In medieval and early modern Europe, the Christian ruling class enjoyed the banking services of what were known as “court Jews”—Jewish people acting as financiers in exchange for temporary protection, even while other Jews faced scrutiny and persecution. This protection, however, was never secured; if fortunes changed, they could easily become political and societal scapegoats.
This analogy proves useful for viewing how modern-day Republicans view the Jewish public, according to Joel Swanson, a scholar of modern Jewish intellectual history at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY. In Swanson’s view, while President Donald Trump’s administration is cracking down on diversity and inclusion initiatives across the country, Jewish Americans are receiving special protection and treatment—but how long until the tide changes? He touches on this and more in his latest article on Slate, “What Are We Allowed to Say? How Trump’s Department of Education has made it harder for me to teach Jewish Studies”.
On this week’s episode of The Jewish Angle, Swanson joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy to get nerdy about European Jewish history and reflect on the lessons we can learn about Jews’ modern-day place in North American society.
Transcript
Joel Swanson: But the figure of the American Jew becomes sort of a symbol of the temporarily protected class under the Trump administration. They don’t want diversity, equity, and inclusion for other minority groups. We are allowed to have those programmes for Jewish students.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, I’m Phoebe Maltz Bovy, opinion editor of the Canadian Jewish News. You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN that looks at the complicated place of Jews in today’s cultural and political landscapes.
So as regular listeners or people who follow me online in any capacity may have picked up on, I have for the most part traded Twitter, now called X, for the platform Blue Sky. Like all social media platforms, it has its ups and downs, but one definite up has been following an account called Joel S., who is Joel Swanson. He is a professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College as well as a public intellectual.
And the sort of the reason for having him on is partly just I’ve really enjoyed what he posts and also because of his March article in Slate called “What Are We Allowed to Say? How Trump’s Department of Education Has Made It Harder for Me to Teach Jewish Studies.” That piece brings up a number of themes listeners to this podcast will be familiar with. And yes, sorry, it is a bit more Americana, I realize, on a Canadian podcast, but as we’re trying to think through a lot of these issues in Canada about we’re sort of Jews in DEI, all of these things are still very active discussions in Canada in ways that are quite different from how they are in the US. I think looking at sort of what would happen in this alternate universe where everything some people in the Jewish community, certainly not all, are requesting and then some would happen. Would that be a better world or not? We have a case study right there in the U.S. So, Joel Swanson, welcome to The Jewish Angle.
Joel Swanson: Thank you so much, Phoebe. It’s great to be here.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So first, I want to know about you. I have enjoyed your posts. I read your bio on the Sarah Lawrence website and I was like, oh my goodness, we have a lot of research interests in common and things like this. I saw that your dissertation was on, quote, “an array of little-studied Francophone Jewish writers and philosophers in the pre-war period,” and I was like, “That is extremely interesting to me as somebody who did a not dissimilar dissertation, but on the 19th century.” So just do you want to tell me a bit about how you got into your academic field, but also how you came to have a public intellectual role?
Joel Swanson: My academic background is primarily in modern Jewish thought, broadly construed. One of the reasons that I like modern Jewish thought is that as a discipline, it’s sort of broadly philosophical, but in a way that engages the political situation of Jews in the modern period and the backdrop of Jewish emancipation and debates about Jewish identity. How is Jewish identity going to be defined against the backdrop of modern nation states in Europe in particular? Is it going to be defined as a religious identity? Is it going to be defined as a cultural or national identity? Debates about what it even means to be a Jewish person that still, I think, resonate today. We’re still grappling with what it actually means to be a Jew and how do the religious and the national elements of that identity relate to one another or conflict with one another. So, I guess through my academic studies, I got asked to write some articles for the Forward, sort of bringing my academic background into debates about Jewish identity, particularly with the first Trump administration and certain controversies that were going on about ways of defining Jewish identity in particular, and a policy adopted by President Trump during his first term in which he identified anti-Jewish discrimination as a form of nationality-based racism for the first time. So Jews as a group in the United States were identified as a nationality and not just as a religious group under US law for the first time.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So it’s very Clermont-Tonnerre, right?
Joel Swanson: Yes, absolutely.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Which I’m sure all of our listeners get that reference.
Joel Swanson: So sort of the reverse of that. So, for those who might not know, Clermont-Tonnerre was a sort of liberal-minded member of the French aristocracy during the French Revolution who was debating the question of whether Jews in France should be given equal citizenship as Christians in France, primarily Catholics, for the first time in French history under post-revolutionary French government. Essentially, his argument was that Jews should be given equal citizenship rights if they abandoned an identity as a political group. Whereas previously, Jews saw themselves as sort of a separate entity, a group that governed themselves like a nation, so to speak, with their own laws, their own folkways, their own customs, this French noble said, well, Jews can be equal to French Catholics under French law, but only if they say, well, our Jewish identity is just something we do in private. It’s not something that we govern ourselves according to Jewish law.
