Jews Only Group Guilty Of Cultural Appropriation From Position Of Submission

The phenomenon and its curious exception require significant further study.

Tel Aviv, December 31 – Anthropologists examining the controversial phenomenon in which a more powerful society adopts and adapts elements of a subject people’s heritage have observed that the insistence on the direction of the dynamic pertains to every situation except for one involving Jews, who can be accused of the practice even when serving in the role of the less-powerful group, a new study confirms.

Researchers writing in the sociology journal Tosh note the exception to the normal rules of “cultural appropriation” when Jews figure in the picture in some way: when Jews absorb or adopt cultural elements from their host cultures over the course of centuries or millennia, they face the same opprobrium from Social Justice Warriors that any other culture faces only in the position of host or dominant.

Thus, the article explains, Jews who brought to Israel the foods, musical styles, or dress of the Muslim societies that hosted their communities face more fury for appropriating those elements than their Muslim host societies will ever face from activists for the reverse.

“By mechanisms that we can describe,” the article states, “the cumulative documentary evidence regarding cultural appropriation indicates that as a rule, the phenomenon applies only when the party or society perpetrating the appropriation exerts or has exerted imperialistic influence on the culture from which the practices, objects, or styles are appropriated; this contrasts with the reverse phenomenon, similarly criticized, of the dominant power imposing its culture on the subject culture, often to the detriment of the subject culture’s integrity and sustainability.”

“Those mechanisms, however, fail to account for perhaps the only exception to this rule,” it continues. “Jews commit cultural appropriation no matter which end of the dynamic they occupy.”

“The case of shakshuka serves as an illustrative example,” the authors elaborate. “The Mediterranean dish, itself the result of a blending of ingredients from disparate cultures – tomatoes only entered the Mediterranean diet in the century following Columbus – now features as a prime vehicle for those accusing Israeli Jews – and not, it must be noted, Arab citizens of Israel – of appropriating native cuisine and culture. The culpability of Jews for cultural appropriation persists in the minds of those who police such matters regardless of two important factors: one, which we have mentioned, that the Jews adopted the ‘appropriated’ cultural element while under the domination of a greater power; and two, that despite their ancient origins on the region, Jews must not be permitted to claim as theirs any of the region’s ‘indigenous’ cultural elements. The phenomenon and its curious exception require significant further study.”

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