Flash: People Hate the Jews
I’ve got no real experience with anti-Semitism. Like every other Jew, I know that it exists and that it has a violent force in the history of my community. It’s just that I’ve never really experienced it personally. Once upon a time, my father was pulling out of a parking lot, and another driver didn’t like his moves. He rolled down his window and snarled that we were Jews. I was too young to understand the larger context, but the bile in his language was unmistakable. He spit out the word like a wad of phlegm.
But that’s about my only memory. I grew up in a suburb that was overwhelmingly Jewish, a postwar enclave just outside of Detroit. The schools were great, the houses were new, and the infrastructure of Jewish life was rapidly unfolding. Synagogues, butcher shops, bakeries—the works. All of us went to neighborhood public schools where we were taught by women who were exactly like our mothers. In my second-grade class, there was exactly one gentile. For a couple of years, she attended school on the High Holidays until they finally shut down for those celebrations and Passover. One little kid didn’t make for a class.
All of this went on forever. High school was a little more diverse, but there were 5,000 Jewish undergraduates at the University of Michigan. It would have been weird to bump up against someone who hated me, at least for the reason that I was a dirty Jew. Then, as now, I had occasional encounters with gentiles, but they fell into the groove of warm curiosity. Maybe even more than warm. For some people, at least, I was an adorable exotic. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I say funny (?!), unexpected, irreverent things and push some of the limits in the nicest possible way. There’s no calculation here. As God says in the Book of Exodus, I am who I am.
But those days are rapidly fading. Every Jew I know is thinking about identity, and how precisely to calibrate the extent of public display. One powerful voice like Tucker Carlson would be enough to change the cultural atmosphere, but there are many voices like his on both the right and the left. Just to be fair, they are more numerous on the right and they carry the taint of barely suppressed violence. It’s that torch parade in the night in Charlottesville. When a column of thugs chant “the Jews shall not replace us,” it’s hard to suppress the memory of goose-stepping Hitlerites and piles of books being burned in the streets.
A dear friend of mine who is also a rabbi says that she can feel it acutely, as if the wind has suddenly shifted direction. We both grew up in a golden America where the prevailing ethos was exquisite sensitivity, a public acknowledgment of Jewish suffering, and admiration for the State of Israel. I can tell you from experience that none of those things apply any more. Last week, I took a body blow for the State of Israel and a close-in scalpel slash of genteel anti-Semitism, both in settings where I previously felt loved. Deeply loved. Unconditionally loved. They were not, of course, the same exact thing. A critique of the State of Israel is one thing (I agreed with the particulars); loathing for the Jews is another entirely.
My point is that a door has opened and we are now in a world of hostile sentiment. We will need personal confidence, public courage, a new effort to build alliances, and untiring outreach. A whole century of detox will need to be repeated as we reconstruct the public perception of Jews and Judaism in America. It begins with the acknowledgment that everything has changed. Clearly, we’re not in Kansas anymore.