Reading through the comments generated by my two posts (here and here) on antisemitism so far has gotten me thinking about how many of us–Jewish or not, but especially Jewish–ever really talk about our experiences with antisemitism, not in the context of arguing a point about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or of any other issue that is not, simply, an assertion of the fact that antisemitism exists and that it has real consequences in Jewish (and non-Jewish) lives. I know that the first post I wrote was the first time ever that I tried to construct a chronology, a narrative of the antisemitism I have experienced in my life, and it brought home to me all over again just how enormous and profound an effect it had on my worldview, not all of which I wrote about in the second post, since my focus in those posts is really quite specific. I was moved when AndiF chose to share her/his (sorry, I realize I don’t know) experiences from a generation before me, and I was interested to read some other people’s experiences from the generations after me. So here’s what I propose: a post where the point of the comments is, simply, to tell stories about our experiences with antisemitism, not to analyze those experiences, but just to tell them and then let them speak for themselves. I am not talking about political analysis of some politician’s or scholar’s or blog posts’ rhetoric, and I am not talking about listing antisemitic incidents at which you were not present. I am talking about moments when you saw or experienced antisemitism in action.
I am not going to limit this post to Jews, because I think it’s important to hear from non-Jews about their experiences, but it is my plan to delete any comment that is not a story. (I am not going to make that an absolute rule, since there are always exceptions, but it is my plan.)
Let’s see what kind of collective story our individual stories combine to tell.
Probably the worst instance of antisemitism I experienced was when I was three. We were temporarily prosperous, the only time in my life before I was grown that I lived in a house rather than an apartment. And the couple across the back fence from us found out we were Jewish. They were a stereotype, first or 2nd generation German immigrants, had heavy German accents. And when they found out we were Jewish, they stopped speaking to us, and let their Doberman loose in our yard to shit. My Dad put up a high brick fence. They shoved a trailer against the fence so the dog could continue to get into our yard. They commented to the air “that yard is so dirty you should not object to a little clean Aryan shit”. My Dad pulled his gun from the wall in the bedroom and showed it to them and commented to the air. “I don’t believe in punishing animals for the sins of their owners, so if I ever see that dog in my yard again there will be two fewer Aryans in the world.” My Dad was absolutely sincere and his tone must have conveyed this, because the dog was never let loose in our yard again.
I will add that I have had far worse experiences as a leftist. I have had people try to kill me for that, which is worse than letting a dog shit in your yard. Since you asked us not to I’m not going to analyze, but I will say that emotionally and experientially people who hate leftists and people with anti-secular prejudices have affected me much more than antisemitism.
When I was a kid, I had a babysitter who – if you expand your definition of “mother” past biology or custody – was quite literally a second mother to me. My Jewish father, and my half-Jewishness, never came up. A couple of years ago, though, we were talking about my father’s business and she said, “Jews are awful. All they want is money, money, money.” She made a motion like she was grabbing things from the air.
For a second, I was speechless. We were talking about my father here. Finally I stammered, “You know that I’m half Jewish, right?”
She laughed kindly and drew an imaginary line down the center of me. “Well,” she said, “then half of you is all right!”
Suddenly I understood why I’d always felt self-conscious when counting out exact change.
**
When I was in France, I was hanging around the bookshop where my friends and I worked and a man came in to sell back some old novels. While the cashier was working out the prices, he turned to me. “Are you Jewish?” he asked. “Yeah, you. Are you Jewish?”
He sounded angry. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, though; anti-Muslim sentiment was high enough that it seemed plausible that he wanted to use me to vent about them. (Think of Palestinians who often have to put up with anti-Jewish rhetoric.) He kept asking me, and I kept standing there, paralyzed. Finally a friend of mine told me I didn’t have to answer him, so I didn’t. After he left, she told me that he was crazy.
I still wonder what would have happened if I’d said that yes, I was Jewish. I almost wish I had.
I was a college student working in the summer as a laborer for my then-prospective father-in-law, a man who had been a union carpenter for 40 years and was not kindly disposed towards those who went to college instead of getting a real job. A Chicago Polish Catholic, went to church every Sunday.
He was doing his best to work my ass off, thinking he’d show up Mr. Soft Hands. That was O.K. by me, since he paid in cash and back in the 70’s going home with a $100 bill that wasn’t in your pocket that morning was a pretty good wage for a college student. At the moment we were building a screen door frame and we were joining the corners together. The fasteners we were using were made of a strip of metal maybe 1″ by 1/2″, sharpened on one of the long sides and rippled so that it looked like a series of s-curves when you looked down on it. You’d match the wood strips up on the frame’s corners and then drive the strips into the joint to hold it together.
He wanted me to hand him one, so he called out to me. “Hand me one of those Jewish nails, will you?” I honestly didn’t make the connection. “What? What’s a Jewish nail?” “One of those!” he said sharply – not a patient man. “Oh.” I handed him one. “Say, why do you call those Jewish nails?” “Because they’re crooked.”
I thought on that one a few seconds. “What do the Jewish carpenters call them?” He thought on that one a few seconds. I’ll bet he wondered where I was going with this. He answered “I don’t know any.” “I can think of one”, I said. “Who?” My rejoinder: “Jesus. And his father, too, if I recall correctly.” Meaning Joseph, not God.
He wasn’t one for political or social discourse. He’d say things about blacks and whoever else wasn’t a white Polish Catholic as a matter of course while we would work together, or at his home, or at a relatives’ house. But that was the last I heard about Jews from him.
I still don’t know the right name for those things.
some years back, i was working at the late Sen. Wellstone’s office. Got a call from a constituent who was upset about the previous evening’s Oscar winners. He insisted that Sen Wellstone do something about it. I attempted to explain that the Senator was not a voting member of the screen actor’s guild, and i was met with this.
“But…he is one of them, you know.”
Sadly, we’re not allowed to hang up on people until they swear at us. I don’t remember exactly how i did get off the phone.
That’s pretty awesome.
I do worry about the utility of saying “Jews are great! After all, Jesus was one,” obviously, but still, awesome.
—Myca
I’m afraid I have plenty of stories I could tell but since I had some of the heavier ones in the other post, I’ll tell my funniest one: in college I was out drinking one night with some friends when one friend, who was a bit higher than the rest of us, got upset about something and yelled “Screw a Jew!”. As soon as she said it, she got a horrified look on her face, leaned over, hugged me, and said “You know it doesn’t mean anything, right? It’s just like saying ‘Fuck a duck'”.
Nice comeback, RonF.
And I’m a ‘she’. :)
I’m not a Jew, but here is a story.
I went out after work with a coworker to a hookah bar run by some of the coworker’s friends. We were sitting down to smoke and one of the guys there starts playing some videos he’s found on various websites on his laptop. The guy is American but is of Sikh ancestry and/or religion and starts out with a few videos celebrating the assasination of Indira Gandhi. Then, as he’s queing up another video, he specifically asks me if I’m Jewish (I was the only white guy in this group) and I replied “no, why…?” The next video is a Hamas video showing various scenes of carnage and pictures of masked Hamas guys, followed by pictures of different Israeli politicians morphing into different types of animals with caricatured Jewish features- I specifically remember Sharon’s image morphing into a pig-demon of some kind.
I’m curious as to whether he would have in fact showed the video if I told him I was Jewish. I could also add an enormous number of one-off comments of friends and family from when I was growing up- my friend’s uncle describing his online-stock-trading hobby as “I’m just Jewin’ around” being a particularly evocative one.
My childhood was full of seemingly random attacks on me from other schoolkids, but I have no idea if it had to do with antisemitism or not. (It definitely had to do with my being a wimpy, weird kid, but these things aren’t mutually exclusive.)
I remember being in… 4th grade, maybe? … and having a conversation with a schoolmate who was telling me about how to recognize Jews. He described “Jewish noses” in detail. I didn’t understand at the time that I should take offense. “Well, I’ve got a Jewish nose,” I said. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Yes, I do,” I said. We went back and forth on this several times until he finally got what I was saying. He was horrified and embarrassed, and I was bewildered by how discomfited he was.
* * *
Years later, I was attending a Jewish summer camp, in Maine, and we took a 10-day canoeing trip on the St. Croix river (the border between Maine and Canada). We went through some extremely isolated towns, which we’d sometimes explore. I think I was with my friend Stu (or Craig, maybe?) when we had a chat with a charming retired couple on their lawn. After we’d been chatting a while, it came out that we were Jewish, and they expressed friendly, kind surprise that we didn’t have horns.
* * *
Talking to someone on the phone — again, someone from Maine — and he used the term “hit by Jewish lighting.” It took me a while to figure out that this was slang for burning down a building to collect on the insurance.
