Jewish Americans

Jewish Americans

The basis for much of the prejudice and discrimination targeting Jewish Americans is the widely accepted belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. It is obvious to me that Feagin and Feagin (2008) do not accept that view since they dismiss any notion of the Jew’s responsibility in Christ’s death as “erroneous” (Racial and Ethnic Relations, p. 115). I believe just the opposite that the Jews are ultimately responsible for Christ’s death and to prove my position, I can use the same Gospel of Mark that the authors cite as their reference. It must first be understood that the setting for Christ’s crucifixion was in Jerusalem, which at the time was under Roman rule. Under that condition, the Jews had authority to indict Jesus, but they did not have the authority to administer capital punishment, which was the sole charge of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Mark 11:18 indicates that the Jewish chief priests and teachers of law feared Christ as a threat to their whole way of life and began looking for a way to kill him. The chief priests had Christ arrested, tried Him, and then handed Him over to Pilate, who ultimately convicted Christ to death by crucifixion. My point is that while the Jews themselves did not physically hang Christ on the cross, they were the group responsible for His death. I feel that the American colonists shared the same belief as me about Christ’s death and for that reason they “restricted Jewish participation in colonial life,” a practice that has “formed the base for protest of religious and other oppression to the present day” (Racial and Ethnic Relations, p. 127).

In reality, I wonder exactly how dangerous it is, in modern America, to disclose whether an individual is a Jew or not. I would expect that Jews in other parts of the world, Europe in particular, would have more insecurity than would American Jews. I may be a little naÐ"Їve and out of sync with reality, but I cannot understand where there is any danger posed to American Jews for revealing their identity. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz rails on and on about her option of becoming white and from the message in her writings, in order to ascend in social status Jews have to concede their “Jewishness” as a penalty for conforming to the social construct of “whiteness” (Thompson and Tyagi, 1996, p. 125). I will admit that historically, there has been a social construction of whiteness in America. This form of structural racism is a creation that subsists only because we agree that it exists. If then we can decentralize the concept that whiteness equals privilege and effectively invalidate America’s social