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20
Antisemitism
In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition
and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the dis-
cipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of
anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States
and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, and the White Conflations and
Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary

antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book
begins to fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and
weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist
Supremacist Contradictions in
Imaginary Composition and
aims and character of antisemitism. Drawing upon rhetorical analysis, personal narrative, and original
phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the
lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book
illuminates the experiential, rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, exposes
the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism, and gestures toward a future in
Rhetoric
which, through more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and
students and better engage Jewish members of the discipline as accomplices in antiracism.
“I take this book personally. Grayson’s theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes,
and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imag-
inary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book—recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark
reflection—and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join
others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It’s a powerful and
vibrant contribution to our field.”
—Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation:
Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities
“In this timely and important monograph, Dr. Grayson adroitly explains the impact of antisemitism not
only for rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars and students but also our contemporary moment.
In lucid and engaging prose, she unpacks thousands of years of history and tropes, making this book a
must-read for anyone engaged in antiracist work.”
—Janice W. Fernheimer, Zantker Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and
Digital Studies, University of Kentucky
Mara Lee Grayson is the author of Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices
for Critical Writing and Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing
and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence. She holds a PhD from Columbia
Mara Lee Grayson
University and works as an associate professor at California State University,

Dominguez Hills.
STUDIES IN
COMPOSITION
www.peterlang.com AND RHETORIC
Mara Lee Grayson
Cover images: ©iStock.com/wildpixel; ©iStock.com/argus456
9781433192968_cvr_eu.indd All Pages 19-Jan-23 22:01:41

20
Antisemitism
In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition
and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the dis-
cipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of
anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States
and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, and the White Conflations and
Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary

antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book
begins to fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and
weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist
Supremacist Contradictions in
Imaginary Composition and
aims and character of antisemitism. Drawing upon rhetorical analysis, personal narrative, and original
phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the
lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book
illuminates the experiential, rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, exposes
the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism, and gestures toward a future in
Rhetoric
which, through more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and
students and better engage Jewish members of the discipline as accomplices in antiracism.
“I take this book personally. Grayson’s theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes,
and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imag-
inary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book—recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark
reflection—and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join
others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It’s a powerful and
vibrant contribution to our field.”
—Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation:
Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities
“In this timely and important monograph, Dr. Grayson adroitly explains the impact of antisemitism not
only for rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars and students but also our contemporary moment.
In lucid and engaging prose, she unpacks thousands of years of history and tropes, making this book a
must-read for anyone engaged in antiracist work.”
—Janice W. Fernheimer, Zantker Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and
Digital Studies, University of Kentucky
Mara Lee Grayson is the author of Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices
for Critical Writing and Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing
and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence. She holds a PhD from Columbia
Mara Lee Grayson
University and works as an associate professor at California State University,

Dominguez Hills.
STUDIES IN
COMPOSITION
www.peterlang.com AND RHETORIC
Mara Lee Grayson
Cover images: ©iStock.com/wildpixel; ©iStock.com/argus456
9781433192968_cvr_eu.indd All Pages 19-Jan-23 22:01:41

Supremacist Imaginary
Studies in Composition and
Rhetoric
Alice S. Horning
General Editor
Vol. 20
The Studies in Composition and Rhetoric series is part of the Humanities list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.
PETER LANG
New York • Berlin • Brussels • Lausanne • Oxford
Mara Lee Grayson

Supremacist Imaginary
Conflations and Contradictions

in Composition and Rhetoric
PETER LANG
New York • Berlin • Brussels • Lausanne • Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2022041708
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
ISSN 1080-5397
ISBN 978-1-4331-9296-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-4331-9297-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4331-9298-2 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-9299-9 (epub)
DOI 10.3726/b19038
© 2023 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

80 Broad Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10004
www.peterla ng.com
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
In memory of Lauren Samara Weinstein (1971-2021).
Thank you for the hamsa I said I didn’t need -and for everything else.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Jewish Whiteness, Christian Hegemony, and Disciplinary (Mis)

Representation 15
2 The Antisemitic Imaginary 33
3 The Racialization of Jewish People in the United States 55
4 On Being Jewish: Existing and Original Research 75
5 Difference and Defense: Experiences of Jewish Identity in a

Christian Hegemonic Society 91
6 Antisemitism in the Profession: Contemporary Manifestations and

Microaggressions 117
viii | Contents
7 The “Bizarre” Absence of Jewish Discourse in Rhetoric and

Composition 143
8 Talking about Israel, (Anti)Zionism, and the Politicization of Jewish