I’ve been in the bay area for about a year, and it’s been one of the oddest experiences for me in terms of ethnic and gender slurs openly leveled at me from strangers. I have yet to decide if this speaks ill or well of SF and Oakland. This is just one of them:
Specifically antisemitic remarks. Although I’m Irish, I do look Jewish. When I started working in the Mission District in SF, I ended up in two separate instances of different white panhandlers calling me a kike (one, oddly, before asking for money, one after asking). This was open, yelling it across the sidewalk. As far as I know, no one around me batted an eye. It was kind of startling.
I posted before about some of the things that happened when I was a kid. Like a lot of people, I’ve experienced less of it as an adult, but it’s still there. One particular incident was really different than any of the others and bothered me a lot more.
I was taking the train into Chicago from the far Western suburbs. It was maybe 11 or so at night. I was on the train because on my way home from work – already pretty late – maybe 8ish or so – I got in a car accident just three blocks from my office but 30 miles from my house. I was fine, but the car was totaled. I had cleaned out my car before the tow truck came, called a co-worker to take me to the train station and caught the last train into the city.
I was feeling really shook up from the accident and wondering about how I was going to get the money for a new car and how I was going to get to work in the interim and how I could of misjudged my turn so badly as to hit another car. To distract myself, I start going through a folder that I pulled out of the car, a folder of stuff I had taken from my parents’ house several months before. In the folder was an Israeli savings bond my great-grandmother had bought for me when I was a baby. It was for $800. And my name was spelled wrong on the bond. I sat there looking at it for a while, mostly wondering where I could go to cash it in, whether they would cash it with my name misspelled, whether I would need to go to the Israeli consulate, whether there would be protestors (something was going on at the time, but I can’t remember what), and whether they would try to talk me out of getting my money out of solidarity. (When my dad cashed in his bonds when he was a 22-year-old father of two making minimum wage, they tried very hard to talk him out of it.)
At some point I realized that the only other person in the train car – a guy about my age – was looking over my shoulder. He asked me what the bond was, and after I answered, he asked me if was Jewish and I said yes. Then in a very calm voice, he started to explain to me how the Jews control everything, how they’re all rich and powerful, how the Jews stick together and care more about Israel than America. And mixed in with this, he kept asking me small-talk type questions about myself. And every answer just further confirmed his beliefs, no matter how much I tried to mitigate or explain.
Where did you go to school? Presigious Expensive U. (but only because of financial aid! My dad’s just a cabinet maker*.)
What do you do for a living? I’m a newspaper reporter (covering dog catcher races and county fairs in a tiny town of 10,000 right at the edge of civilization and corn fields).
I felt like everything about me just confirmed some antisemitic stereotype he already had.
Rich. Check.
Controls the media. Check.
Israeli agent. Check.
He wasn’t hostile. He was very matter-of-fact but very certain of himself and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. If he had been hostile, I would have been scared because we were the only two people on the train, and he was bigger than me, but in some ways it would have been easier. I was raised to stand up for myself and not back down, even from a physical fight. But his attitude left me at a complete loss. Eventually his stop came – thankfully before mine – and that was that.
What’s always stayed with me about it was how easily a total stranger could make me feel like I should apologize for everything about myself, from who I was to what I do for a living.
* I’m pretty sure he doesn’t call the crooked ones Jewish nails. I think he just calls them crooked.
I grew up in a very liberal area with a huge (largely assimilated) Jewish population and never really thought about, though I got a little bit of the money stuff. I didn’t really appreciate that till I moved to Montreal and had been living there for a while. I have a couple of magen david necklaces that I always used to be wearing, but one time I had taken it off and then when I went to put it back on later, I realized that I was a lot more comfortable without it. Because I wouldn’t have to worry about people responding to me or interacting with me differently, and because I wouldn’t have to worry about ‘representing’ The Jews in everything I did, rather than getting to just be an individual.
I realize now how few places there are, really, where I don’t even have to think about being visible. I also have a lot more respect for my mother’s insistence, growing up in Hungary post-shoah, on wearing a magen david all the time. Even more so since travelling there recently and seeing graffiti of swastikas and being warned about being visible on the day that the rightist party was having some kind of gathering.
It was also in Montreal where I was advised to clear Jewish stuff off my cv, to improve my chances job hunting. Two years ago. Also of course shavuot was not an excused absence from the government-sponsored french program, even though there were whole weeks off for Christmas and Easter.
This year my (soon to be ex) roommate told all about Jews controlling the media and the economy in New York. He knew I was Jewish and I think it never occurred to him even for a second that there was anything remotely problematic in what he was saying.
My father is an anti-Semite. When I was a teenager, he used to sit up until midnight shouting anti-Semitic rants at the late-night TV shows (usually Newsnight). I had nowhere to do my schoolwork where I couldn’t hear him shouting, and usually just left it until the little hours.
I had cause to be in the same place as him during the invasion of Lebanon in 2006. He was gloating about an attack that had killed twelve Israeli military. I replied “Yes, because killing people is good?” I think he hasn’t said anything about the subject to me since.
This year my (soon to be ex) roommate told all about Jews controlling the media and the economy in New York. He knew I was Jewish and I think it never occurred to him even for a second that there was anything remotely problematic in what he was saying.
My sister-in-law, who lives in New York, says stuff like this very casually. I think (or try to tell myself) she means it in the same way someone might say a lot of women who work in nail salons are Vietnamese or a lot of cab drivers are Pakistani, in a merely observational if overly broad kind of way. But because the association is of Jews with money and power, as opposed to just a particular profession, it always kind of makes me wince.
In the early 90’s in Olympia, WA, I was on a first date with a guy who’d grown up in the western US somewhere. We were discussing family and religion and I told him my dad was raised Catholic, my mom Methodist, and I myself Episcopalian, though Pagan described me better at that moment. I asked if he was raised with any religion. He said yes, but he was embarrassed to say which. I was totally confused by this comment and said it wasn’t his choice, it was his parents’. He was hesitant to say which religion until I agreed to not laugh or judge him or something like that. Then he said Jewish.
I was astonished. I grew up on the east coast and attended schools where there were only a few other Christian kids – often only one other in my class of 30. We got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off because no one would have come to school anyway. It’d never occurred to me that someone might be embarrassed to be Jewish. I told him all this, and I guess he’d never thought about what it’d be like living in a place where he was the majority. We sort of dropped the subject then, because it all felt awkward.
And I’ve just discovered my spell checker knows how to spell Episcopalian, but not Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.
Totally relate to #10. I was in a cab going back from college to the airport, and the cab driver was the chatty type. He was running through all the classic conspiracy theories, with the central banks, and something about a “grove”, and controlling the world, and the central actors in the whole deal were the “Rockefellers”.
I don’t think I told him I was Jewish, but part of me wanted to demand that he pull over and let me out. But then, I was stuck in a cab in the middle of Minnesota (there really isn’t much between Northfield and Minneapolis), and I needed to get to the airport to catch my flight. So I just kind of shrunk into my seat.
My normal reaction to all this is to just try and make it all sound rather absurd, so whenever he looked at me for verification, I’d say something to the effect of “I think when your theory is based off the conspiratorial machinations of ‘The Rockefellers’ and ‘Jewish bankers’, that’s a sign you’re in conspiracy-theory land.” I don’t think he was convinced, though. Of course, I said it real quiet, so he might not have heard me. It certainly didn’t deter him.
* * *
This past year, when I was just settling into Chicago, I met some new folks in my building and we were all hanging out in someone’s room. At one point me and another girl got to talking about Israel/Palestine — she went to Columbia, which is kind of ground zero for the most scorched-earth academic battles on the subject, whereas at Carleton everything is pretty subdued. We didn’t agree, but the conversation is going fine, until another guy busts in to say how “the Jews” (he was quite clear about that) have obtained “hegemony in the original sense of the word” over the field of Middle Eastern studies, shutting down discussion via spurious accusations of anti-Semitism, and that no politician dares question Israel because if they do they’ll lose “Jewish money”.
I responded that you don’t get to talk about spurious accusations of anti-Semitism when you’re yelling about how the Jews control the world with their money. Insofar as there might be a lot of Jews in the field of ME studies (I have no idea if that’s true, incidentally), it could more fairly be chalked up to the facts that (a) it’s kind of a pertinent field to us and (b) Jews are overrepresented in academia generally — everything from physics to law. He said it’s fine for us to teach physics, but we had to stay out of middle eastern studies.
And when I said that Jews don’t, in fact, control every forum for discussing Israel/Palestine, and used the UN as my example, he looked straight at me and said “Look at where it was built! Rockefellers!” (they’re popular in this crowd, aren’t they?).