And the famous quote that constantly gets recited in Jewish studies is, “We must deny everything to the Jews as a nation. We must grant everything to the Jews as people.” So he wanted to say essentially, Jews should just be the same as other French people and should just do their Jewish things in private, in their own homes and in their own synagogues, but they should not be governed according to Jewish law in the public sphere. They should accept the supremacy of French law in the public sphere. What the Trump administration was saying was essentially sort of the reverse of that in some ways, that they should be defined as a national group and as a group that is not just a religious group as they had been defined in the past under American law for the purposes of anti-discrimination, but that Jews should be seen as a nationality as well as a…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That’s why that quote jumped out at me so much when you said that. I hadn’t even realized that Trump had done that. He’s done so many things that one passed me by.
While we’re on the topic of historical analogies, I know when we were discussing this podcast previously, you had brought up the Dreyfus Affair and you said you had something to say on why it’s relevant now. So why do you see the Dreyfus Affair? That’s when the French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason for anti-Semitic and other, but mainly anti-Semitic reasons at the end of the 19th, early 20th century France. How do you see it as relevant?
Joel Swanson: This past semester, I did a lecture about the Dreyfus Affair in my Modern Jewish History survey class. The question that I got repeatedly from my undergraduate students was they agreed that it was a miscarriage of justice and that obviously Dreyfus had been mistreated by the justice system. But they kept asking, well, why was this one person, no matter how much this, how obviously it was a miscarriage of justice, why did this one case sort of divide all of French society? Why was this one person so important for an entire decade in French political and cultural life, basically? What I tried to say in response to that was that arguably it wasn’t really about Dreyfus at all. He was just sort of a symbol for these larger debates about the place of religion and the legacy of the French Revolution and whether the French government should be primarily secular or whether religious influences should be allowed back into the French government. He became essentially a symbol of these larger debates about the legacy of the French Revolution and French Republicanism in its broad sense. A lot of famous intellectuals, writers, professors, and scholars publicly involved themselves in that debate. But the most famous, of course, is Emile Zola, the famous French-language literary figure.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: The one with the J’accuse.
Joel Swanson: Yes, yes, the J’accuse piece, which has become so iconic in French culture that you still see people use the phrase more than completely out of the way.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: More than, I was going to say, more than French culture. I’ve seen it in, like, New York Times op-eds. I mean, J’accuse, I think, is like colloquial. Sort of, yeah, I think it’s just in the vernacular, even in English. I was thinking, though, that it’s interesting how one person, I mean, you could say the same with George Floyd, right? It’s often one person representing something bigger. It wasn’t that Zola was specifically a pal of Dreyfus’s, you know. It was obviously about something bigger.
Joel Swanson: Well, the interesting thing about Zola is that he actually, by all accounts, didn’t really care that much about anti-Semitism or Jews one way or the other. He didn’t really care about this issue because he thought that one Jewish army captain had faced such a miscarriage of justice. Rather, he was sort of a broad political liberal who supported a non-religious French government where people would have equal rights under the law. He saw defending Dreyfus as an opportunity to involve himself in this public debate. For Zola, Dreyfus was just an opportunity for this. He became representative of this new figure of the intellectual in France. If you read French newspapers during the period after Zola’s J’accuse article, you see a dramatic rise in the number of newspapers using the word “intellectual.” In some ways, he becomes a paradigmatic figure of what it means to be a public intellectual, known first as an artist and writer, but who then involves himself in the affairs of the state in a big way.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right. What’s interesting with the Dreyfus Affair also is that for Zola and others, especially on the French left, it was a moment of kind of purging its own anti-Semitic sentiments. There had been a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment not only on the French left but also on the right. Initially, there was this notion that Dreyfus was privileged, so who cares, right? But not so privileged once you’re on Devil’s Island. There was a move to reject anti-Semitism, though it didn’t always stick. Moving up to 1940 is a different matter. I wanted to talk about your Slate piece because there’s a historical analogy there I had not thought of. The Dreyfus Affair I think about a lot, but this analogy in Slate about court Jews is what Trump seems to be going for. It is a useful way of making sense of an administration whose so-called fight against anti-Semitism is at odds with what most American Jews, who tend to vote Democrat, see. It also makes sense of Trump’s actions when he claims to act in the interests of Jews, meaning those who support him but are not representative of American Jews generally. Do you want to talk a little more about the court Jews analogy?
