Why One Jewish Woman Supports the Women's March

by Jennifer Friedlin

When Rev. Louis Farrakhan calls Jews termites, I feel disgusted.

When someone says you cannot be a progressive and a Zionist, I get livid.

When someone tells me I should walk away from the Women’s March, I could not disagree more.

I am a Jewish Israeli-American woman. I know that words can lead to deadly outcomes. I know that leadership matters and that people who can draw crowds can also plant seeds of destruction.

However, I am also an activist who has sat in a police wagon with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour and listened to fellow leader Tamika Mallory speak eloquent truths to crowds of protesters. I have nodded along with their words and grew convinced that the raw power and passion generated by the march could affect real change.

So I felt deeply divided as I read about Alyssa Milano’s and Debra Messing’s decision to distance themselves from the march because of Sarsour’s and Mallory’s ties to Farrakhan and their own alleged anti-Semitic statements, respectively.

On face value how could Jewish women stand by anyone who aligns herself with those who represent hateful ideas? But I am convinced the march, and particularly the women of color who lead it, did just that when they decided to spawn this movement.

As a white Jewish woman, I have come to understand that even as I was learning about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, I was benefitting from systemic racism. My parents may not have been able to buy a home in Garden City, L.I., where anti-Semitic policies excluded Jews, but they were welcomed in Roslyn, where they got a mortgage and built equity in a way not afforded to people of color. My prestigious high school tracked kids based on the color of their skin.

In college things did not improve. My Ivy League university was filled with kids who openly said black students only got in because of affirmative action. There were just a couple of non-white students in my graduate journalism program. I have never had a boss of color.

I may have worked hard to get where I am, but any obstacles and barriers I faced reflected gender bias, not my status as a white Jew in New York.

I believe I am still racist and that, if you are white, you probably are, too. We have been indoctrinated with biased messages our whole lives and it will take a great deal of proactive work to purge them.

I think Sarsour and Mallory know this. And yet, they still took the helm of a movement made up largely of women just like me, who tend to storm into spaces to run the show. The leadership likely found common ground through tough conversations that involved listening as much as talking. Whether or not you are white and Jewish, we should all do the same.

As we do, we would be wise to remember that people with little hope are likely to look to those offering something they desperately need. Can anyone blame a Gazan for turning to Hamas, which offers humanitarian support even as it launches rockets into Israel?

Can anyone blame Mallory for taking succor in the Nation of Islam, which embraced her after her son’s father was murdered?

Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, why not focus on Mallory’s condemnations of hate and Sarsour’s raising of tens of thousands of dollars for Jewish victims of anti-Semitism, including the Pittsburgh community? Why not bring concerns to the Women’s March before shunning it?

If we decide to walk away now, and the Women’s March and its gains fizzle, we will only have ourselves to blame.

Friedlin is a marketing executive in New York.