Your Questions, Answered: From Critical Race Theory to Israel-Palestine

Okay, now that we’ve dispensed with Israel-Palestine, it’s time to tackle something less controversial: critical race theory.

Rabbi Ron Roth writes:

I just finished an adult education series on Judaism and Critical Race Theory. I found material from many viewpoints: that Jews should embrace it, that Jews should reject it, and that there is a nuanced approach. What do you think?

I avoid terms like “critical race theory” (and “cancel culture” and other such buzzwords) because they are so politicized that they tend to obscure more than they inform. “Critical race theory,” for example, can refer to the academic approaches to racial inequality formulated by scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw; to the bogeyman of right-wing activists opposed to basic literacy about our country’s racial history; or to a popularized politics in many progressive spaces that bears little resemblance to its academic antecedents and makes dubious claims that the scholarship does not support. (See DiAngelo, Robin.)

People bring so many outside assumptions to terms like “CRT”that I can’t control, and so as a writer, I try to avoid such words and instead speak more specifically about whatever I mean. With that caveat, I’d say briefly that structural theories of racism can be quite useful for understanding the world around us. In particular, they help explain why bigotry persists in a society even when many individuals reject it. I’ve personally learned a lot from these insights, and careful viewers of my on anti-Semitism will notice their influence on my work.