Nobody else, including the girl I was talking to before, was saying a word, except the one other Jewish kid in the room who kept trying to diffuse the situation by exaggerating the stereotypes as they came up (i.e., talking about how he, personally, was exhausted by having to run his segment of the global banking system each day, stuff like that). I’ve used that strategy before myself — I have no idea how effective it is, though, on someone who already is being into rather extreme stereotypes.
Thankfully, none of these guys were law students, but I still live in the same building as this kid, and occasionally see him in the kitchen or hall. We never make eye contact.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb north of NYC. I vaguely remember some stuff w/ coins and loose change. But I remember clearly in 7th grade (1978 or 1979) when this guy, who was kind of a bully, asked to borrow a dollar. I didn’t trust him at all and said, “No.” To which he said, “Don’t be a Jew.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I might have said, “How could I do that?” but I’m not sure.
In high school, I remember hearing “Jewbag” as an insult.
After high school, I don’t remember witnessing much in that vein. Then I moved to Portland, OR in the mid-90’s. The number of anti-semitic spoutings I heard went way up. I’ve never felt comfortable having my coworkers or employers know that I grew up in a Jewish family.
2 years ago at the family Xmas gathering, my wife’s Aunt was talking about the insane real estate prices in Bend. She blamed it on the Californians moving up who would pay whatever the asking price was, “… without even trying to Jew you down.” I had a nice talk with her the next day. She had no idea that could be insulting – kind of like the way people never think about the term “Indian Giver.”
The normalized anti-semitism can be witnessed nearly anywhere I go. And that says nothing of what I hear in the news.
Here’s one I didn’t tell in either of my posts: I was laying in bed with my Catholic girlfriend–we’d been together for years–and I don’t remember why, but I was upset about something having to do with antisemitism, but a subtle form of it, one not easily seen by someone not Jewish, and she asked me, “Why are you being so Jewish all of a sudden?” When I asked her how Jewish she had understood me to be before then, we got into a huge fight. Eventually–though it took weeks–she recognized that she did indeed have antisemitic attitudes and assumptions that she had internalized–the church she would go to with her family when I first met her, for example, still prayed for the conversion of the Jews at Easter–and we were able to work through it. But it was hard, very hard, and I have understood since then why some people say that interdating/marriage is just not worth it. (When we broke up, it had nothing to do with antisemitism.)
I also think this comment by Hershele Ostropoler in the thread on cultural appropriation provides a really good example.
Interesting that so many of these involve money. As someone in my early 20s who grew up in a New Jersey suburb with a large Jewish population, some of the experiences recounted on these threads seem almost impossible. My most memorable incident was pretty minor, and also involved money. I was sitting at a restaurant table with a teacher (in high school) and another Jewish student. Somehow I mentioned my dad, and she asked something about having Jewish fathers. Thinking she was wondering about growing up in another culture, I rambled a bit about my dad and how he likes to tell the Sandy Koufax Yom Kippur story. Then she said something to the effect of, “no, how is he about money? Is that different?”
Being a bit socially naive and having a particular fondness for this teacher, I didn’t realize until afterwards that she was being antisemitic.
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In high school, I’ve had a share. In P.E., there were a good number of very Catholic Latinos (at least 4/5ths of the class), a seemingly large percentage of which talked a good deal of smack against Jews. Now, I’m a fairly active kid, and I’m pretty popular for schoolyard games. One day, I mentioned my religion. I’m a joker, so one of my acquaintances laughed and said no, you can’t be, you seem like too good of a person. When I insisted, they commented that that was “fucked up” (my religion, not their bigotry) and that “I didn’t seem that greedy.” Now, heaven knows I’m nonreligious and have only some time at Hebrew High to back up my cultural heritage, but here I was, playing proxy for a group of people they had heard of but rarely seen. Instead of challenging their perceptions on the larger scale, I only tried to make myself seem like the “counter-stereotype”–something I wish I could do-over.
When I was in my early 20’s some friends of friends moved into my neighborhood (in a small town in New England). They had just come back to the mainland from Hawaii, where they had moved the year before, but found it too difficult, so decided to move back. The family (mother and father maybe 15 or 20 years older than me, with 3 girls and a boy) were talking about the social and economic hardships of living in Hawaii. Somehow the conversation veered off into Jews controlling the world, being greedy and money grubbing, etc.
I had heard all my life that people believed this, and had had some nasty experiences with antisemitism with kids when I was a kid, but as an adult I hadn’t had a conversation with an adult who was being so blatantly antisemitic. The mother’s face and way of speaking was crude and ugly, when moments before she’d just been talking about ordinary hardships, in an ordinary speaking voice with ordinary mannerisms. I can’t remember now if I said anything about my being Jewish or not. I think I considered whether it was safe for me to reveal that information, but I don’t remember what I decided to do. Afterward I avoided them as much as possible.
I went to grad school in the mid-west and on the first day I met my first Mormon who was simultaneously meeting her first Jew. She was curious about me, NY and Judaism and I was very curious about Utah, Moroni and garments. She was very patient and explained her beliefs and all about Utah while she asked me questions about the big city and being Jewish and it was all very nice and chatty and I was thrilled that I was making a friend until she shyly asked if she could touch my horns. I was dumbfounded. I thought it was a joke but it wasn’t and when I said that I didn’t have horns she said she knew that they didn’t stick out past the hair or anything but that there were bumps on my head where horns would be because everyone knows that Jews have horns so there must be something there. I actually let her touch my head to check. I still can’t believe I let her do that.
Two stories:
When I was younger, I was working in an office. I had some candy in my desk. Someone chided me for not sharing my candy (which I had bought and paid for) by saying “You Jew!” I immediately launched into a scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” and said “Yes, that’s right. I’m a Jew. A Heeb. A hooknose. A Red Sea Pedestrian.” Then I handed over a piece of candy.
A few years later, I was watching the evening news in Dallas. There had been some kind of local summit on Black/Jewish relations in the city. One of the African-American local leaders begins to say something about how “*Everybody* knows the Jews control….” However, one of the Jewish leaders shut him down, saying “Don’t you tell me what we do and do not control in this town!”
I had forgotten about this when commenting on Richard’s blog, but… I *did* hear something like this once when I was an adolescent. I was very unpopular–and very badly bullied–up through the eighth grade. I am not Jewish. I have naturally curly hair, and never learned what to do with it until I reached adulthood. Anyway….
I cut it short–with no layers–in sixth grade and ended up with the mushroom shaped head thing that happens when those of us who have curly hair try to get it cut at cheap walk in salons. Mostly, people used racist tropes to make fun of it, calling it an “Afro.” But I do remember one kid saying, “Well, I mean, she can’t help being Jewish” (in reference to my frizzy, curly hair.” That shocked me. It wasn’t something one heard often (amid free-flowing stereotypes leveled at Blacks and Latin@s as I grew up in the South). It was the first (and only) time that I ever head a Jewish stereotype leveled like that–that is, by someone who was serious and who wasn’t talking *about* some neo-Nazi group. I assumed that guy’s family must be in the Klan or something.
*****
This is a bit different, but I was shocked upon moving to Montreal (where I lived for a year) that people felt comfortable unloading all of their bigoted opinions on me upon finding out that I was from the South (assuming that I would be sympathetic). I remember having a casual, apolitical conversation with some dude who was cutting my hair. When he found out that I was from the South, he assumed that I would be “amused” by this truly “hilarious” story about how he and a friend joined the Klan in Canada as children as a joke. And, no, I didn’t really find a “light-hearted” story about an antimsemitic, racist hate group to be funny. Call me a Feminist with No Sense of Humor, but well…
******
In college, I was active in a group that worked a great deal with Jews for a Just Peace. I was an antiwar activist. Mostly, I joined along in pro-Palestinian activism that was highly critical of Israeli state policy. But then my group decided (along with JFJP and others) to participate in an event called Intifada Solidarity Night that would donate money to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. I remember being very, very uncomfortable with calling it Intifada Solidarity. Is that what it was? And weren’t we conflating the first and second intifadas (and the vastly different forms of resistance used in both), and could we–mostly white, non-Jewish–folks really justify that? I opted out.
I had boyfriends with families to whom I couldn’t reveal my ethnic background.
The same families also had to be protected from the information that I was an atheist.
I don’t know if this counts as a story. If Richard wants to delete it, I won’t be offended. But it seemed appropriate to mention it. I see it as a story about myself.
Last night my grandfather sent me one of those e-mail forwards. It listed all the Jews with high level positions in the Obama administration. It ended with the punch line: “Am I the only one noticing that Obama and Biden are not so much assembling staff, as gathering a minyan?”