Identity 171
9 Resisting the Whitewashing of Jewish Identity: Finding Our

Space(s) and Place(s) in the Field 195
Index 217
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, my thanks go out to the Jewish teachers and scholars who par-
ticipated in the study that informed this book. I am very grateful for your generosity
and the trust you put in me to listen and to share your stories. I hope that I have done
justice to your experiences.
My gratitude also to: series editor Alice Horning, without whom this book
might still be an idea in my head; the members of the CCCC Jewish Caucus, the
NCTE Jewish Caucus, the CCCC Committee on Critical Whiteness, and the
CCCC Committee for Change for creating and maintaining spaces where I have felt
both safe and brave; the scholars, mentors, friends, and colleagues who have talked
through some of these ideas with me in brief or at length (or who have just listened to
me rant), including Judith Chriqui Benchimol, Nancy Bleakley, Jennifer Brodmann,
Frankie Condon, Maureen Daniels Akerib, Paulina Frias, Brooke Hotez, Alexandria
Lockett, Annemarie Perez, Iris Ruiz, Brett Shanley, Cheryl Hogue Smith, and
Tenisha Tevis; my spouse and “darling husband,” Alex Doyban, for encouraging
and supporting me and for tolerating my shouting at the television; my mother, Pearl
Kornberg, for the conversations and for sharing with me the family stories that made
their way into this book; Sheridan Blau, who once told me, after I complained about
a situation at work: “Write about it;” and, finally, my father, Martin Kornberg, who,
so many times, so many years ago, told me the very same thing.
Introduction
The idea for this book arose in part from a need to make sense of my own expe-
riences as a Jewish woman teacher and scholar whose work examines racism,
antiracism, and whiteness in academic and educational spaces. Like memoirist
Melissa Febos (2021), I have always found writing to be “a way to reconcile my
lived experience with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof)” (p.
xiv). I began researching antisemitism a few years before I even imagined this
book, initially seeking some sort of reconciliation between two of my identi-
ties: white and Jewish. Despite the white privilege of my skin, throughout my life
I’ve experienced antisemitism and I’ve always had a general feeling of marginal-
ization borne of my positionality in a Christian hegemonic society. For most of
my life, however, antisemitic sentiment, which long has lingered beneath the sur-
face of racial and political discourse in the United States, was covert, and, given
my other privileges, its impacts were easy to ignore.
But there’s something about realizing on a campus visit, never a totally pleas-
ant experience under the best of circumstances, that, despite your white skin,
you’re the so-called diversity candidate. Something about having the same reali-
zation at multiple campuses you’ve flown out to, having agonized over positions
you were always intended to interview for and never intended to get. There’s
something about finally landing that tenure-track job and leaving New York City,
2 | Introduction
where, though there was antisemitism, at least there were Jewish communities,
synagogues, and delis to remind you that being Jewish wasn’t so unusual. There’s
something about moving to the other side of the country and realizing you’re
the only Jewish person in your department and one of very few on your campus.
There’s something about the university president’s brief, empty statement two
months later about the mass murder of eleven Jewish congregants in a synagogue
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Something about the omission of the word antisemi-
tism or its variants from the statement, and the president’s comparison of the mas-
sacre to other acts of violence, including “drive-by shootings” and bomb threats
against “high-ranking” politicians. There’s something, too, about the absence of
any statement at all after a similar shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California,
less than a two-hour drive from where you now work. Something about learning
that “a recognizable symbol of hate” was found on a school building, receiving no
additional information, and never hearing about it again. Something about won-
dering if it was a swastika or if it was a noose, then wondering if you’d feel safer
if it turned out to be the latter –wondering, that is, if you’d feel safer knowing it
was your students being targeted instead of you. Something about how grotesque
that thought seemed and how, when you tried to push it out of your mind, it
settled in the lining of your stomach.
There’s something about being told by your fellow professors of composition,
rhetoric, literature, and linguistics –people who study language, even some who
rally against linguicism –that the culturally situated way you speak is a problem.
Something about being positioned by those colleagues as, to use their word, the
scapegoat for the department’s well-documented racism and sexism, because it was
you, the outsider, who called them out (Grayson, 2022). And there’s something
about hearing the word kike as the punchline to a joke spilling from your cowork-
er’s mouth, the subsequent laughter from your other supposed colleagues, and the
feeling as your stomach knots around itself that tell you: You don’t belong here.
At the Intersection of Whiteness and Jewishness
I know antisemitism in my skin and viscera. Yet, outside of my own body, most
of the messages I’ve encountered in academia have told me that antisemitism
isn’t that bad, that it doesn’t exist anymore, or that, if it does, it doesn’t matter
because, well, I’m white.
Introduction | 3
Given the focus of my research and teaching, I spend a lot of time think-
ing about whiteness: How it is constructed and interpellated, how it is reified
and reproduced, and how I benefit from it. I have joined, founded, chaired, and
facilitated committees, task forces, working groups, and workshops on whiteness,
white privilege, and the necessity of critical reflection around individuals’ own
white racialization. Yet, when I have spent time in many of these spaces, virtual
or otherwise, I have still felt different.
Often, I have been the only Jewish woman in these groups; the other mem-
bers have been predominantly white, Christian women. They did not talk the
way I talked, and their experiences were not the same as my experiences. They
didn’t describe being told by grade school classmates that they were going to
Hell because they celebrated Chanukah. They didn’t talk about being called a
“Jew bitch” and a “kike.” They guiltily confessed to automatically clutching their
purses in Black neighborhoods, but they didn’t share stories of being terrified in
certain white neighborhoods too. They didn’t talk about realizing as a child that
churches didn’t have security guards stationed out front the way that synagogues
did. Even those whose families had instilled in them a critical view of whiteness
didn’t recall learning early on, like I did, that two seemingly contradictory real-
ities could co-exist: Some Jewish people were white, but white people weren’t
Jewish.
Though I have spoken and written about the necessity of understanding one’s
own white racialization, understanding my skin privilege didn’t explain all of my
experiences of racialization. Whiteness didn’t explain why, when I was walking
through Washington Square Park two weeks before I left New York, a light-
skinned man jumped in front of me and sneered: “Nice nose.” Whiteness didn’t
explain why a dark-skinned stranger on the FDR Drive rolled down his window
and called me a “hook-nosed bitch.” White aesthetic ideals may explain why I,
like so many Jewish women, spent my teen years dreaming about getting a nose
job, but it was my Jewish face, not my whiteness, that made me want one. As
Jewish writer and activist Melanie Kaye/K antrowitz (2007) noted of the Jewish
woman’s desire for this particular plastic surgery: “Nose jobs are performed so
that a Jewish woman does not look like a Jew… Tell me again Jewish is just a
religion” (pp. 29–30).
If my nose has marked me as Jewish, my skin has marked me as white. But
the more time I have spent in white spaces with white people, the more I’ve felt
I am back in the theaters of my childhood, playing a character whose backstory
and view of the world differ dramatically from my own. If I’ve been acting, my
white skin is a costume that has enabled me to enter such spaces –and many,
4 | Introduction
many, many others –but it has also required that I cover the body and subjectiv-
ity I actually inhabit.
Though some scholarship from the late twentieth century, such as anthro-
pologist Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folk and What That Says about
Race in America, has explored the racialization of Jewish people and, specifically,
Jewish absorption into whiteness, I have rarely seen my identity fully accounted
for in scholarship on race or whiteness. Until I began working with the Jewish
Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I
found few places in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS) where
I could talk to other Jewish people about being Jewish. Since connecting with
other Jewish scholars and since conducting the research that I describe in this
book, I have learned that, if I have felt alone, at least I am not alone in those
feelings of isolation or my frustration with the lack of critical discourse around
academic antisemitism and disciplinary Christian hegemony. Whatever comfort
this solidarity has provided me, it pales in comparison to the sadness of knowing
that so many Jewish educators feel isolated and unacknowledged, especially at a
time when antisemitic sentiment and violence are on the rise.
The Reemergence and Mainstreaming of Antisemitism
I began this research in early 2021, while working from home due to the
COVID-19 pandemic still spreading, virtually unchecked, across the U.S., amid
an increasingly white nationalist social and political landscape. I must admit that
writing this book at this time was emotionally challenging for me. One weekend
of writing was derailed when I learned of a hostage crisis at a synagogue in Texas.
An afternoon I had intended to spend writing was spent reeling from an email
sent by my union representative in which she described my ongoing experiences
with misogyny and antisemitism as “personality disputes.” Many, many more of
my planned writing times became thinking time, mourning time, and grieving
time, when the weight of reflection or the weight of the present became too heavy
to keep writing.
In the first half of 2022 alone, we have seen multiple mass shootings inspired
by racist, antisemitic conspiracy theories; the banning of books about racism,
gender, and the Holocaust; the passage of anti-abortion laws grounded in a bas-
tardized fundamentalist Christian theology; and widespread antidemocratic,
racist voting legislation. These are the fruits of white supremacy. Yet, though
antisemitism is a shared characteristic among right-wing and white supremacist
Introduction | 5
movements (Bronner, 2020; Subotic, 2022), when we talk about white suprem-
acy in popular and academic discourse, too often antisemitism is unaddressed.
Recent events have demonstrated that we lack a comprehensive discursive strat-
egy for discussing antisemitism or how it functions in our institutions, let alone
a comprehensive strategy for combating it.
Consider, for example, a February 2021 complaint by two Jewish students
against Brooklyn College, a City University of New York campus that serves one
of the largest Jewish student populations in the U.S. and which happens to be
the school from which both of my parents graduated, becoming the first in their
families to finish college. The students criticized the school for “advancing the
narrative that all Jews are white and privileged” (quoted in Redden, 2022) after
a series of events in the counseling program. During an identity development
activity, information was provided on multiple racial and ethnic identities, but
“the only reference to Jewishness was in the worksheet for ‘White Racial Identity
Development’” and a Jewish student who expressed frustration was told they
were “in denial” of their whiteness (Redden, 2022). Apparently, the professor
was unaware of the existence of social justice educator Christopher MacDonald-
Dennis’s (2006) Jewish identity model; the model is also unmentioned in
accounts I have read of the incident.
One complainant was a Jewish Latina woman who left the program due to
her experiences. She explained:
It’s not like I don’t know what discrimination is, and now to be told all of those
experiences don’t matter and your skin color doesn’t matter because now you’re
essentially white and privileged because all Jews are white and privileged, which
negates all of the history of the Jews, and on a personal level it completely erases
my lived experience, and for it to be fortified by the students and the teachers –it’s
crazy-making. (quoted in Redden, 2022)
Colloquially, “crazy- making” describes manipulative discursive moves and

behaviors, like gaslighting, designed to confuse a person, delegitimize their expe-
riences, or make them believe their experience of reality isn’t real. Such behaviors
are commonly weaponized in service of white supremacy, such as when a per-
son is labeled “too sensitive” for identifying racism as racism or antisemitism as
antisemitism.
The reality is that Jewish people experience antisemitism. If that wasn’t bad
enough, we also have the ongoing experience of being told that we do not expe-
rience antisemitism, that Jewish people are all white, that antisemitism is not a
6 | Introduction
form of racism, and that, consequently, our voices are irrelevant to conversations
about marginalization and oppression, even our own.
What This Book Does and Doesn’t Do
If the relative assimilative success of Jewish people in the U.S. has taught us
anything, it’s that inclusion does not equal equity and that representation is not
enough to change the structures of white supremacy. The experiences of those
who do not identify as Christian are understudied in antiracist research –which
is, of course, another form of marginalization that upholds Christian hegemony.
This book attempts to fill part of that gap in hopes of eventually developing a
more inclusive community of antiracist educators and an even stronger coalition
prepared to challenge white supremacy.
This book is about the embedded antisemitism and Christian hegemony of
the U.S., its academic institutions, and the field of RCWS, and how those ideolo-
gies and dynamics impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and
scholars. Importantly, because this book is situated in a U.S. context in which
Christianity is hegemonic, this is not a book about Islamist antisemitism. (See
Kiewe, 2020, for a rhetorical examination of that topic.) This book is about the
rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the
white supremacy imaginary, via popular and academic discourse, for the main-
tenance of U.S. white Christian cultural hegemony. This book is about how that
rhetoric essentializes the diversity of Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims
and character of antisemitism. This book is about the complicity of our academic
institutions and our own professional spaces in the simultaneous perpetuation
and denial of anti-Jewish racism.
This book celebrates being Jewish without a caveat. Such celebration neither
requires nor suggests that all Jewish people are good people or that some Jewish
people do not enact the same toxic white Christian supremacy that endangers all
Jewish people. Like other marginalized and oppressed peoples, Jewish people are
not immune to internalized white supremacy. Some light-skinned Jewish people
have uncritically accepted whiteness as a racial identity or a set of ideals, and may
not even realize they’re doing it at their own expense.
The actions of individual Jewish people are no justification for antisemitism.
After all, when a Jewish person embraces and enacts whiteness, it isn’t Jewishness
they’re embracing; to the contrary, I would argue that the enactment of whiteness
requires to some extent the rejection of Jewishness. And, as I explain whenever I
Introduction | 7
hear an antisemitic remark about Stephen Miller, the far-right, anti-immigration,

