Why charities can't stay out of politics

The recent article by the chair of the Charity Commission calling on charities to steer clear of politics has met with the predictable waves of criticism from charity leaders. However, it’s important to understand the ideological and historical roots of this kind of argument if we want to safeguard the future of the social sector.

Baroness Stowell’s claim boils down to a simple idea. Apolitical work is legitimate, politics is not. But deciding what’s political and what isn’t is itself a deeply political question. 

The idea that politics is suspect is associated largely (but not exclusively) with the conservative Right who like to advance their agenda while pretending their views are no more than common-sense. A classic example was the coalition government’s success in framing a politically-driven programme of austerity as nothing more than the obvious response to the state of the public finances. Anyone who disagreed was condemned as having been blinded by their own partisan agenda. 

It’s no surprise that being non-political usually means accepting the status quo. A charity that chooses to leave in place statues of imperialists and slave-owners? Apolitical. One that chooses to take them down? Political. In the frequently quoted words of Brazilian archbishop and liberation theologian Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist”. 

The fact that government and sector leaders are at cross-purposes over the legitimacy of charities acting politically stems from the ambiguity of the concept ‘charity’ itself. The word is actually a homonym and is currently used in two totally different ways.

The first echoes the Victorian roots of the charity sector – a network of institutions whose role was to help the poor. The assumption was that poverty was an unavoidable human condition. All decent people could do was to ameliorate the conditions of the most vulnerable members of society. Going slightly hungry was better than starving to death. Charity was about enabling people to survive the status quo, not about changing it. This view underlies the role government tends to ascribe to charities to this day. They are seen as a way of outsourcing services while saving money in the process. 

While many donors no doubt implicitly share this view, most people on the front line of charity work realise that it’s unsustainable. For them, poverty and the other problems they combat every day are the results of political decisions and the way we’ve chosen to structure our society. If they want to help their beneficiaries, they have no choice but to address themselves to social change. It’s no surprise that service delivery organisations almost always branch out into campaigning. Charity in this view is the opposite of accepting the world as it is – it’s about creating the world as we want it to be.

It should be clear by this point that we’re not talking about a clash between ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ views of charity. This is a conflict between two equally political, ideological conceptions of the voluntary sector’s role. The dilemma for social sector leaders who adhere to the more progressive view is how to drum up support from a government – and possibly a public – who not only take a more conservative line, but who see their views as apolitical common-sense.

A final word from my own, faith-based, perspective. The word ‘charity’ comes via the Latin caritas from the Greek agape – meaning love. In Christian tradition, charity is a voluntary act motivated by love of God and neighbour. In Judaism, the word usually translated as charity, tzedaka, comes from the same root as tzedek – justice. Tzedaka is a legal and moral obligation, not a voluntary act. For many Jews, the term’s etymology gives it a radical complexion. Tzedakah, charity, is the obligation to pursue a world built on justice. It’s hard to see how that can be separated from politics.

Fighting for the Jewish people’s soul: Masorti Judaism at the 2020 World Zionist Congress

It’s natural to be preoccupied with local events – what’s going on in our own family, community, country. When we poke our heads up we tend to notice only the most dramatic international events (the US elections spring to mind). But it’s also important to be less parochial about our Jewish lives and realise we’re not only part of our synagogue or even the UK Jewish community, but members of the worldwide Jewish people.

And for the Jewish people, last week saw an important, if generally overlooked, event: the World Zionist Congress.

The Congress was established by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and led indirectly to the founding of the State of Israel just over 50 years later. Today, Congress meets every five years and is the ruling body of what are known as the ‘National Institutions’ – semi-governmental bodies governed by representatives of Israeli political parties and Diaspora Jewish organisations. They include the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet L’Israel or KKL). They have responsibility for settlement and environmental activity in Israel (KKL is Israel’s biggest non-governmental landowner), promoting aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), combatting antisemitism and Jewish education in the Diaspora. Between them they have an annual budget of around $4 billion.

This matters directly to us. Israel has always been central to Masorti Jewish life. However, as the modern State of Israel developed, the Israeli government refused to recognise Masorti and other non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. Masorti rabbis in Israel cannot conduct weddings or funerals, Masorti communities receive no public money, and the Israeli government has gone back on its promise to create an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall.