My grandfather thinks this is great. Look how far we’ve come! I felt embarrassed and worried. What if people notice? It will just reaffirm their belief that the Jews control everything. (On the other hand, could it undo the perceptual damage done by all the Jewish neocons? Maybe. Or should I just stop thinking like this? Most definitely.)
This is more about internalized anti-semitism, but I think that’s an important aspect of any type of prejudice, anyway.
My father is half Jewish. He grew up in Virginia in the 1950s and was under careful instructions to explain to anyone who asked that he went to church on Sunday (Unitarian, in actuality, but I think he left that part out).
By the time I was born, he had internalized the idea that his Jewish heritage was a source of shame. He didn’t even bother telling me about it until I was 14, and then only in response to a school project asking about family history.
The incident that I experienced therefor only made sense as a moment of anti-semitism in retrospect. I was about 11 or 12, asleep in the back of the car, and I woke up to hear my mother saying to my father “she [meaning me] is really very pretty, she could be a model” to which my father replied “no, her nose and lips are too big.”
Putting aside issues of whether big lips and a big nose somehow puts one outside the category of “pretty,” I actually had a fairly proportionate nose and lips. But my father saw me differently; he looked at me and his fears about his background were literally written across my face.
When I was in high school, a kid on line in the cafeteria on pizza day told the “joke,” “What’s the difference between a pizza and a Jew?” The answer was “A pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.”
One incident that maybe counts more as fear of antisemitism than actual antisemitism was when I was on the Academic Decathlon team in high school. Two of the events — interview and speech — required speaking in front of judges. (Those were always my worst events — I’ve got a lisp and a stutter which get much worse when I’m nervous, and I was just never good enough at remembering to make eye contact and stuff like that.) So anyway, I was wearing a magen David necklace that day. My mother told me to take it off, because, “You never know who might be judging.” I argued back I didn’t think there were any antisemites among the Academic Decathlon judges, but then, right before walking into the interview/speech room, I had a brief moment of panic and tucked the necklace under my shirt.
My great-grandmother was Ruth Ann Weinman. She was Jewish. She converted to Christianity sometime around the time she married my great-grandfather, Benjamin Fecke.
My grandfather never would really admit that she was Jewish.
If questioned, he’d note that her last name had one “n” in it — which was nonsensical, not only because Weinmann isn’t particularly more- or less-Jewish than Weinman, but because if her last name had but one “n” in it, her last name would have been “Weinma.” She wasn’t a Jew.
Of course, she was; pretty much everyone but my grandfather (and, I’m told, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother) was open about that. But because we weren’t allowed to know that, we lost out on a fair amount of family history. Lost to the ages are the reasons why she converted, and the family she came from. Why it was a negative thing for our family to have had some Jewish ancestry is beyond me; of course, I’ve never much understood anti-anything, so I suppose I’m a bad person to ask. But it is always amazing to me how far people will go — even to deny their own family — in order to avoid viewing other people as our equals.
how far people will go — even to deny their own family — in order to avoid viewing other people as our equals
Or how far they will go to avoid being viewed as less than equal by other people.
My heritage is German-American, Missouri Synod Lutheran. Can’t recall any anti-semitic slurs coming from family or church, but it always made my family uncomfortable when I imagined aloud that we may well have Jewish connections. I could never establish that, but certainly hoped we did.
Most of the derogatory words I’ve encountered came from the general public, usually in response to my name. The slur almost always implied cheapness or hording money. I am frugal in some ways, extravagant in others, which is pretty normal. The ex-wife and I once had a yard sale, and we couldn’t help noticing that none of the multitude of people that showed up early and tried to make a ridiculous cash offer for “the whole shebang”, nor the constant stream of people trying to pay less than the low prices we’d marked, appeared to be Jewish. In fact, from that day forward whenever someone tried to take advantage of us in a transaction, we would say they were attempting to “Christian us down”.
The most recent incident was actually a year and a half ago. I look ethnically ambiguous, and so am not targeted for anti-antisemitism regularly.
Around the summer of 2007, I used three adjectives in my self description on a social networking site. They were “mexican,” “jewish,” and “irish.” The next day, I got an email from a white guy in his early 30s from rural georgia asking if he could “jew me down.” Because clearly, I’m for sale, and open to haggling about the price.
I’m not Jewish, but I have always held on to this particularly frightening memory from my childhood.
I guess I was seven or eight and was with my Mom at an antique store in Western KY, near Illinois. She was buying a really old school-desk to refurbish for my younger sister for her birthday. She haggled with the guy at the store over the price, which was something everybody always seemed to do, and he sold it to her for significantly less that the price on the tag.
She had paid and we were just leaving, when very suddenly, the guy leaned down and real close into my face and sort of hissed at me “Well, boy, your momma jewed me down real good, didn’t she?”
It was one of the most shockingly hateful things I had ever experienced, the way he sort of spat it at me. I’ve never forgotten it.
On the way out of the place, my mom told me “I don’t want you to be confused about what happened in there. That man is a hateful old monster and that’s that.”
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Ruchama wrote:
I was recently told this joke by a Black woman who’s a classmate of mine, she was doing a paper on racial jokes and wanted to know if I’d heard it. It haunted me for several days.
My anti-semitism stories seem too numerous to recount but I’ll list a few:
Background: Raised in a small town less than 2 hours from NYC.
* Late 80s/Early 90s: One of the boys who tormented me the most in elementary and middle school was a very angry, mean (in retrospect I think he must have had some major dysfunction going on in his family) Muslim kid of Jordanian descent. His favorite insult was to call me “Jewgirl” instead of my name. Other students took to calling me that, too. Then it was “Dirty Jewgirl” and “Ugly Jewgirl” and “Fat Jewgirl” and “Lesbo Jewgirl” and “Kike Dyke”. Jewgirl and Dirtyjew were basically my names in school. This started when we were in the same class in 4th grade and didn’t end until I left the school district after 7th grade. I recall him mentioning things that gave me the impression that he learned these ideas from his parents, who seem to have taught him Jews were evil and dirty and moneygrubbing. I was physically threatened, pushed, tripped, etc.
*Early 90s: The same kid made fun of me when I picked up change I’d dropped on the ground. I learned very quickly, as most Jewish people I know were taught by their parents or their peers, that when you are Jewish you are NEVER to bend over to pick up change that you dropped or that you see laying on the ground. Never.
* Late 80s: At the elementary school in town there was a big Christmas tree in the lobby. Some of the Jewish parents pushed the school to allow there to be an electric menorah next to it. Some non-Jewish parents kept pushing the menorah behind the Christmas tree to hide it. Every morning my mom would pull it out, and every afternoon it’d be back behind the Christmas tree.
*1991: Two Christian Fundamentalist friends of mine (who both later turned out to be secular dykes, believe it or not) cornered me in the locker room in 5th grade and told me they were really worried I wouldn’t go to heaven with them after the Rapture and that I needed to accept Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal lord and savior NOW or I might not get to be with them and they then went on to explain the awful things that would happen to me if I didn’t accept Jesus when the Rapture came. They were very upset at the idea that we’d be separated during the End Times. I ended up in tears.
*Late 80s/Early 90s: Found out later that my best friend’s mom frequently called me a Fat Jew or Fat Jewish Pig when I wasn’t within listening range.
* Early 90s: An ex of mine went to a playdate at a friends house when she was in middle school and the friend’s mom started ruffling the hair on top of her head. The mom said she was looking for my ex’s horns. The worst part? She was dead serious.
*Throughout childhood: Told I’m lucky I don’t have a Jewish nose or Jewish hair.
* Early 90s: School art teacher has us making easter egg cards in art class. I tell him it’s a Christian symbol for a Christian holiday and I’m Jewish. He says it’s a “universal” symbol of “spring” and forces me to make one, too.
*Over the years: Lots of accusations that Jews killed Jesus.
* Mid-90s: The leader of the school choir had us singing religious Christian music for the holiday concert. My parents approached her and said that it was one thing to sing Christmas carols (really?) but another to sing church music, and could I be exempt from singing the expressly religious songs (the one that mentioned Jesus) and could she maybe consider adding a secular or Jewish song or two? The teacher more or less said we were a minority and therefore should shut up. She tried to say Christmas was universal. Um… yeah, right.
* 2008: My partner’s clueless coworker kept asking her about the “Jewish Christmas” and no matter how many times my partner tried to explain to her that it wasn’t related in any way to Christmas she insisted on referring to it that way and in relating it to Christmas. She was simply ignorant, not hostile. But it’s hard not to see it as offensive.
* Mid-90s: There was a rock thrown through the window of my childhood shul.
* 2007 or thereabouts: Anti-semitic graffiti all over town. Swastikas and horrible sayings about Jews.