antidemocratic, white supremacist-courting senior advisor to former president
Donald Trump: Antisemitism is antisemitism, even if the Jewish target is a
shithead.
Surely, more can be said about how Jewish communities, like other mar-
ginalized communities, perpetuate whiteness and racism. But this book is not
that book. Laboring against racism in academia amidst the mainstreaming of
white nationalism and antisemitic conspiracy theories has made clear to me that,
in our profession and in our society, we are sorely lacking even the most basic
considerations of Jewish identity, history, and experience, and of antisemitism’s
construction and functions in contemporary racial discourse.
At a time when work challenging white supremacy –even by merely high-
lighting the perspectives of people of non-hegemonic identities –is already
threatened by right-wing governmental interference, readers might wonder, if the
place of this work is so tenuous, why would I seek to complicate it? First, I see a
gap, and I am afraid of how, while too many Jewish people remain silent, others
seek to fill this gap. Second, I think the only way past is through: I like difficult
conversations because I know that learning happens when we engage with rather
than reject complexity. Finally, while I believe Christian hegemony and antisem-
itism factor into the limited discussion of Jewishness, I also believe that we are
not talking about Jewish identities and antisemitism because many people don’t
really know where to begin.
The majority of the limited number of books and articles on Jewishness in
RCWS address Jewish forms of meaning-making, such as Talmudic and Biblical
rhetoric, but don’t offer a full picture of Jewish experience or antisemitism in the
field itself. Moreover, despite the growing body of antiracist scholarship, there is
little work directly from RCWS that explores Jewish identity or antisemitism,
especially from an antiracist or critical whiteness perspective. Amos Kiewe (2020)
wrote that “scholarship on antisemitism from a rhetorical perspective is almost
nonexistent” (vii). Other scholars have echoed the same (Greenbaum & Holdstein,
2008; Fernheimer, 2010), while making strides to fill those gaps. Kiewe’s book
The Rhetoric of Antisemitism fills a gap, but, as Kiewe (2020) himself has noted,
it “is not a book about contemporary antisemitism but about the grounding and
perpetuation of antisemitism despite the passage of time” (p. vii).
Unlike Kiewe’s book, this book is a book about contemporary antisem-
itism: its manifestations, its rhetorical construction, its impacts on the lived
experiences of Jewish RCWS teachers and scholars, and its situatedness within a
U.S. white supremacist imaginary that not only simultaneously perpetuates and
8 | Introduction
denies antisemitism but in fact requires antisemitism to sustain itself. This book
gestures toward a future in which, through productive and nuanced communi-
cation and deliberation, the field of RCWS can better support Jewish educators
and students and engage Jewish members of the discipline as better accomplices
in antiracism. Most broadly, this book aims to help scholars and educators of all
identities better understand how the examination of antisemitism contributes to
a more dimensional understanding of racism, white supremacy, and antiracism.
Conceptual Frameworks and Original Research

The conclusions I draw in this book are informed by original qualitative research
as well as existing theories of whiteness, antisemitism, and white supremacist
rhetoric. As much of my work is grounded in racial literacy (Grayson, 2017, 2018,
2019), I have drawn upon the critical frameworks of racial literacy developed by
the late Black and Jewish critical race scholar Lani Guinier (2004) and sociologist
France Winddance Twine (2010) as I have approached this research. In other
words, I have understood that racism –including anti-Jewish racism –is contex-
tual and intersectional, and exists on personal, interpersonal, and structural levels
(Guinier, 2004). I have approached this work with the knowledge that racism,
and, likewise, antisemitism, must be read, decoded and interpreted, and that
individual “micro” acts are representative of macro-level structures, ideologies,
and inequities (Twine, 2010). Though I build from this conceptual foundation,
in the chapters that follow, I rely more heavily on philosophical and sociologi-
cal concepts of the imaginary (Herbrik & Schlechtriemen, 2019; Searle, 1995;
Taylor, 2002), research on whiteness (Ahmed, 2007) and Jewish racialization and
identity (Brodkin, 1998; Kaye & Kantrowitz, 2007; MacDonald-Dennis, 2006),
and frameworks for understanding the discursive and rhetorical construction,
reproduction, and dissemination of antisemitism (Bronner, 2020; Kiewe, 2020;
Kryzanowski, 2019; Subotic, 2022). I discuss other frameworks that have influ-
enced this research in subsequent chapters.
To draw attention to the lived realities of Jewish people, I draw upon the
findings of an original IRB-approved phenomenological study (California State
University, Dominguez Hills, IRB #20-084) exploring the experiences of Jewish
scholars and teachers of RCWS as they navigate educational and professional
spaces, including but not limited to graduate programs, the job market, their
home departments and institutions, their classrooms, professional organiza-
tions, and academic conferences. Because I come at this work from an emic,
Introduction | 9
insider perspective, this work is also informed by my lived experiences as a white,

Ashkenazi Jewish woman.
Overview of Chapters
The first three chapters of this book contextualize the research and establish its
necessity and theoretical grounding. Chapter 1 introduces the context and exi-
gency for this work, with emphasis on how RCWS disciplinary spaces perpetu-
ate the marginalization of Jewish people, often via the same contradictions and
conflations that define antisemitism and Jewish marginalization in society more
broadly. I explore the complexity of my own Jewish identity in relation to white-
ness, as well as how and why my Jewish identity has at times been obscured by my
white racial identification. I contextualize my experiences within broader conver-
sations about race, racism, and identity as I begin to examine the difficulties of
discussing antisemitism in U.S. academic contexts, even within RCWS.
Chapter 2 explores the antisemitic imaginary that sustains white Christian
supremacy, the deeply embedded societal vision created by both whiteness and
Christianity, which I suggest composes the foundation of the contemporary U.S.
I unpack the concept of the imaginary, or how a society conceptualizes its world
and the ideologies, institutions, and practices that sustain it, to form the basis
for one of the book’s foundational arguments: that, in the context of the U.S.,
antisemitism is a necessarily embedded part of sustaining a white supremacist
world concept. In this chapter, I also introduce some discursive patterns and
rhetorical tropes of antisemitism.
Chapter 3 examines in greater detail the historical racialization of Jewish
people in the U.S. I discuss the political and social affordances of white identity
and the limitations of whiteness in accounting for the experiences of diasporic
Jews. I consider the impact of the Holocaust on U.S. Jewish racialization and,
reciprocally, the impact of white Christian supremacy on the nation’s collective
memory of the Holocaust. Finally, I address the discursive and rhetorical means
by which whiteness obscures, maintains, and uses antisemitism in the context of
contemporary racial discourse.
In Chapter 4, I highlight gaps in our discipline as they pertain to both
Jewish rhetorics and rhetorics of antisemitism before introducing an original
Institutional Review Board-approved qualitative research study, influenced in
part by the philosophical and methodological framework of post-intentional
phenomenology, exploring the experiences of being Jewish in RCWS. I examine
historical connections between phenomenology, Judaism, and antisemitism and
10 | Introduction
introduce the critical and conceptual frameworks that have informed my explo-
ration. In Chapters 5 through 8, I present the findings of the study introduced
in this chapter.
Chapter 5 explores the diversity of Jewish identities, existing frameworks for
Jewish identification, and the experiences of Jewish identification of the scholars
who participated in this research. I highlight two themes that arose to characterize
participants’ experiences and understandings of their own Jewish identities: the
experience of difference in a Christian hegemonic society and the experience of
defense from antisemitism. I also emphasize the necessity of understanding the
unique, situated identity development processes of Jewish people in the U.S.
In Chapters 6 and 7, I explore more fully the manifestations of overt and
covert antisemitism in disciplinary and professional spaces. In Chapter 6, I use
the framework of microaggressions to demonstrate how Jewish educators experi-
ence antisemitism in their professional lives and RCWS spaces, including grad-
uate school, the job market, professional organizations and conferences, and
participants’ own classrooms, departments, and institutions. I also discuss how
Jewish educators experience being in spaces ostensibly dedicated to antiracism,
social justice, and educational equity.
In Chapter 7, I unpack a third theme that arose in participants’ experiences
of their own Jewish identities, Discourse, to examine the limited attention to
Jewish rhetorics and discourses in RCWS, which one participant characterized
as a “bizarre absence,” given the significance of language and text in Jewish cul-
tures. I explore how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in pro-
fessional spaces, how antisemitism is coded in references to Jewish voices and
meaning-making practices, and how the Christian hegemony of the academy
reifies itself through these processes.
In Chapter 8, I explore how contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding the
nation-state of Israel politicizes Jewish identity, obscures contemporary antisem-
itism, and distracts from the white Christian supremacy of the U.S. and its insti-
tutions. In this chapter, I examine how the conflation of Jewishness and Israel
impacts the lived experiences of Jewish scholars of RCWS. I also explore how the
Jewish ideologies of Zionism and anti-Zionism have been coopted by non-Jewish
people in furtherance of various aims across the political spectrum, offer strat-
egies to distinguish between legitimate political criticism of Israel and criticism
motivated by antisemitism, and discuss how discussion of Israel and Palestine
may be used to deflect from critique of U.S. racism, thereby sustaining the white
supremacist imaginary.
Introduction | 11
Finally, in Chapter 9, I synthesize the findings of the original research and

