A recent open letter initiated by the Union for Reform Judaism, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the National Council of Jewish Women—signed by over 30 other primarily American organizations of similar assertively liberal persuasion—defends diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the name of Jewish values.
It’s a message that lands to the left of my own politics—but it also makes a number of good points.
For one thing, it doesn’t dance around the fact that DEI as practiced can sometimes be craptastic for the Jews:
“Some Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion champions have spoken or acted in ways that have caused us pain, including through overt expressions of antisemitism, and others have shared visions of the future that differ from our own; none can speak authoritatively and comprehensively about what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is or is not. Rather, it is for each of us to do the work of opening the doors of opportunity for all. It is not only possible, but necessary, to advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts in a way that is truly inclusive of Jewish safety, identities, and history.”
Several liberal Jewish groups pledge to stand by DEI:
— Gabby Deutch (@GSDeutch) February 7, 2025
"As Jewish groups that are committed to protecting & advancing the safety & security of our community, we know we have an invaluable tool to leverage: DEI initiatives"https://t.co/cCtBB5HPEr pic.twitter.com/CJZvGf7WaY
Instead, it’s the principles worth hanging onto. Not only is DEI beneficial to “Jews who identify as People of Color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and women”—the majority of Jewry!—but, and this is the part I’m fixated on, it is part of a value system that has a place for Jews.
Abandon DEI, some are realizing, and you might just be abandoning the very idea of anti-discrimination.
For the past three weeks, the demolition of DEI programs in U.S. workplaces and universities has been part President Trump’s general mission to reduce the federal government to a few abandoned paperclips in a dusty office somewhere.
One of President Trump’s promises was actually to get rid of all that wokeness. And while Jewish voters didn’t bite (most voted Democrat, as per usual), he could still have their support—American Jews, and any Canadian conservative counterparts not altogether miffed about all the tariffs-and-51st-state nonsense—if DEI is genuinely something doing us wrong.
And he does, to a point. Not all Jewish groups are fleeing Elon Musk-owned X for progressive haven Bluesky. Some Jews are even sharing their delight at the downfall of DEI in their New York Times columns! (That would be Bret Stephens, whom I will oblige by not, as a woman, signing up for anything physically strenuous.) Ambivalence seems to be the order of the day where Jews and DEI are concerned, as Haley Cohen reported last week for Jewish Insider.
As is true in American society at large, some Jewish organizations are ride-or-die DEI, while others are taking advantage of Trump’s instincts on this one to reject policies that they maybe never adopted, or maybe only went for in 2020 out of fear of getting cancelled.
But as the illiberal right becomes more powerful than the illiberal left, DEI might start to sound like a better state of affairs than what followed. It may be a cure-worse-than-the-disease type situation.
The complicated relationship Jews have to diversity initiatives is nothing new. Holistic admissions—the search for the well-rounded college applicant, as opposed to the one with the highest grades and standardized test scores—was initially code for a quota system to keep Jewish numbers low (and posh WASP numbers high) at elite universities, and only more recently used as a way of practicing affirmative action (for underrepresented minorities, which Jews were not) without falling afoul of U.S. law. But American Jews often support affirmative action (along with other Democrat-associated causes) for a variety of reasons, including a sense that Jewish values mean looking out for the vulnerable, but also an understanding that entities wishing ill on Black and Latino people tend not to be super enthusiastic about Jews.
When, in the 2010s, I first wrote about the awkwardness of being a member of any group with an ambiguous spot in progressive privilege hierarchies (Jews, but also Asians-Americans and white women, or white men with idiosyncratic setbacks unrelated to identity categories), I was not referencing the 2020-2021 racial reckoning, let alone the campus encampments, as none of that had happened when The Perils of “Privilege” was published in 2017. The terminology wasn’t identical to today’s. But the structure was already in place. You were either marginalized or you were the oppressor.
If you were the oppressor and you complained about injustice coming your way, then you were part of the problem, a reactionary crying ‘reverse racism’ or one of those people who (as the endlessly repeated adage would have it) mistook equality for oppression, having become so accustomed to everything being handed to you on a silver platter. Unless otherwise specified, Jews were white, maybe even whiter-than-white, which incidentally seems to be Musk’s stance at the moment. (The replies on X aren’t as convinced.)
This means that Jews cannot merely fall outside the purview of DEI. If Jews are not DEI-worthy, then it’s not just that complaints of antisemitism would get passed along to a different bureaucratic division. It’s that conceptually, we’re not a group against whom discrimination is viewed as a real thing.
Following Oct. 7, and particularly once the omnicause-supporting campus encampments formed, DEI went from something Jews didn’t benefit from to something outright anti-Jewish in some cases. DEI, the entity supposedly concerned with inclusivity and microaggression, was not terribly interested in Jews who felt shunned on campus.
The DEI Complex Will Never Protect Jews: The problem isn’t that the system—of affinity groups, diversity officers, microaggression policing, and more—hasn’t included Jews until now. It’s that the system itself is dangerous, from @ArminRosen https://t.co/g4scJsiwTn
— Tablet Magazine (@tabletmag) October 25, 2023
So chucking DEI may seem like a win for the Jews, even if mixed in with an administration that brings, shall we say, a mix of things. But is it?