Joel Swanson: Yes, that’s an analogy I found very useful. The court Jew in medieval and early modern Europe was essentially a financier providing financial services to the Christian ruling class in exchange for temporary protection. While other Jews might face persecution, the court Jew enjoyed greater security. However, this security was always temporary. If fortunes changed, they could easily become scapegoats.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, there is a way, which is that most Jews were not court Jews; most were just poor.
Joel Swanson: Absolutely. Most Jews were not court Jews. But the court Jew was involved in banking and finance and provided financial services to kings and nobles around Europe. This position offered temporary protection, but it was always tenuous. I find it useful today as a comparison to how the Trump administration uses American Jews. The figure of the American Jew becomes a symbol of a temporarily protected class. Whereas the Trump administration rejects initiatives for other minority groups, like DEI programs, they allow them for Jewish students. For instance, in a settlement with Columbia University, Columbia agreed to ban DEI programs for most groups but must have a figure to represent Jewish students against anti-Semitism. This protection does not extend to other minority students.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So you write about the Trump administration banning, quote, implicit bias training for students but making an exception for anti-Semitism. And you write, and I’m quoting your Slate piece here, not only does this separate Jews from other groups with which we might stand in solidarity, but it makes it impossible to educate students about the actual forms that antisemitism today takes, end quote. So I agree that this double standard is bizarre. I agree that it’s ultimately bad for Jewish students who are getting this special treatment they didn’t ask for. I think this could contribute to antisemitism. I don’t think this is a good thing. And certainly, as I’ve said before and will keep saying, and even though people are going to say, nobody who signed the Harper’s letter says this, I say this constantly, the Trump administration should not be like, rounding people up off the street, like, you know, foreign national students for having written an op-ed or something like that, or protesting. No, no, no, I’m, I’m against all this. I’ve said this since it started. You know, I’m, you know, a liberal Jew in Toronto, like, obviously, whatever. But I do want to push back a little bit on your characterization of DEI as a quote, right wing boogeyman, because the oppression hierarchy. So this is where my own sort of non-academic background is in. I wrote a book about privilege accusations. It came out in 2017.
Joel Swanson: Yes, I read your book. I enjoyed it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Thank you. You are one of the three people who read it and I’m honoured. But the oppression hierarchy, though, as understood in the 2010s and really through the Biden years, didn’t include Jews as a marginalized group reliably. Sometimes it was complicated, depends which privilege checklist you were doing. And it did sometimes even involve this idea of Jews as hyper-privileged, as epitomizing privilege, as somehow more white privileged than other white people. And all of this, and this has been ongoing for years, or else I could not have written about it in something that came out in 2017. But it really did come to a head during these campus encampment protests when some students, some Jewish students complained, using language of safe spaces and so forth. So we agree that, that Trump’s approach is wrong. But also, I guess what I’m saying is like there was a. There, there. What Trump’s doing, I don’t think is addressing it, but like what. What should be happening, I guess, is what I’m asking.
Joel Swanson: So it’s a really important question. And I think that the, that one of the challenges of the Trump administration’s approach to campus antisemitism and to antisemitism more broadly, is that he would not have been able to have as much success as he has had if not for the fact that there is a very real issue there. And I don’t deny that there is antisemitism on American college and university campuses. They’re absolutely.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And do you include. And by when you say that, do you only mean like because some students and faculty support Trump, or do you mean because there’s antisemitism across the political spectrum in different ways?
Joel Swanson: I mean, because there’s antisemitism across the political spectrum, there, there are absolutely people. While I don’t agree at all with the entire characterization of the pro-Palestine student movements that you hear from the administration, I certainly have seen students make statements about Jewish identity that are very uninformed, that are insensitive, or make statements that seem to be endorsing violence against Israeli Jews. And I find that highly objectionable. And I will say that I find that objectionable. And I will continue to say that even while I find the Trump administration’s.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Approach to it, specifically the DEI thing, like what. What should be happening there?
Joel Swanson: Well, so it’s interesting that you say that, because. So the state of California, a number of years ago, they passed a statewide bill that required that students in public high school in the state of California would be required to take classes in what is called ethnic studies. And ethnic studies encompasses a lot of different ranges of studies. You could study Chicano studies about the Latino community. You could study Native American studies in high school. So there were a variety of ways that students could fulfill that requirement. And when the bill was first written, there was a lot of pushback from. From Jewish groups about the fact that the ethnic studies curriculum did not seem to include the study of Jews and Jewish history as part of this process. And in particular, there was pushback about the fact that the Middle Eastern studies component of this ethnic curriculum seemed to erase Jews who come from the Middle East and North Africa, Mizrahi Jewish communities. But while there was general agreement, except from some dissident Jews on the left, that there were problems with the curriculum, there were big debates about what to do about it. There were some who said, well, this is evidence that this entire approach to ethnic studies needs to be thrown out. But then there were other groups who said, well, no, we actually like the idea of requiring students to study a minority community in high school. We just want to, for instance, Mizrahi Jews to be included as an option in that. So there was a big debate about whether the approach to this problem should be to sort of toss out the entire framework or to revise the framework to make it more inclusive of Jewish experiences. And I think we see similar debates going on with DEI programs at a college level. And I absolutely agree that there are DEI administrators and DEI programs that have not necessarily been sensitive to Jewish experiences and that have dismissed the history of antisemitism.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I think it’s that there was like. Because I live in two eras, right. Like, I live in.
