Every African-American like myself is raised on tales of “house slaves” and “field slaves” amid our ancestors’ jarring histories. The former – often fair-skinned and better-fed – enjoyed the relative “privileges” of serving within their masters’ homes while the latter toiled in the fields – darker-skinned cogs in the misery machine that was the cotton and tobacco industries of the antebellum South.
I often think of house slaves and field slaves when I see Jews such as filmmaker Sarah Friedland – whom, like Jonathan Glazer at the Golden Globe Awards in April – used her prize-winning moment at the Venice Film Festival this past weekend to denounce Israel and champion the #Palestine cause.
While Jewish women like Friedland – white, elite, affluent – may seem a world away from Southern slaves, they have far more in common with house and field slaves than they might imagine. Indeed, Jews like Friedland – along with second-step daughter Ella Emhoff and comedian Ilana Glazer – are the “house slaves” of modern Jewish America.
But unlike the slave owners of the mid-19th century, Friedland and her ilk – house Jews we might call them – serve masters who exist both soul-less and shape-shifting; virtue-signally ideologues intent on distancing themselves from their co-religionists toiling in the fields of Jewish sanctity and survival.
It’s easy to find fault with house Jews like Friedland – to cast them aside as horrific and dishonorable. And they are. But in many ways, they’re not to blame. American Jews have had a spectacularly stellar ride within the New World with little to prepare them for the avalanches of antisemitism that have swept the nation – and the world – since October 7.
This cultural and economic success – “privilege” as the woke folk like to say – has found enviable endpoints in artists like Friedland, whose pointed-yet-unbridled creativity reflects everything that is good about Jewish-American achievement.
But like so many house Jews, Friedland has succumbed to the false belief that her privilege and position somehow shield her from the hard truths of what it means to be Jewish right now. “Both my parents come from mixed-class identities and divergent interpretations of Jewish identity,” said Friedland in a 2022 interview, aping standard house-Jew language as she works hard to reassure gentiles that she isn’t – gasp!! – one of those “pro-genocide” Jews that Rep. Ilhan Omar so infelicitously spoke of in April.
House Jews
WE FIND house Jews everywhere – protesting for Palestine and #blacklivesmatter, demanding space for the downtrodden on diversity committees and Kamala Harris affinity Zooms, decrying a nonexistent Gazan genocide at starry film festivals, and disparaging their #ashkinormativeness for the sake of a few extra “likes” on social media.
They’re everywhere all the time for everybody – except for fellow Jews – particularly field Jews at the frontlines of Israel’s survival and the battle against global Jew-hatred.
The question is: Why do house Jews so easily abandon their own people in a way that Blacks, Latinos, and LGBTs have avoided? For one thing – why not? There’s money to be made and fancy festivals to win for house Jews willing to sell out their own. Entire industries of entitlement and grievance clamor for Jews willing to validate their woke ideologies and frame their own people as the key barriers to Black or Latin or trans #equity.
Jews are "rich" and "white" and "privileged;" and who better to confirm that privilege than the most privileged Jews of all – Jews like Friedland privileged enough to believe that they’re somehow exempt from Hamas’s hate.
Wokeness and Judaism
But woke Jews sacrificing their own at the altar of wokeness is an all too obvious answer. The real reason house Jews operate with such impunity is fear. Nothing has prepared modern Jewry for this moment of unbridled global hate. And for many, such as Friedland, the obvious answer is to act as if that hate does not apply to them.
To pomp and parade in opposition to field Jews like myself, who are well aware that there is no difference between the Sarah Friedlands of the world whether hailing from north London, Northern California, or North Tel Aviv.
OF COURSE, Friedland clearly thinks she’s different – smug in the belief that her anti-Zionist bona fides will somehow save her from the exterminist’s sword. But those doing the exterminating certainly don’t think so. In fact, they’ve told us. Jew-killing is enshrined in Hamas’s charter and even though they’ve amended it in subsequent years, the blood-lust of Yahya Sinwar and his posse on October 7 can leave no doubt of their genocidal ambitions.
Therein lies the folly of the house slaves of the Jewish people like Friedland. Like their truly enslaved counterparts two centuries ago – who were ultimately still slaves – house Jews are ultimately still Jews, prizes for rape and kidnap and slaughter no matter how loudly they might pimp for Palestine.
There are many challenges but also lots of rewards to being someone, like myself, who is both Jewish and African American. One reward is a clarity of vision. I believe Hamas when they say they want to kill Jews not just because they’ve said it – but because I know the depravity, first hand, of America’s long history of racism. It’s a visceral kind of hate – rabid and unquenchable. House Jews like Friedland would be wise to believe it too.
The writer is a columnist and editor at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.