* Early 2000s: I was involved in Jewish solidarity with Palestinian causes, and got told that Jews had become Nazis and were literally as bad as the Nazis had been. Also, stuff about Jews controlling the media. Saw horrible posters and heard horrible slogans. Began to be almost immune to it. Lots of anti-Semitic charicatures. Assumptions about Jews all being evil oppressive Zionists. Suggestions that killing Jewish Israelis is good and positive.
I could go on, but I’ll stop.
Oh and how could I forget how my 1st grade teacher taught us that modern-day Jews smear blood on their doorframes every Passover to keep away the angel of death?
Interesting. I ran into a girl who asked if Jews had horns and a halo in Texas. She was from a VERY rural background. The horns she had learned about in bible school. The tail she deduced because why would you have horns and not a tail? I explained that this paritcular myth originated when Christians mistranslated stories about Moses that said he had a “halo” to read that he had “horns” and artists then started depicting Moses with horns, and it became an Antisemetic myth. She absorbed it pretty well. I also ran into a lot of people in Texas who could not get their heads around the idea of a secular Jew. I still remember a well-meaning woman saying in her thick Texas accent: “put down that ham sandwich. Its Tray-ef.”.
I seem to be an outlier among Jews. I got hit all through elementary school, but it was not for being Jewish, I got beat up by Jews and Gentiles alike for being a fat kid with glasses who liked to read. Eventually I made friends among other people who liked science ficition. So I’m the only Jew on this list for who whose experiences of antisemitism were few and far between? Maybe something to do with growing up in various suburbs of LA….
1991, canvassing for Greenpeace in Potomac, Maryland. Older woman, Rosa from Bavaria, says that she thinks it may be too late but she will gladly contribute twelve dollars to save the environment from the depredations of “Bush and the Jews.” Also is outraged at the claim that human beings originated in Africa or “the Middle East” because human beings must have first appeared in the mountains of Asia, where it’s closer to Heaven.
My grandmother, who just turned 92, told me to never say I that I am a Jew, but that I am Jewish. Why? Because saying Jew all by itself is a curse word.
A few years ago I did a language course…I’m easily identifiable as Jewish from my name, and almost the first thing the teacher said was, “tell me, aren’t Jews really intolerant and exclusionary”? He said he’d never met a Jew and was surprised that one would be interested in foreign language study.
Back in 2002, my mother and I went to an interfaith Darfur vigil outside the Sudanese embassy. As a sweet old Minister was trying to speak, members of the New Black Panther Party showed up in some sort of military style uniform, shouted over the minister about how the Jews were always out to get the black man, and similar invective, ending with a chant of “black power” multiple time.
note: the New Black Panther Party is not related to the old group Black Panthers and has been denounced by founding black panthers members.
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* Early 90s: School art teacher has us making easter egg cards in art class. I tell him it’s a Christian symbol for a Christian holiday and I’m Jewish. He says it’s a “universal” symbol of “spring” and forces me to make one, too.
It actually is a pagan symbol of spring that Christians have adopted, much like Christmas trees.
RonF: That the teacher was factually correct about the egg– and it’s not only pagans who use the egg as a symbol in this way; Iranians do as well; they color eggs on Norooz, the Persian New Year, which is in March–does not change the fact of his insensitivity to Country Jew’s feelings. Certainly, in the US, in the mainstream, Easter eggs are associated with the Christianity, not paganism.
I know you were not saying otherwise, and that you were just providing information. I am just taking this opportunity to remind everyone that I’d prefer to keep statements about the stories people tell off this thread as much as possible.
Yeah, you’re right – sorry about that.
I was called a “kike” at school when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I don’t clearly remember this, but my mother was off-the-charts furious and afraid when I came home and asked her what it meant, and I do remember the resulting meeting in the principal’s office. My mom had terrible experiences as a kid – being chased home by rock-throwing classmates – and was acutely aware of the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the time. She used to point out the restricted neighborhoods and country clubs as we drove around, and even now there are places she won’t go because of their history. In many ways, I’ve been more affected by her experiences of anti-Semitism than my own.
I actually grew up in a town adjacent to the village of my mother’s youth, where the houses were built in the 1960s and the areas weren’t restricted, with the result that my school was about 70% Jewish. School was closed on High Holidays, no one gave exams on the first day of Pesach, and our choir sang an equal number of Chanukah songs and relatively secular Christmas music. We learned Mendelsohn’s “Elijah” instead of Handel’s “Messiah”. I was shocked at the number of people I met in college who had never met a Jew before, but that felt more like ignorance than malice.
My first direct experience was in medical school and came from an attending, who told me I’d get a good grade in my surgery rotation because the doc who supervised the students was Jewish and “always does well by his own”. This was followed by a series of “jokes” about the “smart Jews” who “run this whole place”. Very scary, although not physically threatening.
Since then I’ve had a few patients refuse to see me because I was Jewish. I’ve also had patients tell me they requested me because I’m Jewish, and “everyone knows you’re smarter”. That creeps me out, too.
Many of the incidents, comments and reactions described above are familiar to me, though not of overwhelming effect. It wasn’t until I was drafted into the Army that I was confronted with anti-Semitism.
I was an enlisted social worker at Fort Gordon, GA, working in Mental Hygiene. The Headquarters Company commander, Major Donald Murphy, was in the habit of requiring us to return to the post on Saturdays to do company chores. I eventually objected to the Saturday obligations, saying that my sabbath was Saturday. I volunteered to come in on Sundays. He looked at me and sneered, “What are you, a Seventh Day Adventist?” He was taken aback when I told him I was Jewish–he had no idea that Jews’ sabbath was Saturday.
My previously perfect evaluations subsequently hit rock bottom and I got no further 3-day passes. Fortunately it was near the end of my servitude.
During the Christmas holidays it was the custom of the fort to place a figure of Santa Claus sticking out of the tank turret at the main gate. At night they also lit the windows of the 20-story Signal School building (the tallest building for 100 miles) in the pattern of a cross. Screwing up my courage I went to speak with the post chaplain to suggest this was a violation of the establishment clause of the Constitution. He looked at me and said “The majority of the people around here are Christian.” He said nothing more and waved me away.
When I was in Junior High in small town Minnesota, there was an influx of “Jesus people” (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_people). This was the Christian side of the counter-culture movement in the late ’60s, so people were wearing their long hair and love beads, but carrying around updated, hipper versions of the gospels. I was attending an alternative school so we weren’t trapped in classrooms 50 minutes of every hour: people could come and go pretty freely.
For some reason, the focus of the Jesus People in my school was to locate people who weren’t baptized and pray for them. The six Jews in the school (out of 600) were the obvious first choice. For about a month, small groups of people would follow us around and pray for us. They got so disruptive that the teachers had to ask them to leave the room so the classes could continue. I have vivid memories of sitting in class and outside the classroom door there would be five or six people on their knees praying out loud for my poor lost soul.
The experience was odd, but I remember feeling bad for all the kids who had been lulled in by the Jesus People. It was a cult. They were making our lives miserable, but they were also being victimized by this loony organization. The praying for our souls ended after about a month and the kids moved on to other fads.
In my high school civics class, we were talking about smaller government organizations, and the postal service came up. For some reason, the teacher went on a tangent about how you can write “return to sender” on an envelope. Someone suggested that if you got a letter from someone, you could open it very carefully, write a reply, reseal it, and write “return to sender” on it.
“Why?” asked the teacher, “you don’t want to spend 32 cents to send a letter to your grandma?” (I think stamps were only 32 cents back then).
Suddenly, a random student piped up, “Only a Jewish family would do that!”
The class started laughing, and I spoke up in disgust. Several people, including a girl who claimed to be my friend, and my one liberal ally in the class told me to stop being so sensitive. But what really killed me is that the teacher said NOTHING. When I confronted him about it later, he claimed he never heard the comment being made (which was impossible in a small 15-person class, not to mention the uproar it caused.). Unfortunately, this was not the first time a comment like that had been made in a class at my school without any of the teachers responding. I was so glad to get out of that school.
—
My most frightening encounter, however, took place when I was volunteering on organic farms in Ireland. I was cooking dinner for our hosts (it was technically my day off, but my fellow volunteer and I offered to cook dinner for everyone anyhow), while our host talked with one of her friends who was visiting. Her friend was talking about doing some renovations to her house, and our host suggested that she talk to a mutual friend because he was in construction/an architect/I don’t remember what.
“Oh, I don’t want to ask him! He’s Jewish… you know how they are. He’ll squeeze every penny out of me.”
