Montclair State Professor Recaps Panel Talk On Antisemitism

MONTCLAIR, NJ — The following op-ed comes courtesy of Dr. Laura Quiros, an associate professor at Montclair State University, who is speaking about a panel held at the university on Feb. 22. Find out how to post announcements or events to your local Patch site.

Recently, my colleagues and I held space for the Montclair State University Committee to engage in a panel discussion on antisemitism. The panel was interdisciplinary because a response to antisemitism requires collective action and collaboration between and among academic and non-academic professional settings, university student spaces, and the general public. On the panel was a theater artist, producer, Black and Jewish Rabbi, a Latino and Jewish Full Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University and a White and Jewish Full Professor of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University. The panel was a response to the present need for interdisciplinary collaborations to address social injustices—specifically, antisemitism.

The reason I was compelled to tell this story was two-fold; to name the perceived resistance or difficulty, I observed when discussing the intersectionality of Jewish Identity and similarly, present day antisemitism.

As a trauma-informed social justice educator, I believe that anti-oppressive practice in any form starts with self-awareness and specifically requires us to understand ourselves and the ways in which our socialization and values can foster implicit bias. That premise grounded me in starting the evening with a question on identity. The first question asked of the panelists was, how do you identify and what does it mean to and for you to be Jewish? Each panelist responded to that question from their own lens, from their own experiences within that identity that they named. Those shared experiences based on the intersectionality of their identity were very rich and very different. The learnings from this first question were invaluable and probably could have been the sole question of the night. I name this here because I have noticed that in conversations on Jewish identity there is often a conflation and an essentializing of what it means to be Jewish and that prototype is often backed by an intellectual debate of “Jewishness.”

Why do we move so quickly away from the personal intersectionality of Jewish identity? What makes it hard to hold space to unpack the diverse experiences of occupying several identities at once coupled with the intergenerational and ancestral traumas of the past? The beauty of unpacking is that often within this unpacking there surfaces a recognition of bias, and/or an awareness of the ways we may have been essentializing Jewish identity, allowing us to really understand ourselves and one another. Yet, we often move so quickly past this question of identity and intersectionality.

The second reason I choose to write this piece is because I have observed that the topic of antisemitism-in and of itself- is rarely named on college campus settings and when it is the discussion moves from the space of dialogue to a debate about Israel and Palestine, instead of staying with the current experiences of antisemitism. There is so much value in the unpacking and naming of present day antisemitism. One challenge of the social justice journey is that people are on many different parts of this journey; in this case, some do not even know what antisemitism is, some know but do not believe antisemitism is a real threat and/or the topic of antisemitism is too simple and they already have all the knowledge they need. This last point is interesting to me. In social justice work, particularly when the discussion centers around race, I often hear folks complain or comment on the fact that they “know this already.” That they have heard that before, they know what racism and structural oppression is- and my question in response is-if this information is so simple to you then why aren’t you continuing the conversation in larger spaces? Why aren’t we talking about the everyday actions of antisemitism? This conversation on this type of oppression falls victim to other forms of oppression, the inability to stay in a dialogue that while may be named as “simple,” is anything but. If you know what antisemitism is, ok, then what are you doing with that? How are you educating others? How are we bringing this conversation into the “classroom” and holding space for it?

As one who holds space for many organizations around social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion, I am keenly aware that my participants are in different places and on different parts of the social justice journey mainly because of the intersectionality of identity and the experiences that accompany those identities. Despite this, I have to always start with grounding us in a here and now dialogue and refrain from moving to a place of intellectualization and debate. We have to stay in dialogue, in relationship and connection and in solidarity. Recent and past events require us to reconsider the ways we are in relationship with one another, the ways in which we challenge social injustices, the ways we gather, and the ways we teach.

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