The Crocodile in the Water
By Megan Black Johnson
Co-Director, Common Good Program
There is a crocodile in the water. Its eyes seem to float just above the surface, watching me. I can see its thick, armored back and sharp spines cresting every so often, reminding me that its powerful defense system can easily become a ferocious attack.
I’ve encountered this crocodile before. I first saw it nearly 10 years ago, when I started working on the problem of antisemitism. I was organizing interfaith clergy across the country to tackle some of the most pressing racial justice issues of our time - voting rights, criminal justice reform, access to healthcare, etc. Though we were united in common cause, the fraught political environment of 2015-16 was so high pressure that hairline fractures in our coalition started to expand into real rifts. If I had been better informed in that moment, I may have been able to anticipate the flare-up of tensions that emerged when a speaker at an interfaith convening, a Black pastor, discussed a recent visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem and described the experience through the lenses of race and colonialism. Many of the rabbis in the room took issue with this framing, concerned that the event had not adequately addressed the problem of antisemitism and pointing us to the “Unite the Right” march that had recently taken place in Charlottesville, VA, in which white nationalists had carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” directly invoking the antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
The rabbis’ pushback, in turn, sparked anger and frustration among many of our Black clergy, who felt that their voices were being silenced and the urgency of our racial justice issues were being sidelined by colleagues who - yes, were Jewish - but were also white and relatively more privileged.
That’s when I saw the crocodile for the first time. It poked its head above the water, blinked slowly at me, and wriggled the spines on its back before slipping away. It was a warning that we were approaching dangerous territory – a place where the survival strategies of two ancestral traumas were at odds with each other, where the work of interrogating those traumas and building bridges between their inheritors could feel like prodding a slumbering crocodile.
But we forged ahead. In an effort to rebuild the coalition, I recruited a team of talented organizers and facilitators with deep knowledge of antisemitism, racism, and Jewish and Black communities to host a two-day encounter between our rabbis and Black Christian clergy, intending to address these issues head-on.
And that’s when we found ourselves wrestling the crocodile.
Once we were in the room together, the depths of grief, rage, and betrayal that were expressed by these rabbis and pastors as they reflected on their truths, beliefs and deepest-held values overwhelmed me. I had entered the room believing that we had more in common than not. I expected a clear path toward alignment if only we were honest with each other. Instead, our honesty seemed to feed the crocodile, whose scales thickened and protective spines lengthened with each articulation of a value statement or political position.
Desperate to subdue the crocodile, we tried a new tack. “Do we even need each other?” we asked the clergy in the room. There was a heavy pause. The crocodile inhaled and thrashed its tail. They looked at each other. “Maybe not...,” one proffered. “...[B]ut we do want each other,” said another. “We want to be here,” affirmed a third. The crocodile sank below the water. The next day as we wrapped up, the rabbi of our host synagogue told me that he thought the meeting was the most important event their Beit Midrash had ever hosted.
That convening launched my work countering antisemitism as a strategy for protecting democracy and achieving racial justice, work that I’ve led for Western States Center since early 2021 as director of the Common Good program. In the years since then, as Common Good has convened diverse cohorts of stakeholders and facilitated trainings and workshops for partners and organizations across this country, the crocodile has continued to show up. When I find that my workshop on race and antisemitism has unleashed instinctive defensive posturing and raw emotion, I know that I’ve probably nudged an injury born of deep and ancestral trauma. Those emotions – anger, distress, agitation – that's the crocodile surfacing, defending against my intrusion.
I became a mother just a few weeks after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza. The articles I skimmed as I nursed my beautiful newborn daughter in the darkest hours of the night were filled with stories of children murdered or kidnapped from their mothers, and images of babies starving to death in Gazan hospitals. Night after night, I followed as the plight of the hostages unfolded and Gaza was decimated by bombs supplied by the U.S. while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right governing coalition expressed increasingly hostile and dehumanizing rhetoric regarding Palestinians. Even removed as I was, tucked away in my child’s nursery, I could sense in my own emotional response the stew of fear, anger, shame, and betrayal that awaited me on the other side of maternity leave.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, our organization partnered with the Bridging Divides Initiative to release a toolkit to guide resistance to bigoted, dehumanizing rhetoric. By the time I returned from maternity leave in January, we had started receiving requests from community organizations, newsrooms, faith communities, and nonprofits across the country asking us to conduct internal trainings on antisemitism for their teams. As we dug deeper into what these organizations needed from these trainings, we kept coming face-to-face with the crocodile, more powerful and vividly threatening than ever before.
But we also discovered a desire for peace and solidarity, and an understanding that Jewish safety requires more than just Jews to be invested in it. The requests we received to train people on antisemitism were not just asking for guidance on a definition of antisemitism; our partners wanted to engage in a responsive dialogue about how antisemitism interacts with issues like racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, white supremacy, and white nationalism. They wanted to rebuild common cause and a shared sense of the stakes within their diverse teams. They wanted to wrestle the crocodile, and they wanted to win.
Because most Jews occupy a complex and sometimes contradictory space in the American imagination - with access to privilege but always a maligned “Other,” - the work of countering antisemitism has long been a challenge. To do it effectively across race, religion, class, and ethnicity, you have to be willing to engage the gnarly power dynamics inherent in race, religion, class, and ethnicity. This means bringing in charged topics like anti-Blackness, Christian hegemony and Christian nationalism, class privilege, and historical traumas like the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the genocide, forced removal, and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, and the Holocaust.
Over the last year, we have seen the crocodiles that represent the raw wounded legacies of these historical traumas seeming to battle each other in the public square and our movements. The crocodile born of the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Jewish pogroms and persecution has entered the battle arena. So has the crocodile born of racism and settler-colonialism, always at the ready, thumping its tail as a warning against the evils that brought it to life. Meanwhile, agents of authoritarianism and white nationalist agitators stand on the sidelines, ready to exploit this battle for their own ends, a threat even more imminent given the stakes of our upcoming national election.
Whether our ancestral traumas cause us to battle each other or join forces in an effort to transcend their potency is a question, not a foregone conclusion. That question has guided our work over the last year, informing the workshops we’ve led and the tools we’ve created, and has spurred our capacity-building as we pass the somber one-year marker of October 7th.
In the coming months, we will continue to engage our partners in the field in workshop spaces and strategy sessions that encourage them to wrestle their crocodiles rather than letting them wrestle each other. We will also be launching a new year-long iteration of the Common Good cohort for civic, faith, and community leaders in the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area focused on what we call “the Commons”: our Common Grief, Common Ground, and Common Future.
Western States Center has long been an organization focused on building common cause and movement capacity in the service of a greater good: a just, inclusive democracy. This is a vision for the world, not just the U.S. It’s a vision that begins here at home, with organizations and leaders who are committed to protecting democratic institutions, countering bigotry, dismantling systems of inequity, and most importantly: who are willing to take a brave step into crocodile-infested waters together.