opinion
Jews Don’t Need a Heritage Month,
and Neither Does Anyone Else
Jonathan Tobin
F or some community members, it’s exactly what
Jews have always wanted and needed. In 2006,
following up on a resolution passed by Congress,
President George W. Bush was the first to declare May
to be Jewish American Heritage Month. His successors
have happily done the same.

President Joe Biden’s proclamation is full of the
same fulsome praise for the role that Jews have played
in the history of this republic, similar to Presidents
Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and, like theirs, is
peppered with self-referential language seeking to
position himself as a true friend of the community. As
has become the custom and much like the way other
declarations of other months, weeks or days dedicated
to various ethnic, racial and religious groups, as well as
a never-ending list of philanthropic causes and efforts,
the states have chimed in with their own proclamations.

The fuss made over Jewish American Heritage Month
may not equal that accorded celebrations such as
those for Black History (February), Hispanic Heritage
(September), Women’s History (March) or LGBTQ+ Pride
(June), and it does have to share May with Asian
American & Pacific Islander Heritage. But it is gaining
a lot more attention with each passing year. And a lot
of serious people, including those who are advocates
in the battle against antisemitism like former U.S. State
Department Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism
Elan Carr, think it ought to be made an even bigger deal.

This pleases a lot of people in the Jewish community
who have long thought that Jewish history deserved to be
singled out. To an older generation of Jews that remem-
ber a time when Jewish participation in mainstream
culture was noteworthy and a source of great pride to a
community largely made up of immigrants struggling for
acceptance, any amount of hoopla made over Jewish
American Heritage Month is especially satisfying.

But there’s more to this than a group ego trip. Many
believe that promoting interest in Jewish life and
history among the general population can play a role
in combating antisemitism.

Carr agrees with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the
Anti-Defamation League, that May ought to be a time
when schools teach their students about American
Jewish history, and the ADL and other organizations
post links to curricula along those lines. The consen-
sus among mainstream entities is that such efforts
can promote awareness of antisemitism. They believe
that teaching kids about the way Jews have played an
important role in U.S. history and achieved distinction
in just about every field imaginable can help undermine
16 MAY 11, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
the surge of antisemitic hate.

They think that all the recognition given to Jews in
this manner will, in Greenblatt’s words, “help us build
understanding and allyship.”
One can only hope they’re right, though those who
are committed to this idea ought to give a thought to
the way that the far greater focus on Holocaust educa-
tion has largely failed to achieve a similar goal.

Still, there’s nothing wrong about Jews celebrating
their often-influential role in the story of America. But the
impulse for Jews to get their own “month” alongside that
of other minorities is part of something that goes beyond
the natural desire to see our ancestors celebrated.

Seeking victim status
At the heart of all these “months” is a desire to get in on
the same intersectional victim racket that is doing such
damage to the country. While a laudable pride in Jewish
identity is clearly something the promoters of this idea
want to support, Jews don’t need congressional or
presidential proclamations, or an official Google Doodle
caricature about this commemoration (the absence of
which has led to some complaints) to do that. Nor, I
might add, do all the other communities eager to pro-
mote their special months need any of this either.

Much like the effort to include Jewish history in
ethnic studies courses, the insistence on breaking
down American identity in this way is related to critical
race theory and its insistence that we define ourselves
solely as members of groups rather than as individuals.

We are right to want to draw attention to antisemitism.

But in the intersectional playing field in which “allyship”
to those who are labeled as oppressed minorities (which
in practice generally means to admit guilt for sins of the
past even if you or your group had nothing to do with
those sins), Jews are always going to be considered as
not as oppressed as other groups. In the current context,
curricula about specific groups inevitably become a
competition for victimhood where groups labeled as
oppressed in the intersectional dialectic — a status that
is denied Jews, who are labeled as “white” and therefore
implicitly in the wrong — will always prevail.

Carving up American history
Americans need to re-emphasize the study of their
history which has been downgraded in recent decades.

If we were serious about creating an atmosphere
of public discourse in which antisemitism could be
marginalized and eradicated, Jews would not be
joining the line of those seeking to carve out pieces of
American history to be apportioned among the groups
with their own months. In fact, it is via the process by
which the general narrative of this country has been
changed from one that centers on the American nation
and its leaders as a whole into one that instead focuses
on minorities of various kinds or other demographic
subsets where we have lost the thread of our history.

The founders of this republic may not have been as
diverse as contemporary America, but men like George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and
Alexander Hamilton belong to all of us today, which is
something that composer Lin Manuel Miranda made
plain in his hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” when he
cast them all as non-white minorities.

In that same way, later generations who were consid-
ered great in various fields of endeavor — be they
jurists like Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, or composers like George Gershwin,
Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein — similarly
belong to all Americans, and not just their fellow Jews,
without it being labeled “cultural appropriation.”
The diversity obsession
Though to say it is to fly against the fashionable yet mad
desire to remake society in the image of the woke cate-
chism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), in addition
to the belief that all who are not “people of color” are
privileged and inherently racist, what we need today
is fewer special months and an emphasis on diversity.

This racialization of society has helped create an atmo-
sphere where groups like Jews are more easily singled
out for opprobrium. What we need is more unity and
Americans of all colors, creeds and backgrounds join-
ing together to embrace a shared identity.

Jews don’t need a presidential proclamation to have
a sense of peoplehood. They can get it from their own
sacred texts and history.

To move away from this tribalism that manifests itself
as an obsession with diversity is not to rain on the parade
of those who wish to celebrate the heritage of American
Jews or any other group that desires to be recognized.

But it might do more to create an atmosphere where
prejudice like antisemitism wouldn’t thrive in the way
it has in this age of faux anti-racism that actually does
more to promote hate than to extinguish it.

If the American Jewish community wants to throw a
party and promote more knowledge of a heritage they
justly take pride in, that’s fine. Yet the more Jews seek
to get their share of the intersectional minority victim-
hood scam, they are doing far more harm than good for
themselves and their country. ■
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish
News Syndicate).