their ethnicity.

Then my brain gave out. Traumatic brain injury presents in ways I didn’t fully understand yet. The slip on the ice set my brain recovery back. I’d been struggling through work, then booked two DJs. But I had no more medical or vacation time left.

After I muddled through my daughter’s bat-mitzvah and wrapped up my final piece of research, I handed over leadership of the team to CoDirector and went on unpaid leave for the summer. When I returned, our collective boss had a proposal for me: 6 months to research and write the Jewish book idea I’d been kicking around for a while.

It sounded good, but I worked for lifelong political animals. Rather than fire people, they provided them an enticing off-ramp. I’d watched it happen. It had to look good, so the person would never know they’d been offloaded. Sometimes the dead weight got passed to another team. Sometimes they were sent to the Biden Administration, which struck me as a terrible strategy for renewing America, but what did I know?

“Is this a gift or an off-ramp?” I asked.

“I think it’s a gift?” my boss replied.

I was to submit drafts of my book proposal to CoDirector, who would oversee the fellowship. She didn’t know anything about books, proposals, or my topic. But I trusted my boss had my back. Also, I didn’t really have a choice — I was broken and needed time to heal.

When I submitted draft proposals for my book to CoDirector for feedback, the response I got back was … antisemitic? At a progressive think tank? My brain tried to reprocess and reframe the conversation in a thousand ways that weren’t antisemitic, even though the woman clearly had deeply embedded antisemitic views. Because you know who really really really doesn’t want things to be antisemitic? Jews. 

Jews hate calling out antisemitism, and we will turn ourselves into pretzels to prove something blatantly antisemitic is just good ‘ole American freedom of speech. But as time went on, the antisemitism became tough to explain away.

“I never thought of Jews as being indigenous,” CoDirector said. 

She was my boss now. Our shared boss did not have my back. She’d moved to the think tank’s board in the middle of my fellowship. I now reported to someone who had issues with me beyond the content of my character.

There is no response to being told your ethnicity is not indigenous to anywhere. Well, the Shoah is a response.

I sent over a final, polished proposal at the end of the fellowship.

“I was surprised to find I resonated with parts of your story,” she wrote. 

I wasn’t surprised. I’d written the proposal in part to explain my ethnicity to my team, CoDirector, and the entire think tank. Nonetheless, CoDirector would not be renewing my fellowship, as previously discussed. She was moving the program in another direction. The think tank was moving in a similar direction. One that did not require any Jews. I should apply to the organization’s writing fellowship, which would surely support my work. Or get a job. Either of those things would be easily attainable for me, a Jew with money, privilege and connections.

I applied for five fellowships across a range of progressive and academic spaces, listing my White House experience, my five books, the team I’d run for 5 years at my think tank, and providing recommendations from the head of my think tank and my boss.

I wasn’t asked for a single interview. Not even at my own think tank. No one was looking to fund Jewish American stories. Or Jews, who were White and also controlling the banks and the media, so didn’t need any help, duh.

At the same time, I’d been shopping around a non-profit proposal for tackling the wealth gap. But no one would fund me for that line of work either. A Jew working on equity issues was a White savior. No one was funding White saviors. If you were a Jew working on Jewish issues, no one was funding that either because Jews? Feh. Do we need to hear more about Jews?

I began to apply for jobs. Every application wanted to know my ethnicity, but not one provided a checkbox for me to answer factually. It didn’t matter. Never, in the history of time, has a hiring manager said, “You know what this organization needs? More Jewish women.”

This all happened before Hamas slaughtered thousands of Jews for being Jewish in the wrong place at the wrong time, before people I worked with in the White House praised the slaughter, before Israel responded. What I didn’t know then was that my story was not unique.

In the year since, I’ve interviewed Jewish colleagues, friends and relatives who have been pushed out of academic and progressive spaces.

“Jews call everything antisemitism, so how do you know when it’s really antisemitism?” an employee asked a Jewish VP at an organization I profiled in my last book. The employee was not fired or disciplined. The Jewish VP left a field she’d worked in for most of her career.

I’ve talked to Jewish professors and college students who are leaving their jobs or transferring schools. I have a folder of antisemitic activity from a California school that is so excruciating I had to read it in ten minute increments. And finally, I visited family in Israel, where I hadn’t been for 30 years, and spoke with Israelis up and down the country while bombs exploded and sirens wailed.

Over the next few posts, I’ll begin bearing witness to the parasitic spread of antisemitism across US progressive spaces. You haven’t heard this story yet, because Jews are afraid to speak out. They are afraid for their jobs, their families, and their future in America.

My boss did give me a gift. Without a job, I am not beholden to funders or an organization. I have the privilege of being able to speak truth to power, and the time to do it (in between job and fellowship applications). You could even say, I did it my way, but I won’t. Jews have our own word: chutzpah.

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