Envisioning Solidarity

JVL Introduction

In the wake of the appalling machete attack on the Hasidic community in Monsey at the end of December, the editors of Jewish Currents engage with the real problems the Jewish left faces as it stands accused – unfairly – of not standing in solidarity.

The establishment has used these attacks on as a new occasion for specious, irrelevant attacks on BDS and its proponents. Calls have been made to flood communities of colour with ever more police, or for Jews to set up vigilante groups. But these voices do not come from within the Hasidic community itself which is being used as a pawn in a different game.

Responses from within the Hasidic community are far more nuanced. As one of them, Shimon Rolnitzky, wrote: “The natural friends of Orthodox Jews are other minority communities next to whom we live. A large part of the black, Latino and Muslim communities, our neighbors, look at us religious Jews as their natural allies against a world of enmity and hate.”

Solidarity of this kind is difficult to build practice, as the authors of this text understand, and their conclusion is worth quoting at length:

“We can help envision and enact a meaningful practice of solidarity—and thus an investment in lasting security—beyond tweets and rallies and conversations: a real, substantial alternative to the right’s vision of endless guns, omnipresent state security, and the further entrenchment of deep-seated racial divisions. Solidarity is not the thing we do in the meantime, while we solve pressing questions of security. The building of a better world is the security strategy itself. “

This article was originally published by Jewish Currents on Mon 6 Jan 2020. Read the original here.