If you were all along on board with the wokeness, it might if anything feel like a relief—or even vindication—that your side has proven itself the less-bad of options. I’m addressing this, then, more to Jews who were either wary of social justice ideology since it emerged in the 2010s, or who arrived at such a place post-Oct. 7. Are better days ahead, if North America de-wokes itself?
The expectation that one walk on eggshells to avoid provoking earnest or opportunistic offence was irritating at best, illiberal and chilling at worst. But it turns out that the thing pent up, that many people have been just dying to say, is one variation or another of ‘Hitler had a point.’ Not just tepid things like ‘maybe trans women could have a separate sports league, depending which sport it is, and not compete on the general women’s team’ or ‘maybe you don’t need to render a high schooler lifelong-unemployable for having once posted that’s lame to social media, even if yes that microaggresses people with certain disabilities and maybe they should have chosen their words better.’ No, there are a lot of people just bursting to be aggressively bigoted, and overjoyed that the vibe shifted in their favour.
The same terms mean different things to different people. DEI can mean an antiracism human-resources seminar that costs a university or company a ton of money (paid to a white antiracism educator, often enough) and leaves staff if anything more racist. DEI can also mean a university having a Gender Studies department. Or it can mean a university admitting Black students, or… the very existence of the social sciences, or of publicly-funded education, period.
The right-wing anti-DEI movement is a burn-it-all-down gesture where ‘woke’ is first on the chopping block. It’s less about wondering whether you can solve racism in schools by throwing Robin DiAngelo at the problem and more about whether there should even be a Department of Education.
Over 100 Jewish organizations expressed our deep alarm over the Trump administration’s actions that directly threaten our democratic values and norms.
— Jewish Council for Public Affairs (@theJCPA) February 7, 2025
Read more in @axios https://t.co/bBQUeZI333 pic.twitter.com/MdZ3TpkzY3
I was in academia myself, in a past life, kind of—I got a doctorate and taught undergrads. I am aware of the woke, it is there, one is expected to pick topics that align with everyone’s priors. But also, universities are where knowledge is maintained and produced. That’s what there is, and if you burn it down you need to be offering something better.
If the upheaval underway were about getting rid of progressive excesses and finding ways to extend inclusivity to people outside far-left groupthink (and, in the U.S. context, lowering tuition by getting rid of some of the administrative DEI jobs) then so be it. Lots of Jews would and should be on board. Instead, the plan appears to be getting rid of education itself and replacing it with… nothing? With raw-milk-producing farmer tradwives homeschooling when not posting about their very aesthetic lives? Unclear. But whatever it is, it doesn’t seem like Jews—historically a school-loving people—would be into.
There’s a world of difference between objecting to DEI as a perhaps ineffective way of achieving the ends of diversity, equity, and inclusion (in the manner of, say, University of Toronto psychologist Yoel Inbar) and objecting to the goals themselves.
And if DEI is code for outreach to towards minority groups, then Jews may have been benefiting from DEI after all. This only becomes clear when DEI is excised and you see what, specifically, is lost. Why does the U.S. federal government no longer recognize Holocaust Remembrance Day? Because that’s too DEI-ish, apparently. See also, perhaps, Pierre Poilievre’s pooh-poohing of Canada having special representatives against Islamophobia or antisemitism. Are we to get rid of Holocaust memorial ceremonies and whichever antisemitism awareness campaigns… in the name of sparing Jews further antisemitism?
@PierrePoilievre thinks the office of the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism is “useless” and says he will remove the position. The envoy's role is to support and advocate for the Jewish community. Which @DeborahLyonsSE has done a fantastic job at. pic.twitter.com/uFSF03JUet
— Nati Pressmann | נטי פרסמן (@NatiPress) December 13, 2024
The symbolic outreach can be silly, and there doubtless are more substantive ways of helping communities than awareness campaigns and officers tasked with removing abstract -isms from society. But will we miss the cringe symbolism when it’s gone? I suppose it depends on why it disappeared. If the point is to redistribute resources to more substantive endeavours helping minorities then fine, but what if the point is to say screw minorities, perhaps screw everyone who isn’t a plutocrat? Is that where we’re headed?
It’s not just about Jews, though. People (including people of what in before-times would have been called marginalized identities, and may still be called that here in Canada) are rejoicing at the ability to say slurs of all kinds, free at last to offend for offence’s sake. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days of dog-whistle bigotry. If a dog-whistle was needed, then this meant bigotry had not been normalized.
Here’s my view:
— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 7, 2025
I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.
So I say bring him back.
If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of… https://t.co/OgG6Z3hKPE
But all of this has implications for Jewish Canadians when voting, or just generally when choosing a way forward. Do we want woke, post-woke, or (she tips her hand) some sort of revived centre-left liberalism, without the thought police but with norms of civility, tolerance, and respect? Not that there are enough of us to determine the way forward. We don’t control the weather, after all. Ultimately, we can align any which way, but will get what we get.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
