Organizers of the Chicago Dyke March on Tuesday defended their decision to eject three participants who displayed Jewish symbols by claiming that “Zionism is an inherently white-supremacist ideology.”
The group’s official statement also included screenshots of a chat between an organizer and Laurel Grauer, one of the marchers targeted for holding a rainbow LGBT flag emblazoned with a Star of David, which is closely associated with Judaism. Grauer is an official at A Wider Bridge, which works to build ties between the LGBT communities in the United States and Israel.
The chat appears to confirm Grauer’s account of the incident, which was published Monday in Haaretz. The organizer told Grauer via text that the Chicago Dyke March collective does not support “any form of anti-Semitism” and that she would not be subject to any harassment. However, during the march, she and two others were told to leave for displaying “Jewish pride” flags.
One member of the Dyke March told the Windy City Times that the Jewish flags “made people feel unsafe,” that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”
“What made these people ‘feel unsafe’ was the presence of Jews,” Jamie Kirchik observed in Tablet Magazine. “Censoring this Jewish symbol, meanwhile, organizers were perfectly content to let participants wave the flag of Palestine, a political entity where LGBT people are routinely harassed and murdered.”
With the acceptance of anti-Israel groups into more LGBT events, Kirchick reported, “the effort has shifted from inserting anti-Israel activism into the gay rights movement to outright discriminating against Jews.”
Noting the account of a second woman who “was thrown out of Dyke March for being Jewish,” Bari Weiss wrote in The New York Times, “For progressive American Jews, intersectionality forces a choice: Which side of your identity do you keep, and which side do you discard and revile?”
“The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis,” he added.
The incident in Chicago is a sign “that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right,” Weiss concluded.