I just kept on making dinner, hoping that it wasn’t completely obvious that I was a Jew. I was so scared someone would bright it up or find out. Maybe that sounds exaggerated, but I was in a foreign country, albeit a foreign country that spoke English, staying with complete strangers and trusting them to give me decent room and board in exchange for reasonable farm work (WWOOF is an amazing program, but it’s more or less run on the honor system.), so it was a little nerve-wracking. The rest of my stay there was pretty awkward because my host’s noncommittal response made it completely unclear as to whether she agreed with her friend or not. But, as if to make up for it, the next farm I volunteered at was run by a family of awesome Irish Jews–at that moment I just really needed to be somewhere where I felt safe.
For me antisemitism I’ve been around has always seemed bizarre and completely unexpected. Which is probably because I’m a gentile.
A (gentile) friend of mine told a (jewish) friend of mine that Jews were no longer oppressed because Israel had nuclear weapons.
When my friends were in jail under the threat of being charged with terrorism, I visited a friend of mine in prison with another friend of his (who was Jewish). Someone who was visiting one of co-accused at the same time later on said to me “Isn’t it good that *Jewish friend* visited because they [the media] are saying that they [the people who were arrested] are working with the Palestinians.”
But the most unexpected was on a car journey with someone I didn’t know very well. He was pretty drunk and got on to his new girlfriend, basically saying he’d get lots of kids out of her, because Maori need to repopulate, and Rua Kennana (a Tuhoe leader of the early 20th Century) had 11 wives.
I said “That’s bullshit, in India there were always more indigenous people than white people. It’s not about numbers – we’ve got to take control of the economy.” (not exactly a nuanced argument, but I was mostly trying to get away from him arguing that treating Maori women like objects was a lbieratory political position.)
And he replied:
“Yeah take control of the economy, like the Jews do.”
And I told him that the Jews don’t control the economy, and decided we didn’t really have enough in common politically to have useful discussion.
I went to a very liberal and PC high school – in fact, we had a pro-GLBT day called 2bglad day (I don’t remember the exact acronym) that got us chewed out by Bill O’reilly on national TV for being too pro-gay! Gay couples were allowed to make out in the hallways and we had anti-racist education assemblies, so this was quite a liberal place. Nonetheless, I experienced a little anti-semitism. Firstly, I was dating a girl for a week or two, my first girlfriend basically, and when I told her I was Jewish she put her cross necklace on my arm because she really truly believed it would burn through my skin because I was “unholy.” I’m not sure if this qualifies as “anti-semitic” or “astonishingly stupid.”
Also, I got the usual penny thing – kids who would throw pennies at me and dare me to defy nature and not pick them up. This still happened in a liberal high school with a big Jewish population. Third, in one class we had a conversation about Israel and I was being very pro-Israel (that has since changed) and the teacher said, with a sneer, “you just support Israel because you’re Jewish!” and ended the conversation. I’m not sure if that would qualify as real anti-semitism or not.
Two years ago, I lived in China for six months doing two study abroad programs. I never encountered any hostile anti-semitism there, but the Chinese have a fair amount of “positive” stereotypes about Jews. Upon learning I was Jewish, one Chinese person said “so you’re smart like Einstein! No wonder your Chinese is so good!” Strange but true. I’m also a lefty and there is also a Chinese superstition that lefties are smart, so upon hearing I was a left-handed Jew, which seemed to amuse people, I would often hear “so you’re smart” or “no wonder you speak good Chinese for a white guy.” In addition, the stereotype of Jews is so pervasive that there was a self-help book written that sold fairly well called “The Secret of the Jews” or something along those lines that said if you used the “Jewish ways” you would become rich and powerful, because, ya know, all Jews are wealthy and powerful.
Sorry if this post is too long.
Maia – well blacks are Americans, and America has nukes, so maybe they aren’t oppressed **sarcasm alert**
I had mentioned a few experiences over at Richard’s blog that he wanted me to share here. I’ve posted so many stories that I feel like I should say that I haven’t experienced that much antisemitism in my life. On a day to day basis, being a woman definitely affects me more than being Jewish does. Indeed, like Maia, when it occurs, it always strikes me as bizarre and unexpected. Which is as good a segue as any into the story I’m going to tell.
I have seen antisemitism in some unlikely places. I lived for two and a half years in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer. Paraguay has a very small Jewish population, concentrated in the capital, and while the community is generally well-off, it’s not tied in with any politically significant group in a way that would explain the existence of antisemitism. But it was not unusual to see graffiti along the lines of “Hitler was right” or “Hitler should have finished the job.” A lot of Nazis escaped to Paraguay after the war and were protected by the government. One Jewish volunteer in a site very near me was visiting with a family in her community when one of the men asked if she wanted to see something interesting. He disappeared into a room for what seemed like a long time, and he came out dressed in an impeccably preserved, 100 percent complete SS uniform. The bombs used to attack the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s almost certainly were built by Hezbollah in Paraguay, but the Paraguayan government did everything in its power to thwart Argentine investigators trying to prosecute the case. Hezbollah continues to engage in a lot of commercial activity and arms trafficking there with no government interference. The dictator in power for most of the second half of the 20th century was ethnically German and a fascist, so he had his reasons, but Hezbollah is protected by an ethnically Paraguayan and somewhat democratic government.
And recounting those experiences made me remember another story I had completely forgotten about.
Peace Corps and the volunteer organization traditionally organized a Thanksgiving dinner at hotel in a resort town about an hour outside the capital. Someone came up with the idea of shifting the Thanksgiving party to an area in the east of the country, near some significant Jesuit mission ruins, mostly as an excuse to give volunteers who lived closer to the capital an excuse to travel to another part of the country. Everyone was pretty supportive of this idea, until the volunteer organization announced the hotel where the dinner would be held. Several Jewish volunteers had stayed at this hotel in the past with their parents when their families had come to visit them. They had a seen a number of things at the hotel that disturbed them, and they were fairly confident that several old Nazi fugitives lived there full-time, sheltered by the hotel owner, who was also German. This wasn’t based just on the nationality of the old men in question, but on a number of things they had seen and heard said at this hotel. One family was so upset they left sooner than they had planned, which is a bigger deal than it might seem because there aren’t a lot of nice places to stay in Paraguay.
The Jewish volunteers said they didn’t want to hold Thanksgiving at this hotel, partly because they wouldn’t feel comfortable there and partly because they didn’t want to give a substantial amount of money to someone they believed was harboring war criminals.
The reaction of the non-Jewish volunteers was that the Jewish volunteers were being oversensitive and “ruining” Thanksgiving for everyone else by raising these absurd concerns. The discussion devolved until a few volunteers were actually screaming at the Jewish volunteers who had raised the objections that they were racist against Germans.
In the end, we had Thanksgiving at the usual place, and it was fine. So I suppose the Jewish side “won,” and to be fair, a significant number of non-Jewish volunteers felt that if the Jewish volunteers felt that strongly, it wasn’t worth it to stick with the plan. The idea was to be together and have a good time, and if that wouldn’t happen at the German hotel, then we shouldn’t go to the German hotel. But there also was a fair amount of resentment toward the volunteers who had objected.
This was among a group that was almost entirely made up of people who identify as liberal or progressive. I know that many of us spoke up whenever Paraguayans expressed bigotry toward native people or toward blacks or toward gays (all of which occurred frequently). But when the Jewish volunteers had a problem spending their Thanksgiving with real, actual Nazis, the general reaction was that they were just being a pain in the ass.
I didn’t think of this until reading Richard’s Part 4, but I think it counts, and is more appropriate here than as a comment to his Part 4.
I went to see Tropic Thunder with my husband and two of his work friends who I know quite well. I wasn’t enthused about seeing the movie, in large part because I knew it was presenting itself as “meta” about racial stereotypes and was extremely wary of how that would go.
And at the end of the movie there’s the Tom Cruise character who is in the little room in Hollywood controlling everything and putting these actors lives at risk and, I think, in the end basically saying “well, we still have a movie if they all get killed, we just don’t have to share the profits with them” or something like that and they HAVE TO throw in some reference about that character being Jewish. They didn’t have to – it was one line about bar mitzvah presents or something, and I know many people would have come to their own conclusion as such – Hollywood exec and all that, but it was purposeful, and it was gratuitous, and it was every antisemetic stereotype you can think of basically personified in a bit part by a non-Jewish actor.
And it was at the end of the movie, and I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything when we walked out. I mentioned it to my husband, kind of under my breath but in the post-movie “so what did you think?” I just didn’t say it loud enough that the others would hear me. I still don’t exactly know why I didn’t, but I didn’t feel comfortable saying it.
chingona @27: I very clearly remember several years ago reading Adbusters (yeah, I know) who ran a feature specifically mentioning which high-ranking members of the Department of Defense were, in fact, Jewish: you know, the Grand Zionist Conspiracy and the Iraq War, and all that.