the conclusions drawn in previous chapters as I summarize the functions and
impacts of the conceptual whitewashing of Jewish identity in U.S. racial dis-
course. I explore the difficulty in accounting for Jewish identities, Jewish expe-
riences, and anti-Jewish racism in existing racial frameworks and the challenges
posed to the field of RCWS. I emphasize the necessity of additional attention
in graduate studies, teacher preparation, faculty professional development, and
disciplinary scholarship to the complexities of Jewish identification and racializa-
tion, the rhetorical construction and functions of antisemitism, and the connec-
tions between antisemitism and other racisms and oppressions.
A Brief Note on Terminology

I use the term antisemitism throughout this book. While it has been argued that
antisemitism literally denotes discrimination against all people who speak Semitic
languages, the term was coined to describe anti-Jewish racism, and the category
of “Semites” has been used “exclusively as a reference to Jews and not to a separate
class of people using Semitic languages” (Kiewe, 2020, p. viii). In usage, antisem-
itism (like anti-Semitism) denotes anti-Jewish discrimination. To make clear this
usage and to avoid reifying an erroneous classification of “Semites,” I neither
hyphenate the term nor capitalize any part of it (unless quoting an author who
has done so). Like many other scholars of antisemitism, I categorize antisemitism
as a form of racism (Gilman, 1991; Gilman & Thomas, 2014; Thomas, 2010), as I
discuss throughout the book. I use the term antisemitism, however, to denote rac-
ism and ethnoreligious discrimination specifically targeting Judaism, Jewishness,
or Jewish people.
Though I capitalize the first letters in “Black” and “Brown,” I do not capital-
ize the first letter in “white,” either when used as a descriptor of racial identity or
when describing entities or ideologies like “whiteness” or “white supremacy.” In
other work, I have used capitalization when referencing individual racial identity
to emphasize that the term is a social classification and to reinforce the necessity
of understanding white privilege (Grayson, 2018). In this book, I use lowercase
in all such instances in efforts to decenter and destabilize whiteness as an innate,
static identity and to delegitimize any notion of its supremacy.
12 | Introduction
A Warning
Many Jewish teachers and scholars I have spoken to, within the bounds of my
research and in less formal spaces, told me they hoped this project would be taken
seriously. Such distrust and hope are borne from experience: Jewish people have
experienced intergenerational trauma and erasure and, as a result, may distrust
that their concerns will be acknowledged, let alone validated or understood, by
the non-Jewish majority. Jewish teachers and scholars have conveyed to me that
their individual experiences have been delegitimized, minimized, rationalized,
or just plain ignored. I personally have been warned by other people, Jewish and
non-Jewish, that the field isn’t ready for some of the conversations I initiate in
this book.
While I do not believe it is generally malice or even intent that leads non-
Jewish teachers and scholars to discount Jewish experiences, Christian privilege
means that the Christian person in a Christian hegemonic society doesn’t have
to think about the normativity of Christianity, whereas its normativity is readily
apparent to those who are not Christian (Blumenfeld, 2006; Levine Daniel et
al., 2019). Thus, I draw readers’ attention to a point made by psychologist Lewis
Schlosser (2006) in discussing the implications of Jewish experiences for more
equitable approaches to psychotherapy: “Before proceeding to a discussion of
these issues, it is important for the reader to know that American Jews must also
contend with living in a Christian country that purports to be secular; as such,
Christian Privilege operates to ensure that Jewish issues often go unnoticed” (p.
428). Readers who are uncomfortable with that fact will be uncomfortable with
this book. I encourage them to continue reading anyway.
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Introduction | 13
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1
Jewish Whiteness, Christian

