Where Do We Look for Safety?

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of hanging with Ilana Kaufman and members of the staff and board of the Jews of Color Initiative. During our time together, several people mentioned a public conversation Ilana had with historian Marc Dollinger. When I got home, I looked it up on YouTube. Much of the conversation centered on the revised edition of Marc Dollinger’s book Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s and the conversation that led to Ilana writing the afterward for his book.

One part of the conversation stood out to me because it sounds very similar to things I’ve been saying for a long time. I just love how Ilana phrases it.

In this era of rising antisemitism, I continue to hear white Jews talk about their fear. I hear some talking about taking off their kippot, removing a Star of David necklace, hiding other outward signs of Jewishness, or avoiding multifaith and multiracial spaces altogether, hoping those choices will keep them safe.

I do understand the fear behind those choices and I think it’s important to recognize why some would make these choices.

Then Ilana asked the audience to notice something else. For Jews who are perceived as white, there’s an option available in moments of fear: become less visibly Jewish and move through the world simply as white.

As a Black person, I cannot take off my Blackness before walking into a store. Black people cannot remove our Blackness when we encounter the police. People whose bodies are racialized as brown cannot remove that racialization when they enter an airport or walk into a space wondering how they’ll be received.

For many white Jews, Jewishness can sometimes become less visible but whiteness remains visible.

And that raises a question I wish more in the Jewish community would wrestle with:

Where do we look for safety?

This week we read Shoftim, a Torah portion concerned with power and how we use it. Torah places limits on the king’s power, commanding him to keep Torah close so “his heart does not become elevated above his kin” (Deuteronomy 17:20). The fear isn’t only that a king might abuse his power. It’s that power has a way of making people forget who they belong to. Proximity to power tempts a person to stop seeing his own kin, his own vulnerability, in the people who don’t have what he has.

Earlier generations of Jewish immigrants learned how to assimilate into whiteness, which last names to soften, which neighborhoods would have them, which colleges had stopped counting Jews against a quota and which hadn’t. That’s what access to whiteness bought: doors that opened if you were willing to blend into what was on the other side of them.

But what happens when blending in becomes our strategy for safety?

What if the privilege that allows some Jews to move through the world as white becomes something we use to move toward others rather than retreat into when we are afraid?

I don’t believe our safety will come from our proximity to whiteness. I believe our safety is tied to everyone whose safety is threatened by racial and religious supremacy.

That means Jewish safety is connected to the safety of Black people, immigrants, Muslims, queer and trans people. And their safety is connected to ours.

To me, that is deeply Jewish. Our lives are bound together. We are responsible for one another. We should remember what it means to be vulnerable, and that memory should shape how we show up for other people.

Ilana also speaks powerfully about what Black experience can teach us about freedom: the ability to imagine a future, to know who you are without allowing someone else to define you, and to carry that knowledge openly.

I want a Jewish community confident enough to live visibly and joyfully as Jews while building deep relationships across difference. A community that sees solidarity as strength. I also want us to recognize the different ways we move through the world. A white Jew wearing a Star of David and a Black Jew wearing a Star of David may both experience antisemitism. Race shapes that experience and the choices available to us when we are afraid.

Maybe we should ask:

When we are afraid, where do we seek safety?

And what might become possible if we seek it in one another?

I encourage you to watch the conversation between Ilana Kaufman and Marc Dollinger. Ilana gives us a lot to think about. I hope it sparks conversation with you and your communities, too.