I’ve been pretty safe from direct anti-Semitism because of my ability to pass and the fact that I haven’t always been Jewish, but I do remember a few things:
-My best friend from childhood not referring to me as Jewish after the conversion, but referring to me instead as Israeli (in the context of his political views I felt it was questionable)
-Just last year, someone in our class felt it was appropriate to tell me that our Romani Math teacher was “being a Jew with his marks”. He hardly said anything to me after I asked him, “that doesn’t strike you as a really stupid thing to say?”
-In this same class I was told by someone that al-Qaida did not really exist and the whole 9/11 thing was probably Israel’s fault.
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I’m posting here with a weird sort of addendum to my story @ 57. So I was on Facebook, and there was a comment thread going on a link I’d posted that involved a bunch of references to Nazis (Indiana Jones Nazis, not real Nazis). And seemingly out of nowhere, a friend from Peace Corps posted in a joking way about how if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that she would never spend Thanksgiving with the Nazis. The way she put it, I didn’t know how else to take it but “Ha ha, remember how ridiculous those people were being who didn’t want to go to the German hotel.”
It was so out of the blue – I don’t think I’ve ever talked about that whole thing with anyone in the five-plus years since it happened, and I had nearly forgotten about it until these threads had jogged my memory. It felt almost like a slap in the face. At the same time, I felt strangely relieved. Part of me wondered if I had misremembered or even imagined the whole thing, so it was good to know that, no, I pretty much had it right.
I was really unsure of how to react or what to say. She obviously thought she was making a joke, one that I would appreciate and share in. I tried to compose some sort of joke back about it, but a joke that it would make it clear I didn’t see it the way she did. Everything I tried came off way too bitter or so subtle she would never have picked up on what I was trying to say. I ended up just deleting her comment and writing her privately, which felt awkward too, like I was making too big a deal of it. Now I’m anxious about how she’ll take it. She’s a social friend, someone whose company I enjoy, but not someone I know really well.
Goddamn you, Facebook.
(And I’m sorry to reopen this thread just to blather about this. I’m home alone, husband in a different time zone, probably long since asleep, no one to talk to, and feeling more unsettled than I ought to.)
chingona,
I think you did the right thing there — she might be genuinely well-meaning and just ignorant, and if your reply to her had been public on your page it might have embarrassed her unnecessarily in front of mutual acquaintances. At the same time, she ought to become more aware of how other people saw that incident, and I’m glad you were willing to talk to her about it. I have a very hard time talking to people I know IRL about stuff like that.
Chingona, thanks for posting this.
I’ve been wondering how to respond to a comment on facebook that struck me as anti-semitic recently, although it was not personal to me at all.
I think you did the right thing by sending the person a private message, and I don’t think deleting her comment is making too big a deal of it. The comment hurt you. I also think it was fine to post your thoughts here. That’s what the thread IMHO (and the blog) is for!
PG, Eva,
Thanks for your comments. I put off logging into Facebook this morning until later than usual in my morning Internet time-wasting routine, but she was was really cool about it and very apologetic about it. She said she hadn’t meant to invoke either “side” in the whole thing, just trying to use black humor, and she had agreed with not going to the German hotel. (The meeting where the whole thing went down had upwards of 150 people in it, and only maybe a dozen were active participants in the discussion. I remember what was said, much more than I remember who said what, and it’s not like I talked about it with every single volunteer. I have no reason not to believe her.) But she was genuinely apologetic – not “I’m sorry that you were offended” but “I’m really sorry I hurt you.”
So of course now I feel pretty stereotypical – the Jew that sees anti-Semitism everywhere – but I’m still glad I did it. It would have really nagged at me if I just let it go.
Whatevs! There are comment threads on other blogs that have been going on steadily for years. Literally. (And I’m sorry to hear that you’re home alone. I get unsettled when my husband’s out of town, too, especially at night.)
Your addendum reminded me of my own addendum – I noticed in the boycott post at Feministe (to avoid derailing with a pingback, I’m not going to link directly), Cara said that while she found a cis woman’s comment merely annoying, many trans women found it “damaging, silencing, and erasing.” When I read that, a lightbulb went on about the reactions to David Schraub’s post. I remembered Kristin (and a few others, but her comment still sticks out in my memory) posting comments that I and others perceived as, well, damaging, silencing, and erasing, and watching the moderators tell her to just “take a breather” (and even then, only much later in the thread). It was the same dynamic at work – what’s obviously offensive to a targeted group member is completely invisible to someone outside that group. But I had no idea how to respond to it.
Because, I mean, why in the world would a Jew have problems with spending her Thanksgiving with Nazis? Why in the world would a Jew have problems with being told anti-Semitism doesn’t exist? Seriously, when will we stop being so oversensitive?
I am glad that the Facebook incident was resolved, though – that’s good to hear. I think the more we call out anti-Semitism – even the subtle, most-likely-not-intentional kind – the more comfortable we’ll feel pushing back against it more.
I hate those feelings — the things that feel like it’s being overly sensitive to mention them, but just keep nagging if I let them go. It sounds like you made the right decision, chingona.
Since this thread got some more activity, I figured I’d share this story, since it’s been kind of nagging at me to share it somewhere. I’m a grad student. One of my officemates is a new student this year. The first time I met him was the day that I had to move all my stuff from my old office to the new office, and he offered to help. He noticed an Israeli coin on one of my shelves, and asked if I was Israeli. I said something like, “Nope, just plain boring American Jewish,” and said that the coin was probably from a trip to Israel that I’d taken the previous year.
Later that afternoon, he asked me, totally out of the blue, what the Jewish view on divorce was. I told him what I could remember, with a bit of a sidebar about the problem of agunah. The next day, he’d apparently looked it up on the internet, and came in with all kinds of questions about intricate details of Jewish divorce law. I told him that I had no idea.
Sometime that week, he mentioned, at least three times, that the best meal he ever had was a Jewish meal at the home of one of his undergrad advisors. He listed everything he’d eaten there, and wanted to know the origin of each dish, and where around here he could get food like that.
Since then, he has at least once or twice a week asked me some completely random question about Jewish law or culture. In addition to the reasonable but random ones (like details about kashrut), he has also asked, “So, you’re from New Jersey. Do you know any good Jewish American Princess jokes?” I told him that, as someone who was neither Jewish nor female, he should really not use that term, and he apologized. He’s also asked if I knew any Jewish jokes, because Jewish jokes are usually the best. When I was eating sushi for lunch one day, he asked why Jews like sushi so much.
A few days ago, I was complaining about a section of the textbook in the class that I’m teaching — I think that it’s a pointless section, but it’s on the syllabus so I have to teach it, taking time away from other sections that I think are more important. He asked why I teach it if I don’t think it’s important. I said that I teach it because it’s in the department guidelines, that this course includes this section. He started singing “Tradition.”
That one, I should have said something, but I just didn’t feel like dealing with it that day. This past week, he’s been reading all the labels and writing on the matzo box on my desk, asking me to translate the Hebrew parts, asked a ton of questions about the laws about making matzo, and keeps making jokes like, “Just munching away, aren’t you?” whenever he sees me eating it.
Ruchama, that story sounds very familiar to me – I sometimes feels as if people only see me as Jewish and not as anything else, and it feels threatening and invasive to have someone bring it up and comment on it all the time. It’s creepy, dehumanizing and invasive.
One more story from this same guy. I’m not sure if this counts as antisemitic or just really annoying, but it’s like he can’t talk to me on any level other than relating everything about me back to Judaism. One day, we were for some reason talking about heart attacks, and I mentioned that my great-uncle had died of a heart attack at age 35. He asked when that was. I thought for a second and replied that it happened in 1946. He said, “Wow, 1946 must have been a really bad time to be Jewish.” My face must have reflected my “huh?” because he then asked, “Was he a Holocaust survivor?” I said, “No, he grew up in New Hampshire.” He said, “Oh, well that’s better, then.”
Yeesh. That would have bothered me even more than the “Tradition” thing. Just as someone who isn’t Jewish AND female should be leery of telling JAP jokes, someone who isn’t Jewish should be leery of telling (or asking for) Jewish jokes.
Hearing about this makes me grateful for once that my ethnic community is so small in the U.S. — at least there aren’t as many stereotypes to deal with.
Ruchama – AARGH! That sounds so frustrating. I know people who behave like that – one of them, unfortunately, in my (biethnic) immediate family.
It also sounds like the officemate Richard talked about in one of his “What We Talk About…” posts.
I wonder what the best strategy is to deal with this type of thing? Maybe humor?
Yes, exactly. The “dehumanizing” wasn’t a word that I would have thought of to apply to this, but it really does apply. Invasive and creepy, definitely.
