We have your back.
We will be revolutionaries in your revolution.
Soldiers in your war against the oppressive systems that seek to divide us.
We come at this differently but our liberation is ultimately intertwined. We both seek freedom from historical oppression.
But we’re coming as our true selves because it’s our experiences of oppression and revolution that give our voice weight. For centuries, they oppressed us. Systematically excluded and forced us into positions unnatural to us, all to create a buffer group between an oppressive ruling class and the masses.
We were a convenient scapegoat. Our leadership took steps to disassociate ourselves from our own Jewishness. We did everything we could to become white, to transform our identity to a religious one, to cling to power. We were still oppressed except now without the freedom to even be ourselves.
Centuries of trauma pushed us to do everything we could to gain inclusion into whiteness, to promote it, so that they’d stop killing us, and yet they still chant “Jews will not replace us!”
We advanced the claim of “Judeo-Christian” values, asserting that the West is our home, as the ashes of our people rose in Auschwitz chimneys.
To reclaim our true identity, we must fight alongside you.
We must, in order to advance our own liberation, to save our identity from erasure, fight your fight.
While you have no choice, we must choose the right side of history. We must choose to uproot injustice, to stand up against oppression. Our Torah demands it, our history demands it. Our mission demands it.
The very systems that oppress black and indigenous peoples in the Americas perfected those methods and systems on us. The same structures responsible for the murder of George Floyd have used our people as a shield against the pride of the oppressed. The structures that have created a middle oppressor of the Jew have systematically displaced indigenous peoples and subjected them to Residential Schools.
The president of the United States has continued to polarize the situation on the ground, ostensibly creating two camps, ANTIFA and everyone else. His call to designate ANTIFA as a terrorist organization raises so many questions.
First, since ANTIFA is not an organization, but rather tactics and a broad collective of anti-fascists, is this merely open season on dissent? A political round up?
Secondly, what does this mean of the United States if anti-fascist activism is treasonous? The state has declared war on my people’s ancient universalist vision.
If fighting oppression equals terrorism, you can label us with that word. We must resist injustice by any means necessary.
Part of our tshuva is standing against your oppression. It returns us to a proud legacy and helps us regain who we are.
When we fought the Seleucid Empire, it was a resistance to their arrogant worldview that saw us as savages. They sought to impose their culture worshipping narrow rationalism and the human body on us and everyone else.
We fought their successors, the Romans. We fought so hard that we inspired several other revolts across their empire.
We fought the brutality of Nazism in the worst of conditions. We went down with a fight in the ghettos and forests. We fought fascism on their home turf, in the conditions that they set. We fought their notions of superiority. We fought because it’s who we are. We fought because we had no choice.
We fought the British Empire, driving them from our homeland. We fought their divide and conquer tactics. We fought their exploitation of our resources, and ethnic tensions. We fought the doctrines that drove colonialism.
In this spirit, we must fight alongside you, because it is who we are. It’s natural to us. We fight injustice, we root out oppression and it’s time to join oppressed peoples on the frontlines.
We must fight this system that oppresses the peoples living under its thumb. We must fight its one-size-fits-all consumerism as we fought the Seleucid Empire. We must resist its imperialism as we resisted Rome. We must fight police brutality as we fought Nazi occupation. We must rise up against divide and rule tactics as we did against the British Empire. We must fight for George Floyd, for Regis Korchinski-Paquet, for Trayvon Martin, for Sandra Bland; but we must also fight for Moses, Yehuda Maccabi, Elazar ben-Yair, Mordekhai Anielewicz, Yair Stern and the legacy of our people.
We must listen as experienced allies with not only a painful history of oppression but also a legacy of revolution. We mustn’t come to lead but to follow. As we have in many struggles prior, we will all contribute in our own unique way.
