In all the critical theory writing of male privilege, white privilege, cis-privilege, thin privilege, ability privilege, etc. there is one major highly privileged group that no one ever writes about: Jews. So today, I’m going to add my own addition to the critical theory canon: Jewish privilege.

I started thinking about Jewish privilege a month ago when one Michael Mark Cohen wrote a paean to the word ‘douchebag’. He called himself “a white, middle class male professor” who asks his students to shout white racial slurs at him. Oddly enough, this Jewish person is not insulted by others insulting white people, saying:

The point of this sanctioned spewing of hate speech is that none of these words can hurt me. Because I am an individual. I can choose to not be offended, not to be affiliated with any group and rest assured in my sense of self.

I think the more likely answer for why he is not offended is because Cohen is not white, but Jewish.  I’m sure if people started throwing out insults like ‘hebe’ or ‘kike’ which actually applied to Jews rather than ‘cracker’ or ‘honky’, which do not, Cohen’s reactions would be much different.

Either way, Cohen then goes and advocates for the othering of white males by applying a new racial slur against them.

This is just one example of Jewish privilege: to be able to pretend to be of another ethnic group when convenient and using this position to advocate racism against that ethnic group on major media sites (the essay appeared on Gawker) without fear of backlash.

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Jews make up only about 2% of the population yet are vastly overrepresented throughout are cultural and governmental institutions. So, here’s a small list of Jewish privilege, feel free to contribute more in the comments:

Jews are very wealthy. The average Jew’s net worth is $372k (p. 187), almost three times higher than the average American’s ($135k). Almost half of Jews have income of over $100k, compared to 18% of the general population. The percentage of Jews with income under $30k is half that of the general population.

Jews are far more educated than the general populace (p. 56). 35% of Jews have a post-grad degree, three times as many as the general population. 59% of Jews have a college degree, over double the general population, while only 3% of Jews have not graduated high school, compared to 14% of the general population. 5.4% of college professors are Jewish (religion). Jews are heavily overrepresented at the Ivy League composing “21 percent of the enrollment at Ivy League schools (30 percent at Penn, 29 percent at Yale and 26 percent at Harvard).

Jews are heavily overrepresented in the legal system. Jews make up 33% of the Supreme Court. The protestant white majority have no Supreme Court justices representing them. I can’t find modern statistics of overall justices, but under Kennedy and Johnson 10% of judicial appointees were Jewish and I’m sure the proportion hasn’t changed too significantly since. They also make up 26% of the nation’s law professors and 30% of the Supreme Court clerks.

Jews are overrepresented in government. 6% of congress is Jewish; of that, 10% of the senate is Jewish. 13% (2/15) of the cabinet is Jewish.

Jews are heavily overrepresented in cultural creation industries. According to Ben Stein, 60% of important Hollywood positions are held by Jews, while every major studio chief is Jewish. Of the 8 major US media corporations, at least 3 of the CEO’s are identifiably Jewish from their wiki page, a few more could be JEwish but are not so identified.

Jews can present as either whites or Jews, allowing them to claim both minority or majority status as is convenient. This heavily obscures their Jewish privilege, as it is simply chalked up to white privilege. Quite often I found I had to use religion as a proxy for ethnicity because Jews were simply lumped in statistically with whites.

The privileges held by Jews dwarf those held by whites. I think critical race theorists should spend more time and effort studying this understudied area of privilege.