The Unbearable Paradox

Meditations on Memory, Power, and the Price of Belonging

We know what it’s like to be hunted, and yet we are also positioned—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—inside the machinery that hunts others.

This is the wound. The contradiction. The unbearable thing that so many would rather not name.

To be Jewish is to carry the memory of exile, of running, of doors slammed shut. It is to know what it means to be other—the scapegoat, the outsider, the problem.

And yet, in the West, many Jews have also been absorbed into power. Accepted, conditionally. Welcomed, at a price. Folded into a system that once rejected us, only to find that the cost of belonging was a quiet kind of disappearance.

We are not alone in this.

This is how whiteness works.

Whiteness Does Not Include, It Erases

Whiteness is not a race. Not a culture. Not a home.

It is a machine. A gate that opens and closes. A system that survives by pulling people in and making them forget they were ever outside.

For generations, those on the margins—Jews, Italians, Irish, Slavs—were told we did not belong. We were dirty, foreign, suspect. But whiteness has a use for those who are willing to give up what sets them apart. And so, one by one, we were brought inside.

Not because we were suddenly seen as equals. But because we could be useful. Because every system of exclusion needs new enforcers.

But the price was high.

Names were changed. Accents softened. Rituals left behind.

Yiddish, Irish, Sicilian dialects—languages that carried history in their bones—were silenced in a single generation.

Immigrants who once lived together, worked together, struggled together were told: You are different now. You are better than them. And many believed it.

Because whiteness rewards forgetting. It rewards silence. It rewards those who close the door behind them.

The Cost of Assimilation

Whiteness does not just demand allegiance. It demands amnesia.

And in return, it offers safety—conditional, temporary, revocable at any moment.

For Jews in America, whiteness was a shield. After the Holocaust, after decades of immigration quotas and exclusion, whiteness held out its hand and said: Come inside.

We took the deal.

Not all of us. Not willingly, always. But the shift happened. Jewish names disappeared from storefronts. Radical politics softened into middle-class aspiration. The neighborhoods that once held us emptied as we moved into the suburbs, into universities, into professions that had once been closed to us.

And for a time, it seemed to work. We were safe. We had made it.

Until we hadn’t.

Because the bargain was never real. The gates that opened for us could close just as easily. And the moment power needs a new scapegoat, whiteness remembers that we were never really meant to belong.

Breaking the Cycle

To be Jewish is to wrestle. To argue. To refuse easy answers.

And so we must ask: What now?

If we know what it is to be hunted, how can we stand with the hunter?

If we know what it is to be erased, how can we align with the machinery of forgetting?

And if whiteness is a system that absorbs, erases, and discards, then why are we still trying to make ourselves at home within it?

To Remember is to Resist

Whiteness tells us that history is something to overcome. That culture is something to soften. That survival is something to be bought with silence.

But history does not disappear.

It lingers. It calls to us. It reminds us that safety built on erasure is not safety at all.

To reject whiteness is not to reject ourselves. It is to reclaim what was stolen. To remember that our liberation is bound up with others, that survival and justice are not opposing forces, that we do not have to become gatekeepers to avoid becoming targets.

To be whole in the face of whiteness is to refuse its terms.

To insist on existing as we are. With all our histories intact. With all our stories still ours to tell.