Chicano/a Jews and Gentiles and a “Hook” of a Different Color
I am a U.S.-born Catholic Chicano man. I’m focusing on developing Indigenous and Global Majority leadership and resources and on leading Gentiles in eliminating anti-Jewish oppression.
In Anti-Semitism: Why Is It Everyone’s Concern? and Black Re-emergence No. 14, Cherie Brown and Barbara Love write about “the hook” between Black people and Jews—how racism and anti-Jewish oppression collide to keep African-heritage people and white Ashkenazi Jews separated from each other.
There also seems to be a “hook” for Chicano/a Gentiles and Jews.
Chicanos/as have heavy patterns of silence and invisibility. Jews often have huge recordings of assimilation and invisibility. For Chicano/a Jews, these distress patterns can reinforce each other.
Gentiles, including Chicano/a Gentiles, often don’t notice anti-Jewish oppression unless it’s extreme. By “extreme” I mean unless a Holocaust-level event is occurring.
We Chicano/a Gentiles also often don’t recognize that we have Chicano/a Jews in our communities. We tend to believe that all Jews are white Ashkenazi and that all Chicanos/as were raised Catholic or at least Christian. We tend to think in homogeneous terms, but Chicano/a people are not a monolithic community.
When a Chicano/a Gentile has been antisemitic and doesn’t apologize, and no other Gentile interrupts the pattern because it wasn’t horrific, a Chicano/a Jewish person is left with limited options. Since the anti-Jewish oppression wasn’t horrific (no one was actively targeting a Jewish person for death), they seem to have no reason to interrupt the Chicano/a Gentile’s antisemitic behavior.
Also, to interrupt it could restimulate the Jewish person’s recordings of fear and terror. They could feel like they might be targeted for death or expelled from their birth constituency. Sephardic Crypto-Jews [Jews who keep their Judaism secret and profess to have another faith] and Conversos [Jews who convert to Catholicism] have been pushed out of Chicano/a communities. Also, as I have witnessed, the expulsion may not be overt but more similar to “exile by a thousand microaggressions.”
The Chicano/a Jewish person’s silence reinforces the assumption that anti-Jewish oppression isn’t occurring and the lie that there are no Jews in the Chicano/a constituency.
The silence of the Chicano/a Gentiles is antisemitic. It requires that the Jewish person be the barometer for the Gentiles’ behavior, when it is not the Jewish person’s responsibility to point out anti-Jewish oppression.
In unity,
Port Isabel, Texas, USA
(Present Time 209, October 2022)