Joel Swanson: Sure.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Because I’m American and now Canadian. I can see it from the American perspective of, like. But look, Trump’s obviously suppressing speech in ways that, you know, any sort of scold and Tumblr could never have imagined. You know, yes, obviously that’s happening, but I also see it as, like, if not to say the past is another country and that country’s Canada, but a little bit the past is another country, the recent past and that country’s Canada. And like, it’s grim when Jews are being not just, you know, discriminated against, but attacked. And there’s this preset oppression hierarchy that says, no, Jews are the white oppressors, Jews are settlers, Jews are, you know, all of this. And it’s like, I think the, yeah, I agree that Trump’s exploiting something, but I think what he’s exploiting, maybe where we slightly disagree, is that I don’t think he’s exploiting like that there are a few anti-Semitic bad actors around the edges, which there are, but I think it’s more that there’s something like structural where Jews just are not, like, not to say Jews don’t count, because it’s not. I don’t even know that the answer is that Jews should count. It’s more just that, like it’s the wrong framework for understanding antisemitism, maybe.
Joel Swanson: Well, so I guess this gets back to your critique of the entire framework of privilege. I do fundamentally think we need to reconceive the way we think about oppression itself, to stop thinking about it as static and to think about it as something that works on multiple levels, where someone’s identity can be a source of privilege, so to speak, to use a problematic term in some cases and also a source of being victimized in other cases.
And I actually think that one of the cases that I try to make to my students at this extremely left-wing liberal arts school, where I teach, where most students identify as anti-Zionists, is that the conflictual status of Jews throughout modern history—where at times they are given equal citizenship in the state, and at times that’s taken away, like Jews in the Middle East—illustrates the ways in which identities are not static. For instance, there was a brief period under French colonialism where Jews were given more rights than Muslims, which was later reversed with Arab nationalist movements. This points to how identities are always being reconceived and reimagined. I think it is problematic on a deep level to view oppression as something that is permanently hierarchical, and I hope that Jewish history provides us with tools and a historical lens to reconsider this. It encourages us to think about identity as something circumstantial and ever-changing. I’ve always pushed back against the idea that identity is static or that there are permanent hierarchies.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I see that you’re scheduled to teach a course called “Are Jews White?”
Joel Swanson: Yes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Are you still able to do that in this new Trump era? Are you still going to be allowed to, and what are your thoughts, fears, and hopes for that?
Joel Swanson: We had a meeting of the humanities faculty at my college last year to discuss what classes we were going to offer this coming academic year. I mentioned my “Are Jews White?” class, and one of the other faculty members, who is not Jewish, interjected and asked me, “Well, are they? Can you tell me?” I replied that I can’t give away the ending; they would have to take the class to find out, although I admit that’s somewhat glib. The answer is that the class suggests the Jewish experience says something about the history of racialization itself, tracing back to blood purity ideas during the Spanish Inquisition and the ways Jewish identity was redefined as hereditary. It proposes that the Jewish experience offers insights into how race functions differently in various cultural settings. Ultimately, what I hope my students get from the class is the understanding that “Are Jews White?” is the wrong question; it’s about how we use that term contextually in different cultures.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And you’re still able to teach a course like this, in Trump’s America?
Joel Swanson: The short answer is that I am a little worried about it. I am concerned about people asking for my syllabus. As a college, we’ve been subpoenaed by a committee of the United States Congress asking for certain materials. I’m worried that they might ask for my syllabus for that class and that I might have no choice but to hand it over, although I would try to resist. At the same time, I must give credit to my college administration. They have defended my right to teach that class as an academic freedom issue, arguing that it has intellectual value for students. If I stopped teaching that class, it would seem to me that the administration has won.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I have a million more questions, but we don’t have time, unfortunately. Joel Swanson, where can people find you?
Joel Swanson: Blue Sky is the best way to keep up with things that I’m writing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Professor Swanson, thank you so much for coming on the Jewish Angle.
Joel Swanson: Thank you so much. This was great.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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