Hegemony, and Disciplinary
(Mis)Representation
I’m sitting at a table in a conference room at the 2018 annual convention of the
Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Kansas
City. A few months ago, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People issued a travel warning: “Individuals traveling in the state are
advised to travel with extreme caution. Race, gender and color based crimes
have a long history in Missouri” (NAACP, 2017, para. 7). As a result, in the
months leading up to this conference there has been a lot of conversation among
conference organizers, presenters, and attendees, about whether or not to host the
conference, whether or not to attend, and how to ensure the safety of participants
who are Black, Indigenous, or Peoples of Color.
As I consider whether or not I should attend the convention, I remember the
road trip my spouse (white, blue-eyed) and I took from New York City to New
Orleans two years ago, during the time leading up to the primaries for the 2016
presidential election. One afternoon en route we stopped at a gas station deep in
Mississippi. The façade was covered in posters –“Ted Cruz for President,” “Don’t
Tread on Me,” “We Believe in God and Guns” –a lot of pictures of a white Jesus,
and confederate flags.
“I don’t want to go in here,” I said.
16 | Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary
“If you want to use a restroom, this is it,” Alex said. There were no other
buildings, stores, or people as far as we could see.
Indoors, the same signs and flags papered the walls and hung from the ceil-
ings. Lining a back wall were rifles, dozens of them. The proprietor, an older,
expressionless white woman, wordlessly pointed us toward the restroom.
We used the restrooms and rushed toward the car. The proprietor watched
us leave. I was suddenly relieved that I hadn’t put that Bernie Sanders bumper
sticker I’d received in the mail a few weeks earlier on my car.
“I did not feel safe there,” I said once we were back on the road.
“That woman’s alone in the middle of nowhere,” Alex said. “She probably
puts that stuff up to seem threatening. You’re safe there.” Then: “You don’t have
to tell anyone you’re Jewish.”
I didn’t feel safe there, but, for the most part, I was safe there. That’s the
privilege of my white skin, a veil that shrouds the intergenerational trauma of my
Jewishness.
I’m thinking about this at the convention in Kansas City. Only one other
panelist has shown up and there are so few attendees that the small room at the
convention center looks enormous. Though I’d been tempted by the idea of a
boycott, as I explain later, “my desire not to contribute monetarily to the city
was overridden by my interest in having difficult conversations, even in difficult
places” (Grayson, 2018, para. 1). I also know that, even if I feel unsafe, by virtue of
white privilege, I’m a lot safer than most of my colleagues who do antiracist work.
The panel has yet to start and I’m having a conversation about my book
Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing with the few folx
who are there, when a woman who, in talking about her own presentation iden-
tifies herself as Black, asks: “What are you, by the way?”
What am I? Okay, I know what she means.
“I’m Ashkenazi Jewish,” I say. “My mother’s parents were born in Russia.”
I don’t say where my father’s family is from because at that point I don’t know.
“You’re just Jewish?” she asks, in a not unfriendly tone. She seems truly
confused.
“Eastern-European Jewish,” I say. I smile with my mouth closed. “That’s it.”
“I thought for sure you were Latina at least.”
Though skin color is by no means the sole indicator of a person’s race and
ethnicity, if you’ve met me, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that very few
people assume me to be anything but white and/or of Eastern European descent.
But this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked if I am or told that I look Latina and
it’s almost exclusively in the context of my work that this assumption has been
Jewish Whiteness, Christian Hegemony, and Disciplinary | 17
made. I’m troubled by the language she has used: “Just” Jewish? “At least” Latina?
What does that even mean? For all my claims that I enjoy difficult conversations,
I don’t engage in this one. I don’t ask the woman what she means by “at least” or
“just” or why she assumes I must be something other than what I am.
I don’t ask because I know that trying to unpack the tangled threads of
whiteness, Jewishness, and politics of identity in these questions will take far
longer than the three minutes left until our session begins, because my own rela-
tionship with my Jewish identity is complex and often confusing, even to me,
and because I don’t know that I yet have the language for this conversation.
Returning to this moment years later, my mind spins: Does she assume that, if
“Jewish” refers to the religion of Judaism, I must have some other ethnic identity?
Is she unaware that Jewish identity is, for some of us, a matter of ethnicity or even
race, rather than religion? Does she know the term “Ashkenazi”? Is her statement
antisemitic? What have I perpetuated by avoiding discussing my own identity in
moments like this?
I wonder if her question is rhetorical, intended to remind me I am white, to
let me know that she sees I am white, that she is trying to reconcile my whiteness
with the work I do, and that she wants to ensure I am doing the same. “Can white
activists, teachers, and tutors join with colleagues of color in antiracism work?”
Frankie Condon (2012) asked in I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation,
and Antiracist Rhetoric (p. 35). Amy Aldous Bergerson (2003) similarly asked: “Is
there room for white scholars in fighting racism in education?” Obviously, given
my work, I believe it is not only acceptable for white people to engage in antiracist
work, but also necessary. As Condon explained, “race is an idea that, by design,
has served white interests, and as racism is a white problem” (p. 34). It is on white
people to “join the band,” so to speak.
In the Call for Proposals for CCCC 2022, Staci Perryman-Clark asked: “Why
are you here?” This is a question many teachers and scholars of color are asked
in educational and professional spaces, a question that barely cloaks racism in
vagueness. Chicana rhetorician Iris D. Ruiz (2021) recalled a roundtable on edi-
torship at the annual CCCC convention during which an RCWS scholar spoke
about the need to “open the gates to more women and more diversity of scholar-
ship. However, not once did they mention the diversity of scholars” (pp. 51–52).
In academic institutions wherein 75 percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty
are white (NCES, 2020), the “you” in “Why are you here?” is readily apparent.
Those of us who identify as Jewish do not necessarily face the same prob-
lem, though it is actually quite difficult to determine how many Jewish people
are, in fact, “here” in the field. I have been unable to find concrete statistics on
Jewish faculty in the academy, let alone Jewish scholars in RCWS. Judging by
the names of scholars published and cited in our journals and the names of past
chairs of CCCC, I can guess that some are Jewish, though, of course, there is
overlap between Jewish names and other European and Middle Eastern names
and many people who are Jewish, like me, do not have traditionally “Jewish-
sounding” names, for a variety of reasons. When it comes to Jewish ways of
meaning-making, we are even harder to locate. As I discuss later in this chapter,
“the placement of Jewish traditions is a complex one, not unrelated to the placing
of Jewish individuals within the social and racial spectrums of the United States
and other national, cultural traditions and even the disciplinary ‘homes’ of aca-
demic study” (Fernheimer, 2010, p. 583).
“Why are you here?” is also a question white people are asked in the context
of antiracist work and one I have heard many times. I do not aim here to draw a
false equivalency between the question as it is asked of scholars of color and the
question as it is asked of white people who seek to participate in antiracist spaces
or communities that are more often than not comprised of people of color. In the
former context, the question is racist and exclusionary. In the latter, the question,
I think, has more complex dimensions. After all, how many spaces have white
people occupied, colonized, and appropriated? Why would a person of color trust
that our intentions are good, or that, regardless of our intentions, we are capable
of participating in antiracist work without “recentering ourselves, without recen-
tering whiteness” (Condon, 2012, p. 35)? How often do we become the mani-
festation of the very problem Ruiz (2021) described as our discipline’s interest in
“diversity of scholarship” rather than “diversity of scholars” (pp. 51–52)?
Condon writes about being asked variations of this question –“Who are
you?” followed by: “Why do you do this work?” –and notes that these are ques-
tions we should be prepared to answer. Of “Who are you?” Condon writes: “[I]
t’s a fair question for a person of color to ask of a white woman coming to town
to lead an antiracism workshop and perhaps also a fair question for readers to ask
of a white woman writing a book about antiracism” (p. 27). Perhaps the question
“What are you?” as asked by the conference-goer in Kansas City is also a varia-
tion of this question, meant to elicit an explanation of why I do the work I do and
how I situate my whiteness in relation to it.
Generally speaking, I’ve answered questions like this, whether directly asked
or implied, by addressing my whiteness, by acknowledging that I do this work
because it is necessary, because I believe I have an obligation as a white person
to work toward the dismantling of white supremacy, because there are spaces
wherein I know I can do this work with more ease than my colleagues of color,
and because I want to change the conditions that maintain those spaces wherein
whiteness allows me to work with less resistance. But “we who are raced white
have to learn to unmake ourselves in order that we might make allies of our-
selves” (Condon, 2012, p. 144). Understanding the constructedness of race and
the cultural value of whiteness are key aspects of racial literacy (Twine, 2010).
My attempts at unmaking myself have centered on the interrogation of my own
whiteness and my whitely tendencies. This is work that never ends, for racial lit-
eracy is a process of “learning rather than knowing” (Guinier, 2004, p. 110). In
a white hegemonic society, whiteness will always reify itself, and we will always
reify whiteness if we are not constantly doing this work.
But in Kansas City, I’ve answered differently, perhaps because the question
has been framed differently. “What are you?” is a question some suggest is asked
largely of those whose race and ethnicity are hard to place. I don’t know if that is
the case with my appearance, but it feels like there is more to the question, per-
haps because my whiteness is so apparent. Thus, the idea of answering “What are
you?” with “white” doesn’t just feel reductive; it feels inaccurate.
Three decades ago, racial identity psychologist Janet Helms (1990) wrote that
it was common for white people to “deny that they are White,” relying instead
upon an ethnic or religious identity (p. 50). Though Jewish people are not all
white, white Jewish people are thought to have been absorbed into the fabric of
whiteness in the U.S. (Brodkin, 1998; Prescod-Weinstein, 2017). I wonder if, in
responding to “What are you?” as I have, I have relied upon my Jewishness as a
sort of justification for why I, a white woman, do antiracist work. In allowing my
Jewishness to speak and my whiteness to remain silent, then, have I contributed
to the “mindless reproduction of whiteness” (Condon, 2012, p. 34)?
But, sitting in that conference room, I also wonder: What we have lost
through assimilation? As I plod through the layers upon layers of my whiteness, I
struggle sometimes to find my Jewishness. And as I engage in the iterative process
of unmaking and remaking and unmaking and remaking, where in the structure
of an antiracist white identity does my Jewishness fit in? Has the subordination
of my Jewish identity to my white identity helped me understand my whiteness
or has it left a gap in my understanding of my own identity and my positionality
in relation to the work I do and the professional and ideological worlds I inhabit?
What bothers me most about this exchange is how unsatisfied the attendee
seems with my response. Perhaps it is easier to trust me if she believes me to be
a light-skinned Latina woman with white privilege than a Jewish woman with
the same skin privilege. Perhaps it is easier to believe that a white Latina woman
would write a book about racial literacy than to believe a white Jewish woman
would do the same. Whichever version of me the attendee believes me to be, my

