Michael Harris responds to Isaac Hart on Ethnic Studies

To the Editors:

As someone who has been deeply involved in the Ethnic Studies controversy in California since 2019, I appreciated Isaac Hart’s article “Beating, Not Joining, Ethnic Studies.”  He correctly notes many of the problems that arise from trying to fit the Jewish experience in America into the rigid “oppressor-oppressed” binary framework of Critical Ethnic Studies. It should be noted that of the two lessons on Jewish Americans in the final state-adopted Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, the one from which the specific quotes are taken was submitted by JCRC Bay Area. The other lesson, submitted by JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), is far more successful at avoiding the trap of redefining the Jewish experience solely on the terms prescribed by Critical Ethnic Studies.

However, there is one point which he made which I think deserves a deeper discussion: “In its preface, the curriculum stresses that its focus will be on ‘African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.’ Other minorities, including Jews, remain strictly secondary, and some prominent American ethnic groups rate almost no discussion at all (the word ‘Italian’ gets five mentions; the word ‘Irish,’ one).”  I think there is a very valid case to be made that the first groups mentioned, referred to in Ethnic Studies literature as the “four foundational groups” of the discipline, have indeed been the recipients of the harshest forms of racism and discrimination in this country.  Within the past 60 years, anti-Jewish discrimination in many sectors of American life has disappeared (which, unfortunately, we cannot say has occurred for antisemitism, especially where it hides behind the cover of anti-Zionism, most notably in academia). Yet racist attitudes and de facto discrimination (extending into de jure, as with voting districts deliberately drawn to dilute the electoral strength of Black Americans) against those groups appear to be rooted far more deeply into a wide swath of American society than are seen against, say, Irish Americans or Italian Americans.

The American Jewish experience, especially our recent successes in overcoming employment and housing discrimination, absolutely should be included in Ethnic Studies courses. But we must also appreciate that other groups have not been able to come as far as we have, and extra attention to their histories need not invalidate ours. Dahlia Lithwick and Masua Sagiv, in their piece “Between Charlottesville and Jerusalem”, put it well: “Reckoning with the suffering of other marginalized groups in no way reduces the real and growing fear of anti-Jewish hate and violence…. Jews have always been experts at navigating complexities, balancing our responsibilities to protect ourselves while also helping others. This is the time to model such nuance, explicitly and loudly.”