Back when we were still dating, my now-husband’s brother told him he should marry me so he would be free and clear to make Jew jokes. My husband told him he was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked.
Ruchama, just, wow. That guy sounds like a really egregious example of that kind of behavior. I probably would be tempted to try to defuse it with humor, but this guy sounds so over the top that maybe he just needs it explained to him in really simple terms. I would worry that joking about it wouldn’t get the message across to him about how inappropriate it is. I also wonder if he would understand why it was wrong if you don’t spell it out to him. I guess it also depends on whether you feel like you want to educate him or whether you just want to get through the semester and avoid him after that.
Agreed with chingona that humor isn’t the way to go because it won’t get the message across. Sometimes you have to take the risk of being seen as the Uptight Minority (or Woman) if you want someone to understand that his behavior is a problem. On the other hand, if it’s going to be a greater cost than benefit to you (e.g. you’re worried about how he’ll depict the incident to other people in the department, whether they’ll see things his way or yours), I guess you’d better just avoid him and find excuses to why you can’t do Gentile Education today.
Yeah, given the state of department politics, I’m probably just going to try to ignore it or find reasons to not answer.
Another really weird thing — there’s an Orthodox professor in this department, and this guy is working with him on a project. Whenever I say that I don’t know the answer to one of his questions, he says, “That’s OK, I’ll just ask (professor).” The power dynamics going on in that are so screwed up.
Ruchama,
I have just skimmed these comments and, oy, do I sypmathize! The one piece of advice I would give is this: Given that he is your officemate, if you do decide to confront him, I would talk to someone in authority–dept. chair, graduate director, whomever–and let them know what’s going on. Not so much because you want them to do anything, but because, in the event that it all blows up in your face (as it can so easily do), you want someone in authority to have been aware of the situation before that happens. (Frankly, I would start logging the guy’s comments anyway; what he’s doing sounds to me like it approaches level of harassment, even if that is not his intention and he has no idea that’s what you’re feeling. I know it’s a pain in the ass to do that, but if you have to live with him in your office for any length of time, you do want to cover your ass in the event that any of this blows up.) Good luck!
I suggest you talk to him about it before approaching the authorities.
*hugs*
Also, now this thread has been bumped back up:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/09/private-lives-racist-views
I just walked by a guy selling books from a table by the Metro station, and one of the books was The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I felt like I should say something to him, but I couldn’t think of what to say.
I am a bit late coming to these posts, but for what it’s worth, here are a few experiences I had in Russia. Russia’s antisemitism problem is, of course, intense to the point of institutionalization (as in, you periodically see certain governmental policies that are obviously driven by antisemitism), and I cannot recount all the ugly incidents I experienced in the 12 years that I’ve lived there. Money, of course, was a perennial issue. Because we were Jews, our finances were everybody’s business — the contents of our shopping bags, whether we had a car, what kind of furniture you would find in our apartment. As a child, I constantly had to apologize to my classmates in school for having nice shoes, a Japanese pencil eraser, gold earrings, etc. Such incidents are too numerous to recount, so I will limit my post to 4 things:
1. In Soviet Russia, it was illegal to mention the Holocaust. (Ironically, it was also illegal to mention the Final Solution in Nazi Germany in the last year or so of its existence.) Or rather, instances of Nazi atrocities were discussed and taught in school, but the authorities carefully omitted any mention of the fact that the Nazis were exterminating Jews and Gypsies. So growing up, children were told that the Nazis rounded up several thousand people, took them outside of town, made them dig a communal grave at a place called Babiy Yar, made them strip naked, then shot them and buried them — but there was no discussion of how and why the victims were selected. As a result, there was a gaping hole in those history lessons. Why did the Nazis kill some children and not others? Why did they burn down whole villages, but left others more or less intact? Why were some prisoners sent to death camps and others to labor camps? Why were some Soviet citizens murdered outright, and others only if they were caught sabotaging the Nazis?
During one history class in the 4th grade, a boy asked the teacher why the Nazis killed all those people at Babiy Yar. The teacher started saying something about the Nazis’ hatred for Soviet citizens, and I raised my hand. Then I said that the people who died at Babiy Yar were murdered because they were Jews, Gypsies, and those married to Jews or Gypsies (because that is what my parents told me). The teacher cut me off, and that very day, my parents were summoned to school and told that if anyone ever again heard me “spreading Zionist propaganda”, the matter would be referred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
All Soviet citizens had their ethnicity stated in their internal passports — to distinguish Russians from non-Russians. I cannot tell you how many times I was told — by teachers, classmates, neighbors — that my family and I weren’t Russian. The only time I heard Jews being treated as “Soviet citizens” on par with ethnic Russians was when the Nazi atrocities were mentioned, and World War II casualties were counted.
I remember in the early days of the Perestroika, 1985 or 1986, Russia witnessed a macabre sensation (before Chernobyl, that is): The Ministry of Internal Affairs busted a gang of grave robbers who had been operating since the 1970’s somewhere in Ukraine. Instead of targeting cemeteries, however, these people concentrated their efforts on one of the World War II-era mass graves of Jews, like Babiy Yar. Such mass shootings took place rather early in the Holocaust, before the Nazis perfected their system for stripping the bodies of gold teeth and valuables hidden in body cavities. The gang dug patiently for many years, sifting through thousands of bones for that occasional golden tooth, a diamond or a ring. The fact that this took place is not what shocks me, however. Rather, it was the lengthy article about it that appeared in the fairly liberal Ogonyok Magazine. The journalist described the plight of the victims in great detail — how viciously they were murdered, how their grave is defenseless because whole families perished there, and how coldly the criminals took advantage of that fact. The author described, very movingly, his springtime visit to the site, and how he broke down when he found the phalanx of a child’s finger in the grass. But nowhere in that long article was there even a single mention of the fact that all the victims of that massacre were Jews and spouses of Jews.
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2. On one occasion when I was 10 or 11, my parents and I went shopping, and while my mother went into the store, my dad and I remained in the car. A few minutes later, a traffic police officer (“GAI”) showed up and fined my father 3 rubles for illegal parking and, of course, asked to see my father’s internal passport. My dad gave him the money and the document, the cop looked in the passport and said: “Oh, a Jew? Then it’s 5 rubles.”
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3. “You daughter is lovely! And she doesn’t look Jewish at all!”
“You know, with your looks, no one need to know you are really a Jew.”
I cannot tell you how many times I heard such “compliments” in Russia. I kind of forgot what it feels like to hear this drivel until a couple of years ago when I accompanied my grandmother, who is a practicing Russian Orthodox, to church. After the service, my grandmother came out to meet me on the steps, in the company of a priest who, upon meeting me, said the following: “A Slavic beauty! You can’t tell she has any Jewish blood at all. You must be so proud.” Truly, a blast from the past.
(Incidentally, my grandmother is so old now, she looks pretty much like any other really old person. But when she was younger, my grandmother — the most Slavic member of our family — had olive skin, dark eyes and curly black hair.)
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4. This last story isn’t something that happened to me, but something I heard from my grandparents. In the early 1950’s, the authorities began a new “Purge”, this one stemming from an accusation that there was a conspiracy of Jewish doctors to poison members of the Politburo. Eventually, it evolved into rumors of a plot that involved all Jewish intellectuals, who were supposedly plotting to hurt various Gentiles in various ways — you know, the typical blood libel stuff, only on a much larger scale. People were arrested and tortured, and by 1953, it seemed certain that all Jews would be deported to the GULAGs. One night in the winter of 1953, a group of neighbors knocked on my grandparents’ door. They wanted to try on my grandparents’ shoes and clothes, and to make an inventory of their valuables. “You Jews are getting shipped east any day now,” they said, “and we know you greedy bastards keep boatloads of stuff under your beds, so we want to decide right now who gets what, so we’ll not have any stealing or bickering after they take you away.” Reportedly, my grandmother replied as follows: “The day they come to take us away, I’ll douse everything in this room with kerosene and set it on fire. I’ll burn down this whole building, count on that. So worry not which one of you will take our silverware. Worry which one of you will have a pot to piss in! Now fuck off.” The Purge ended before gaining momentum, when Joseph Stalin died in 1953.
Those are amazing (and horrifying) stories, Redisca. Thank you for posting them.
If you go to UrbanDictionary dot com and look up “Jew” or “Jewish” you’ll find hundreds of anti-semitic ‘definitions’ and variations on racist anti-semitic themes. You can ‘vote’ on them, thumbs up or thumbs down. If more caring people would vote them down, it would go a long way to show lack of support for such terrible ideas.
I’m going to break your rules for a bit. I just wanted to thank you for doing this. It means a lot to me.
While we’re off-topic – the crooked nails are called corrugated nails.
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