skin and the white privilege it affords me will be the same, yet, perhaps, in her
eyes, my white Jewishness is whiter.
So, I start thinking about her identity. Might her racial identity impact how
she sees me? Discussing Black-Jewish relations, Cornel West (1994) noted that,
because “like other European immigrants Jews for the most part became com-
plicitous in the American racial caste system” (p. 105). As a result, Black people
may have “a mistaken view of Jews as any other white folk.” In West’s view,
“Jewish complicity in American racism –even though it is less extensive than the
complicity of other white Americans –reinforces black perceptions that Jews are
identical to any other group benefitting from the white-skin privileges in racist
America” (p. 111). To others, however, the assimilation into whiteness by white
Jewish people is seen as “betrayal,” which West identifies as a factor in Black
antisemitism. The concept of betrayal resonates “strongly in a black Protestant
culture that has inherited many stock Christian anti-Semitic narratives of Jews as
Christ-k illers” (pp. 111–112).
This topic is far more complex than can be summed up in one paragraph,
but most instructive to my thinking about my positionality as a white Jewish
woman is the paradox West points to: Jewish people may be seen as “any other
white folk” or we may be seen as particularly deserving of ire because of our
longstanding position as, well, not like any other white folk. Arguably unlike
people of Italian and Irish descent, who once also were seen as nonwhite in the
U.S., white Jewish people continue to exist in what historian David Biale and
colleagues (1998) called a “liminal zone… somewhere between the dominant
position of the white majority and the marginal position of peoples of color” (p.
5). It is evidence of that “liminal zone” that in some situations I am seen as closer
to whiteness than in others.
Returning to the convention center in Kansas City: The truth is, I know very
little about the woman who has asked me “What are you?” and she knows very
little about me. And, in this situation, neither of us endeavor to learn more about
the other’s motives or meaning, and there is no real productive dialogue between
us. I have faced far more overt antisemitism (if this situation even qualifies as
antisemitism) in my experiences in higher education, almost exclusively from
white Christian people. Yet this interaction haunts and confounds me.
It is a missed opportunity, I think, but, because the popular (mis)understand-
ings of Jewish identity are so fraught, I worry that when we talk about Jewishness
in reductive terms (or try to squeeze a complex topic into a three-minute expla-
nation) we do little to address the salience of contemporary antisemitism or the
ways it sustains white supremacy. I have more than one story like this, stories I
will share and unpack throughout this book in hopes of developing a language
that enables more of us, white or not, Jewish or not, to engage productively in
conversations like the one I avoided.
Jewish Representation and Christian Privilege
Though we make up little more than two percent of the U.S. population (Pew,
2013), it has been suggested that Jewish people are, statistically speaking, over-
represented in the academy. According to data from 2016, globally, people who
define their religious affiliation as Jewish have more formal education than mem-
bers of any other religious group, which may be attributable at least in part to
the fact that “the vast majority of the world’s Jews live in the United States and
Israel –two economically developed countries with high levels of education over-
all” (Pew, 2016, para. 2). (That Jewish identity, which is not solely defined or
definable by religious affiliation, is generally defined in terms of religion for the
sake of such comparisons may complicate this data.) The supposed overrepre-
sentation of Jewish people in academia is noteworthy, longstanding, and does
not preclude or diminish the antisemitism that Jewish people long have faced
and continue to face in higher education. In fact, I suggest that the presence of
Jewish-identified bodies in the academy and antisemitism in the academy are
deeply entwined.
In the U.S. between the first and second world wars, working class Jewish
people, who then were not considered fully white (Biale et al., 1998; Brodkin,
1998; Goldstein, 2006), flocked to higher education in larger numbers than any
other nonwhite European immigrant group. At the same time, however, antisem-
itism “flourished in higher education.” In the 1920s, college was, for Protestants,
not exclusively but specifically men, “not about academic pursuits” but “social
connection” via clubs, sports, and other networks, networks that continued to
exclude Jews, who had been drawn to college as preparation for the workforce.
Put simply, “Jews took seriously what their affluent Protestant classmates dis-
paraged, and, from the perspective of nativist elites, took unfair advantage of
a loophole to get where they were not wanted” (Brodkin, 1998, pp. 30–31). To
limit the number of Jews in supposedly elite institutions of higher education,
universities put in place measures that, with varying levels of overtness, would
weed out Jewish applicants. These measures included revised admissions forms
requiring applicants to provide “religion, father’s name and birthplace, a photo,
and personal interview” as well as more covert measures like giving preference
to children of alumni and requiring admitted students to attend church services
(p. 31).
Of particular interest to those of us in RCWS might be the speech tests that
were required for various degrees and licensures, including teaching, which tested
one’s ability to speak a “‘standard,’ i.e. nonimmigrant, nonaccented English” (p.
32). Despite efforts at gatekeeping, a great many Jewish immigrants and chil-
dren of immigrants became teachers. By the 1930s, forty percent of NYC pub-
lic schoolteachers were Jewish (Pritchett, 2002). Public schools were also where
most Jewish people in the U.S. sent their children. In 1956, in fact, fewer than
five percent of Jewish children attended private religious schools (Beinart, 1999),
for it was the public school that “was considered sacred, holy. It was the method
and setting by which Jews could become Americans” (Schiff, cited in Beinart,
1999). The public school was especially appealing to progressives who appreciated
its seeming egalitarianism. As compositionist Russel K. Durst (2008) wrote: “In
what some would say is typical of Jewish culture, I inherited from both of my par-
ents a reverence for learning, one that was not just stated but regularly modeled”
(p. 51), a sentiment echoed by other Jewish scholars (Brodkin, 1998).
According to rhetorician and Jewish Studies scholar Michael Bernard-Donals
(2010), “Jewish participation in civic life has been defined, even in modernity, by
its marginalization and precariousness” (p. 609). For all the ways Jewish peo-
ple have been included in academia and as much as scholars find connections
between their Jewish identities and their work, there are also disjunctions, rup-
tures that make our marginalization apparent, fractures where our vulnerability
is exposed. Ruiz (2021) argued that our discipline “relies upon Eurocentric histo-
ries to legitimize its disciplinary status, which is colonial and marginalizes certain
groups. The knowledge that is produced by marginalized groups through their
publications is minoritized and… can be clearly seen when one takes a close look
at how race has functioned throughout our disciplinary history” (pp. 46–47).
Ruiz pointed to the 1969 establishment of the Black and Latinx Caucuses of the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the parent body of our more
immediate professional organization CCCC, as milestones in the field’s history
but noted that “the folks who were doing the work of creating these social jus-
tice groups were often marginal scholars who have remained marginalized in the
present” (p. 47).
In 2016, Jewish RCWS scholar Sondra Perl received the Exemplar Award,
meant to celebrate “a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our
organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service
to the entire profession” (CCCC, 2016, p. 57). Though her book On Austrian
Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate is in large part a narrative of a Jewish
woman’s experiences as a teacher, mention of Perl’s work in this area in the award
announcement is limited to the note that she founded the Holocaust Educators
Network (p. 59). That year, there was not a single session during the convention
that addressed Jewishness, Judaism, or antisemitism. In 2017, there was one panel
that addressed ways of dialoguing about antisemitism in the context of Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. In 2018, there were, again, no sessions on the program that
addressed Jewishness, Judaism, or antisemitism. The same was true for 2019.
That year, 2019, the convention was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at
the convention center five miles from the Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill,
where, just months earlier, in October 2018, a white Christian man with alle-
giances to right-wing hate groups and a history of posting anti-Semitic and racist
slurs online, walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue and murdered eleven con-
gregants. The 2019 convention program featured a poem by Goldblatt reflecting
upon the massacre, and a brief statement in the guide to the local area noting that
“the historically Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel has been much in the news due
to the horrific events at the Tree of Life Synagogue” (p. 9). It is arguably an over-
sight that Squirrel Hill is misidentified as “Squirrel” (no “Hill”) at least once in
the paragraph describing the features of the neighborhood. I am more troubled,
however, by the euphemistic description of a mass murder motivated by antisem-
itism as “horrific events.” Why avoid the words “antisemitism,” “anti-Semitic,”
and “murder”? For comparison, the words “racism,” “racist,” “antiracist,” and
“antiracism” appear 56 times in the same program.
That same year, an interactive memorial, organized by Goldblatt and Russel
Durst, was constructed in the lobby of the convention center, on which attendees
were invited to leave notes on index cards, presumably in honor of the victims.
Along with some generic comments like Love Trumps Hate and Resist, few of
which directly addressed the massacre or the eleven Jewish victims, I found an
index card that read: Jesus still loves you. As I have written elsewhere:
Who does Jesus still love? I asked myself. Does Jesus still love the Jewish heretics
who don’t worship him? I’d heard that one before, usually followed by a warning
that, should I not accept Jesus as my personal savior, I’d be destined to spend eter-
nity in Hell. Or does Jesus still love the man who killed eleven Jewish people in
a Squirrel Hill synagogue just months earlier? At best, the statement was narrow-
minded and discriminatory in its attempts to deny Jewish people the legitimacy
of a worldview; at worst, it celebrated the coldblooded hate-motivated murder
of more innocent people than I could count on my hands, which were cold and
shaking. (Olivas et al., forthcoming)
Prior to seeing this note on the memorial, I had felt more welcome as a Jewish
person at the 2019 convention than I had at any previous CCCC convention
I’d attended. That year, program chair Vershawn Ashanti Young and the Social
Justice at the Convention committee had arranged for panels to be displayed
throughout the convention center highlighting the names and contributions of
members of the various identity caucuses, including the Jewish Caucus. A col-
league had suggested I submit my name for inclusion, and, in Pittsburgh, I saw
my name alongside the names of two other Jewish scholars on the display in
the convention center. I felt recognized not just as a scholar but specifically as a
Jewish scholar.
But now, shaken by four words on an index card, I looked around and there
was no one to tell this to, no one sitting at or even approaching the memorial.
This was yet another moment in which I asked myself: Do we Jewish people
“belong” in our field?
Perryman-Clark (2021) invited us to “think beyond diversity by also revisit-
ing what our discipline historically and presently means about equity and inclu-
sion” (para. 10). What has our discipline meant about equity and inclusion with
regards to Jewish people?
In truth, though our bodies have been present in the field of RCWS for
decades, many of our epistemological traditions have been absent. Rhetorician
Janice W. Fernheimer (2010) explained: “not until 2008 was the first collec-
tion of rhetoric and composition essays explicitly focused on Jewish themes
and ideas published, not in connection with other cultural rhetorics, but in its
own volume: Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holdstein’s foundational Judaic
Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition” (p. 582). In the introduction to that
collection, Greenbaum and Holdstein (2008) noted that Jewish experiences are
often omitted or essentialized in texts in readers in composition and cultural
studies. What comes next is perhaps most alarming: “[W]hen one of us pre-
pared for publication a composition reader that attempted to include Jewish per-
spectives that were less expected than usual, several reviewers took notice –and
decided that the volume (now successfully published, we might add) might as a
result be ‘too Jewish,’ to quote one of the reviewers” (p. 2). By “less expected than
usual,” the authors meant distinct from the two forms of Jewish representation
they claimed were most prevalent: the first was the “ubiquitous” and, here citing
Cynthia Ozick, “commodified” excerpts from the Diary of Anne Frank; the other
was the more ostensibly intersectional experience –Jewish and –in which Jewish
identity is subordinated to a “more prominent cultural experience” (p. 1). Because
the representations of Jewish identity these texts offered differed and could no
longer fit in the box that had already reached its quota and been neatly packed
and labeled as Jewish, the collection became “too Jewish.”
Imagine that a reviewer had labeled another collection “too [insert other eth-
nic, racial or religious group here].” Would we have any trouble calling such
a remark racist, xenophobic, or discriminatory? Now imagine instead that
that same reviewer had labeled that other collection “too Christian.” Actually,
Greenbaum and Holdstein added that one reader of their book on Judaic per-
spectives did indeed remark that a Lutheran lens would be “a more appropriate
focus for a book” (p. 2)!
Years ago, before one of my articles about racial literacy in composition class-
rooms was published, a draft of the same article had been rejected by another
scholarly journal. When I received a marked-up copy of the manuscript I sub-
mitted, I saw that the word “Jewish” had been highlighted in the positionality
statement I included to explain how I had come to this work and how I con-
sidered my subject position in relation to my students and my curricula. In the
margins, a reviewer asked: “What right do you have to do this work?” A few lines
down: “What does being Jewish have to do with race?”
I was flabbergasted both by the directness with which this reviewer chal-
lenged my “right” to do research on racial literacy, and, frankly, by the ignorance
of a reviewer who could not conceive of the relationship between Jewish identity
and race. Never mind that the very same paragraph the reviewer was comment-
ing on was the sort of positionality statement the reviewer may have been, in a
rather generous reading, suggesting I provide. A more critical analysis, of course,
demonstrates that the question “What right do you have to do this work?”, when
taken in the context of a preexisting positionality statement, can be read more
accurately as a statement closer to: “You don’t have a right to do this work.”
Again, as with the question from the conference-goer in Kansas City, it wasn’t
just my whiteness in question here, but also my Jewishness. I again find myself
asking: how do I disentangle my whiteness from my Jewishness?
Lest readers dismiss this as anomaly, or as a single person’s uninformed and
prejudiced perspective, remember that scholarly discourse via book and journal
publications is a primary means of knowledge production in any given disci-
pline. Taken together, Greenbaum and Holdstein’s and my anecdotes illustrate
the paradox in how we are perceived as Jewish scholars: To some, our Jewish
identities preclude us from doing antiracist work, yet, to others, work that centers
our Jewish identities is just “too much.” What are we left with if the voices that
control the means of knowledge production in our field, including reviewers,
editors, and other gatekeepers, wish for us neither to center nor acknowledge our
Jewish identities? It seems that the only choice that remains is assimilation or,
more accurately, erasure.
While the field of RCWS has often been celebrated as being, as Andrea
Lunsford put it in her 1989 CCCC Chair’s Address, “dialogic, multi-voiced, and
heteroglossic” (p. 77), those of us who do antiracist work know that our ways of
knowing and doing in the field reflect hegemonic ways of knowing and doing in
our society and therefore are steeped in whiteness (Condon, 2012; Inoue, 2016;
Young, 2019), colonialism (Ruiz, 2021; Ruiz & Sanchez, 2016), and patriarchy
(Glenn, 2018). The same is true for Christianity. The body of research on anti-
racism and whiteness in RCWS is growing yet the Christianness central to our
field remains comparatively unexamined. As Holdstein (2008) argued elsewhere,
as a discipline we are “hardly ‘self-conscious about our principles and practice
regarding religious, Christian ideologies that are transparently assumed and
unquestioned” (14). Perhaps the field is getting closer to a “true and open dialec-
tic with itself… as long as it’s Christian” (p. 19).
Covert Christian privilege is woven not only into RCWS but into everyday
life in the U.S. (Blumenfeld, 2006a). White supremacy defines a system that
privileges white knowledge, language, behaviors, and ideologies through law and
policy, official structures and institutions, and distribution of material resources
(Mills, 1997). To be sure, non-Christians are implicated in whiteness, but I sug-
gest that white supremacy is inherently Christian.
In efforts to understand Christian privilege, education scholar Warren
Blumenfeld (2006a) analogized it to white and male privilege as investigated by
Peggy McIntosh: as “constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely
unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to Christians, with which they often
unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over
their shoulders.” This is a “system of benefits” woven into both society and the
Christian individual’s worldview (p. 195, emphasis in the original). Examples of
Christian hegemony range from the annual Easter egg roll at the White House
and the Christmas music that plays throughout supermarkets and shopping cen-
ters from November through New Year’s to the organization of the workweek,
which gives Christians Sundays off to worship, and the very marking of time
“through a Christian lens.” Even “the language we use in reference to the main-
stream calendar reflects Christian assumptions,” such as in the case of the term
“millennium” in reference to the year 2000 or the twenty first century, which
“is calculated with reference to the birth of Jesus” (pp. 199–200). Just as white
privilege is the privilege of not having to think about whiteness (Condon, 2012),
Christian privilege allows Christian people to see these, and other, events as “nor-
mal” and “appropriate”, whereas those of us who do not identify as Christian
“experience them as examples of institutional (governmental and educational)
(re)enforcements of dominant Christian standards” (Blumenfeld, 2006a, p. 195).
Perhaps readers see these practices not as religious, but merely cultural, more
about U.S. life than Christianity per se. That many of us see these practices as
normative is, in effect, further evidence of the deeply embedded Christian hege-
mony of the U.S. As Blumenfeld (2006a) explained,
the effect of the so-called ‘secularization of religion,’ in fact, not only fortifies,
but, indeed, strengthens Christian privilege by perpetuating Christian hegemony
in such a way as to avoid detection as religion or circumvent violating the con-
stitutional requirements for the separation of religion and government. Christian
dominance, therefore, is maintained by its relative invisibility, and with this invis-
ibility, privilege is neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor con-
fronted. (p. 206)
Like whiteness, Christianity is presumed as a universal in the U.S. Subsequently,