The WZO provides crucial funding for Jewish education all over the world and, since the Israeli government only funds Orthodox institutions, it’s the only source of support for Masorti synagogues, schools, youth programs and teachers. Dozens of Masorti communities around the world, and especially in Europe, are dependent on WZO funding for their existence. Moreover, the fact that Israeli and Diaspora Jews work together at Congress gives us a voice with Israeli politicians – they need our support and are ready to negotiate with us. This gives us a modest but vital degree of influence on issues close to our hearts: democratic values, religious pluralism and minority rights in Israel.

Over the past months there has been a titanic struggle over the future of the National Institutions. Right wing and Orthodox parties were poised to change the long tradition of including all Zionist parties in the governance of the institutions by staging a take-over and excluding moderate and progressive voices (including the Reform and Masorti movements and centre-left Israeli political parties) from all positions of influence. This would have meant the end of funding for our institutions and a critical weakening of our political influence. At the last moment, the representatives of Mercaz, the Masorti Zionist organisation, together with our political allies, managed to block this move and install a broad-based coalition (albeit one dominated by the Orthodox and the right wing) to lead the WZO for the next five years.

More specifically, this agreement includes increased budgets for Masorti and Reform Judaism, and both movements and their centre-left political allies have received senior leadership positions within the National Institutions. For example, Yizhar Hess, the outgoing CEO of Masorti Judaism in Israel will become a Vice-Chair of the WZO with responsibility for Israel-Diaspora relations and control of a significant budget.

But these achievements are one small part of a larger struggle within the Jewish world between the forces of insularity, religious intolerance and chauvinism on the one hand and those of us who believe in combining Judaism with universal, democratic and liberal values on the other. (To be clear, the latter group encompasses people from all streams of Judaism including many moderate Orthodox Jews.) This week, for example, the Likud has nominated Jacques Kupfer, a man with a record of anti-Palestinian, racist and extremist comments, to head up the WZO’s Department for Diaspora affairs.

Our struggle continues. To get involved and find out more about Mercaz – Masorti for Israel – go to masorti.org.uk/about-masorti/mercaz.

Read more about this year’s World Zionist Congress in this article in Haaretz (£) and this first-hand account by one of the Mercaz delegates.

Matt Plen is the Chief Executive of Masorti Judaism in the UK, a board member of Mercaz Olami and a newly-elected member of the Zionist General Council, the body that governs the WZO between Congresses. Thanks to Rabbi Alan Silverstein, President of Mercaz Olami, for information that contributed to this article.

Thoughts on Jews and Black Lives Matter

During the recent debates about the destruction of racist statues, my Facebook timeline featured several posts highlighting examples of antisemitic statues and monuments, mainly from the middle ages, which have never been removed. At first, this reminded me of the deflective responses of some white people to the current Black Lives Matter protests – either complaining about the destruction of property or, more tellingly, saying ‘all lives matter’. But the Jewish response felt decisively different to these attempts to sideline the problem of racism.

Although many (but by no means all) Jews identify as white, our relationship with racism cannot be the same as that of members of the white majority, as we are also a minority and subject to a form of racism – antisemitism. We cannot simply be allies as we also have a personal stake in the struggle. Anti-black racism and antisemitism are different but overlapping phenomena, or perhaps it’s better to say they are subsets of one bigger, overarching problem. How do these forms of racism interact and what does this mean for the relationship between Jews and people of colour (acknowledging that there are plenty of people who are both)? Unless Jews can answer these questions, we’ll lack a firm foundation for our involvement in Black Lives Matter and the broader anti-racist movement.

A caveat – I identify as a white, Ashkenazi (European) Jew and whatever expertise I have is in Jewish history, Jewish thought and the Jewish community. I have very little expert knowledge of the history and culture of people of colour and no first-hand experience of anti-black racism. The following analysis is presented tentatively in the hope it will provoke discussion, feedback and criticism. If it includes misunderstandings or unintentionally causes offence, I absolutely welcome feedback, corrections and further discussion.

A good place to start is Nancy Fraser’s article ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics’ (1996). She says:

In today’s world, claims for social justice seem increasingly to divide into two types. First, and most familiar, are redistributive claims, which seek a more just distribution of resources and goods. Examples include claims for redistribution from the North to the South, from the rich to the poor, and from owners to workers….

(I would add to this category the redistribution of power as well as economic resources.)

Today, however, we increasingly encounter a second type of social-justice claim in the “politics of recognition.” Here the goal, in its most plausible form, is a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect. Examples include claims for the recognition of the distinctive perspectives of ethnic, “racial,” and sexual minorities, as well as of gender difference.