the Christian experience is presumed as universal, and more specific to RCWS,
Christian epistemologies are presumed universal. As a result, they remain
unnamed and uninterrogated, even as many of us do the work of interrogating
whiteness in order to dismantle white supremacy.
Of course, Jewish people are not the only people who are marginalized by
these practices and the hegemony they represent, but Jewish people experience
a unique relationship to Christian hegemony, in part because Judaism predates
Christianity, and in part due to the “conflation of Jewish and white” (Blumenfeld,
2006b, p. 12). This conflation is evident in our discursive practices around reli-
gion. For example, the term “Judeo-Christian,” such as in the case of references to
the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” obscures major differences between Judaism and
Christianity as well as the pervasiveness of antisemitism (Blumenfeld, 2006a;
Topolski, 2020).
Understanding Christian privilege helps to explain how Jewish people can be
seemingly overrepresented yet in fact underrepresented. The paradoxical nature
of Jewishness in the academy, and the quandary in which those of us who seek
to understand our own identities and experiences in academic contexts find our-
selves, is to many of us Jewish people, a familiar position, one akin to or resulting
from the “liminal zone” Biale and colleagues (1998) described. Bernard-Donals
(2010) argued that “a distinctly Jewish rhetorical stance keeps the memory –and
the voice –of the exile in mind. Judaism is founded on a tension between the
homeborn and the exile, who is chosen, apart, and, though a member of a com-
munity, is never quite at home. Though a Jewish rhetorical stance is aware of
community, belonging, and identity, those terms are always called into question”
(p. 614).
Talking about Antisemitism in the Context of

Antiracism
Here is a major obstacle those of us seeking to eradicate antisemitism face: Very

few people are talking about antisemitism. In fact, even in institutions and orga-
nizations that profess their dedication to antiracism, antisemitism (which is, by
definition, a form of racism) is largely unaddressed. In a field wherein the very
nature of our work demands we attend to the functions and dimensions of lan-
guage in context, especially in the context of society and ideology, and wherein
scholarship increasingly interrogates the pervasive influence of whiteness on our
work (Condon, 2012; Inoue, 2016; Ruiz, 2021; Young, 2019), these gaps and
silences are especially striking.
What does this mean for those of us who do antiracist work yet feel mar-
ginalized within our own communities? What does this mean for the Jewish
students who don’t see themselves either in the so-called traditional curriculum
or in our efforts toward more equitable education? What does it mean for Jewish
students, teachers, and scholars who work toward social justice but perhaps don’t
even have a complex understanding of their own situated identities or how those
identities impact or intersect with their research, teaching, and learning?
Unfortunately, many white Jewish people seem to counter their exclusion
from popular social justice interventions and antiracist discourse with reductive,
reactionary critiques of critical race theory, borne of resentment and steeped in
whiteness. Consider, for example, the recent article “Critical Race Theory and
the ‘Hyper-W hite’ Jew” by Pamela Paretsky, a researcher at the University of
Chicago. Paretsky (2021) concluded with an important point about avoiding
essentialism: “We are not characters in others’ scripts,” she said. Of course, most
of the arguments that have led to that conclusion are reductive and reliant upon
strawman fallacies and binary thinking. “In the critical social justice paradigm,”
Paretsky wrote, “Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom
being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness
is an unmitigated evil.” Buried deep within this sentence is a hint of an important

point –that Jewish people cannot be so easily categorized as white and argu-
ably therefore should be better incorporated into antiracist work –but instead
Paretsky seemed to vilify people who do antiracist work rather than the white
supremacy that necessitates that work or the Christian hegemony within white
supremacy that has never seen Jewish people as fully white. At other points, she
mocked microaggressions and referred to “ideological indoctrination,” the same
right wing talking points we hear from reactionary political figures like former
president Donald Trump (see Smagorinsky, 2021). It is hard not to read much of
the article as racist and, frankly, I think Paretsky would do well to actually read
some of the work on critical race theory that she dismisses.
To a white Jewish friend who, upon reading this article, emailed that she
found it “validating” to know “that there are others in the academy who represent
this voice as well,” I offered a critique of the article, explaining that the author
clearly hadn’t done much reading in critical race theory and that I found the
reference to “ideological indoctrination” troubling, especially in light of the fact
that similar rhetoric was used in 1930s Germany to expel Jewish scholars from
the academy (“Controlling”). I know that this friend too has read little critical
race theory and has little interest in reading more, in part because Jewish people
have been absent from the little she has read. Acknowledging the absence of
Jewish people from much antiracist work, I added: “It’s an important reminder
that two truths can be true at once.”
I found this exchange terribly disheartening.
It seems sometimes that white Jewish people are torn between two unsatisfy-
ing options: Either we’re doing antiracist work that more often than not excludes
or essentializes us, or we’re criticizing that work in language provided by conser-
vative politicians, pundits, and other public figures, often the very same public
figures who traffic in antisemitism. If we pursue the former, our Jewish identities
are not merely subordinated to but subsumed by our whiteness; if we pursue the
latter, we can claim our Jewishness only by wearing our whiteness as an invisible
cloak –protective yet unseen and unexamined. In both scenarios, our Jewishness
is secondary to our whiteness.
Of course, for white Jews, it is whiteness that allows us to assimilate. It is
whiteness that has allowed us to occupy spaces from which we were once excluded.
It is whiteness that benefits from racism and our whiteness that needs to be exam-
ined. As Black Jewish physicist Chandra Prescod-Weinstein (2017) pointed out,
“Jews should know that white supremacy is a danger not just to Black people and
people of color, but to white Jews as well” (p. 40).
Not all Jews are white, however. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish people are
likelier than Ashkenazi Jewish people to have dark skin and a growing number
of Jewish people, including those of Ashkenazi descent, are biracial or multiracial
(Guskin, 2021). Still, the U.S. conceptualization of a Jewish person is Ashkenazic
(Cohen, 2017), therefore European, and, in the binary that still prevails in U.S.
racial discourse, Jewish people are generally categorized as white, even by anti-
racist authors and activists (see West, 1994). Trying to understand antisemitism,
U.S. antisemitism in particular, is difficult, but it is arguably more difficult with-
out a comprehensive understanding of whiteness and white supremacy.
One reason we aren’t talking about antisemitism is that antisemitism is com-
plex; it complicates our understandings of racism and antiracism, of whiteness
and privilege, of ethnicity and religion, of positionality and identity. Let us not
forget that the definitions and understandings of these concepts we do have,
though well-studied, have been hard-won in a white hegemonic society. But, as
educators, we know that learning happens we engage with complexity. To do so,
we need a discourse. We need a language, a shared set of terminology, a clear
place to begin. The limitations of our current discourse and the language we use
to discuss Jewishness and antisemitism rhetorically serve to uphold rather than
dismantle white supremacy.
Developing a more nuanced discourse for the interrogation of antisemitism
and its connections to racism and white supremacy will enable us to better address
Jewish experiences and antisemitism in ways that are supportive, productive, and
culturally sustaining. This more nuanced discourse is also an integral step toward
Jewish allyship in fights against other forms of oppression. Before we can develop
that discourse, however, we need a better understanding of the rhetorical, histor-
ical, political, and racial dynamics of Jewish identity and antisemitism, and of
how, in the context of the United States and its institutions, antisemitism is an
integral part of the white supremacist imaginary.
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religion constellation in Europe. Patterns of Prejudice, 54(1–2), 71–90.
Twine, F. W. (2010). A white side of Black Britain: Interracial intimacy and racial literacy. Duke UP.
West, C. (1994). Race matters. Vintage.
Young, V. A. (2019). Foreword: A forenote from an angry Black man: Blackness should always
be center. In S. Perryman-Clark, & C. Craig (Eds.), Black perspectives in writing program
administration (pp. vii–xiv). NCTE.
2
The Antisemitic Imaginary
In their primer of sorts on critical race theory, Richard Delgado and Jean
Stefancic (2012) suggested a classroom exercise to encourage the unpacking of
white privilege:
Imagine a Russian Jew, orphaned at the age of two, who immigrates to the United
States at the age of fifteen without a penny or knowledge of English. She attends
night school while working as a supermarket bagger during the day and plans to
attend a community college and major in premed studies.
This person is white with blue eyes and blond hair. Is she privileged?
Unprivileged? Privileged in some respects but not others? (p. 90)
This exercise struck a chord with me when I first read it and it strikes a chord
today. Growing up in the U.S. as the child of activist parents, I had been taught
that race was a social construct in service of racism, rather than an innate biolog-
ical identity. I knew I was white, but I also knew that, when my parents referred
to “white people,” they weren’t really talking about us. Individual white people
could be Jewish, but, as a group, white people were Christian. Decades later, sit-
uated within the subfield of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies that focus
on rhetorics of racism and antiracist praxis, I am convinced that, while individual
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Antisemitism and the White

Supremacist Imaginary Mara Lee

Imaginary 1st Edition Lee Bacon

The White Negress Literature Minstrelsy and the Black

Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism Robert

Will Grayson Will Grayson 1st Edition John Green David

Confronting Antisemitism from Perspectives of

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism 1st Edition Johnson

The Wrong Rake 1st Edition Eliot Grayson

Inside the Oil Industry 1st Edition Wil Mara

Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary

University and works as an associate professor at California State University,

Mara Lee Grayson

Cover images: ©iStock.com/wildpixel; ©iStock.com/argus456

9781433192968_cvr_eu.indd All Pages 19-Jan-23 22:01:41

Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary

University and works as an associate professor at California State University,

Mara Lee Grayson

Cover images: ©iStock.com/wildpixel; ©iStock.com/argus456

9781433192968_cvr_eu.indd All Pages 19-Jan-23 22:01:41

Antisemitism and the White

Conflations and Contradictions

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

© 2023 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

1 Jewish Whiteness, Christian Hegemony, and Disciplinary (Mis)

2 The Antisemitic Imaginary 33

3 The Racialization of Jewish People in the United States 55

4 On Being Jewish: Existing and Original Research 75

5 Difference and Defense: Experiences of Jewish Identity in a

6 Antisemitism in the Profession: Contemporary Manifestations and

7 The “Bizarre” Absence of Jewish Discourse in Rhetoric and

8 Talking about Israel, (Anti)Zionism, and the Politicization of Jewish

9 Resisting the Whitewashing of Jewish Identity: Finding Our

At the Intersection of Whiteness and Jewishness

The Reemergence and Mainstreaming of Antisemitism

Colloquially, “crazy-​ making” describes manipulative discursive moves and

What This Book Does and Doesn’t Do

hear an antisemitic remark about Stephen Miller, the far-​right, anti-​immigration,

Conceptual Frameworks and Original Research

insider perspective, this work is also informed by my lived experiences as a white,

Finally, in Chapter 9, I synthesize the findings of the original research and

A Brief Note on Terminology

Jewish Whiteness, Christian

would do the same. Whichever version of me the attendee believes me to be, my

Jewish Representation and Christian Privilege

Like whiteness, Christianity is presumed as a universal in the U.S. Subsequently,

Talking about Antisemitism in the Context of

Here is a major obstacle those of us seeking to eradicate antisemitism face: Very

is an unmitigated evil.” Buried deep within this sentence is a hint of an important

The Antisemitic Imaginary

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While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

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Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

Colloquially, “crazy- making” describes manipulative discursive moves and

hear an antisemitic remark about Stephen Miller, the far-right, anti-immigration,