Fraser goes on to attack what she sees as the false dichotomy between these two modes of progressive politics, arguing that many oppressed groups are in fact affected by economic equality and by cultural domination and non-recognition and are therefore in need of both redistributive and recognition-based political solutions. She weaves these two modes into a unified conception of social justice in which economic and cultural oppression are seen as twin barriers to parity of participation in society.

The distinction between politics of redistribution and recognition can help us understand the relationships between anti-black racism and antisemitism. It’s clear that the racism directed at people of colour means the unfair distribution of resources (economic inequality, poverty, discrimination in education and employment) as well as misrecognition (the example I recently heard of a black barrister being repeatedly misidentified in court as a defendant could not make this clearer, but misrecognition also explains phenomena like police brutality and the denigration of black culture). As Fraser argues, misrecognition often also underpins unfair distribution. Well-documented examples include teachers discouraging and setting low standards for black students, preventing them getting into university, and job applicants with foreign-sounding names finding it harder to get interviews.

In the UK, Jews do not on the whole suffer from redistributive injustice because of their Jewishness. The community is on average the wealthiest ethnic minority group in the UK and most Jews do not experience discrimination in employment and education. This is not to say there is no discrimination against Jews: 11% of Jews across the EU reported facing antisemitic discrimination in employment, education, housing or healthcare (2018) and 19% of UK Jews reported being victims of antisemitic discrimination (2014). But in Fraser’s terms, the main form of anti-Jewish racism is misrecognition: the marginalisation of Jews’ identity, culture and concerns, perpetuation of stereotypes, gaslighting and failing to recognise antisemitism as a legitimate concern, and incidents of vandalism and violence.

So Jews and people of colour face two different kinds of racism: anti-black racism is an unequal distribution of resources and power underpinned by misrecognition, whereas most antisemitism takes the form of misrecognition with no significant economic impact. People of colour are also deprived of power in a way Jews are not, although there are times when political antisemitism threatens the agency of Jewish people too.

Where does this leave the relationship between Jews and people of colour and the role of Jews around the Black Lives Matter movement? Here are some tentative suggestions aimed at my fellow members of the Jewish community.

First, let’s acknowledge that although most British Jews are of European origin, the whiteness of Jews should not be assumed. I don’t want to get into the argument about whether Jews are by definition non-white – we all define ourselves differently. But it’s an objective fact that there are many Jews of colour and these people are likely to experience both types of racism outlined above. We should avoid thinking and talking in ways that assume Jews are white, and some of the first actions we take should be to identify and combat racism in our own communities.

At the same time, we should remember that black people face forms of oppression that white Jews do not. This means that the imperative to listen to and learn from the experience of people of colour is no less important for white Jews than for any other group. The fact that as Jews we experience our own form of racism does not absolve us of this responsibility. This is nowhere more true than when tackling racism within our own institutions. There’s a powerful temptation to assume that as the victims of antisemitism, we can’t possible be racist. Listening to the history and experience of people of colour is the best antidote to this kind of complacency.

Yet the trauma of antisemitism can make it harder to acknowledge other people’s pain and oppression. Some part of us thinks that recognising someone else’s suffering downgrades our own. But suffering is not a zero-sum game. Arguments about who’s suffered more serve no-one. Nor does hypersensitivity towards instances of antisemitism among people of colour, or demands of reciprocity – ‘we’ll help you fight racism only if you help us fight antisemitism’. We need to resist this kind of impulse and draw on our experience of antisemitism to strengthen our empathy and solidarity with another group’s anti-racist struggle. The theologian and psychotherapist Michael Lerner has written compellingly about the need to break the repetition compulsion which is created by the experience of abuse in order to build healthy relationships and work together for justice.

Finally, we need to get the balance right between what Fraser calls ‘differentiating’ and ‘universal’ approaches to racism. On one hand, it’s vital to resist the liberal impulse towards colour-blindness, the idea that if we ignore race then racism will go away. On the contrary, the first step towards combatting racism has to be recognising the unique experiences of different ethnic groups, the centrality of race and the way it shapes our behaviours and institutions.

However, overdoing this kind of ‘differentiation’ risks destroying solidarity and reducing the black-Jewish relationship to one of simple allyship between two groups who have nothing in common. This would be missing an opportunity for something deeper. The corrective is to recast both antisemitism and anti-black racism not only as particularistic problems which isolate their victims from each other, but as twin targets of a broader anti-racist struggle. The challenge is to recognise the uniqueness of each group’s experience while acknowledging what we have in common.