Part I: You’re Not Jewish. You Think Anti-Semitism Doesn’t Affect You?

Think again. They’re coming for you next.

This piece unfolded (for this writer) in sessions. I wanted to abandon it but didn’t. Then I realize it was two parts: This, Part I, lays out the problem, Part II offers some solutions.

Initially, I had no intention of writing about antisemitism, nor pondering whether to hyphenate and/or capitalize the word (I bow to the Anti-Defamation League on both issues). This is what happened.

Back from Thanksgiving holiday in the U. S. I haven’t published anything for two weeks and am more tuned into family than current events. I boot up my laptop and stumble on a headline in the New York Times, followed by a pull-quote. Perhaps you saw it, too, but just in case…

Jewish Allies Call Trump’s Dinner With Antisemites a Breaking Point

Supporters who looked past the former president’s admirers in bigoted corners of the far right, and his own use of antisemitic tropes, now are drawing a line. “He legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” says one. “And this scares me.”

My first thought is, THIS scares you? It’s about time.

To one born in 1943, on the eve of prosperity — the country’s and my family’s — Jewish and Republican were once like challah and mayonnaise.

That’s changed, of course. Twenty-four percent of Jews voted for Trump in 2016, including a few of my closest relatives. Don’t ask.

My second thought is, THIS is beyond scary. I need to write something.

Antisemites frightened me. I first encountered them as a kid in Staten Island, the least Jewish borough of New York City.*

*Of the 1.1 million Jewish residents in New York City today, only 32,000 in Staten Island are lantzmen — Yiddish word for countrymen or cohorts.

The Little Jewish Girl

“John has the little Jewish girl over today,” my 12-year-old classmate’s mother says into the kitchen phone, thinking I can’t hear her or, just as likely, not caring if I do.

John and I are seated in the adjacent breakfast nook, at a chrome and red formica table. We are sipping hot chocolate after ice skating on the huge pond in his backyard. He is handsome in the Aryan way of All-American boys in the fifties. Imagine Steve Canyon as a boy.

John’s mother, also naturally blonde and blue-eyed, wears pearls and a perfect pageboy. She’s a grownup Breck girl. I eavesdrop, wondering what else she’ll say to her friend, who — I imagine — looks just like her. (To this day, I have the hearing of a dog; my childhood ears missed nothing.)

The little Jewish girl. As if I am a specimen or a stray — an object or a creature so foreign it has to be named. And she, of the Ruling Class, is keen to examine me.

Who can blame her? I am a curiosity, a brunette and the only Jewish student in her son’s private school. Perhaps she knows from the other mothers that the little Jewish girl is also the only child nauseated by the smell of everyone else’s favorite hot lunch: Shepherd’s Pie.

My mother is called in to see the principal who suggests that something must be “wrong” with me. (I’m Jewish?) Afterward, I become the only student who brings lunch from home.

I hasten to mention that the Staten Island Academy is the borough’s sole non-parochial private school. No praying, no crucifix on the classroom wall. And yet, since I started here in second grade, I’ve started every day starts in “Assembly” where my fellow students and I enthusiastically belt out multiple choruses of Onward Christian Soldiers, a Catholic hymn.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus on before.

Like other children whose grandparents feared pogroms back in their native Russia, even at eight, I know not to utter the words Christ or Jesus. Even cross feels wrong.

But I don’t want to appear even more alien, so for the next five years from 1951 to 1956, I sing the hymn along with my classmates. Each time Jesus or Christ recurs, I mouth the forbidden words instead of saying them out loud.

Eventually, my parents allow me to transfer to public schools. I’m no longer the only Jewish kid. But many of my fellow students, then predominantly Italian and Irish, hate Jews, too.

One of the tough Italian girls in my high school wears a black leather jacket and slicks back her in “DA,” so called for its V-shape, resembling a duck’s ass). She’s a “hood,” as greasers and bad girls are then called, right down to the taps on her shoes. At least I hear her coming.

“Dirty Jews!” she sneers and (literally) spits on the floor as she walks by. I pretend not to notice; inside, I quake. Transfering to public school is like changing seats in the Titanic.

I leave Staten Island in 1961 but not antisemitism. In Baldwinsville, New York, where I student-teach as part of my education at Syracuse University, a seven-year-old boy asks if I have horns.

I learn to look over my shoulder.

Some 25 years later, in a high school guidance counselor’s office with my daughter who is applying to college, I hear myself ask about a school in the South, “But how do they feel about Jews there?”

The guidance counselor, Jewish and around my age, understands my question. Jen rolls her eyes. Growing up in Manhattan, she doesn’t see religion as an issue; she barely sees religion at all. This is the late 1980’s. Girls can be anything, go anywhere.

I still get a bit skittish if I think I’m the only Jew in the room.

Antisemitism Is Escalating

Last year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which tracks antisemitic behavior in the United States, counted 2,717 incidents in 2021 — on average, more than seven a day — a 34% increase over the previous year.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, and author of It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable and How We Can Stop It, notes in a New York Times article:

“The normalization of antisemitism is here.”

Of course, there are still pockets of civil, caring, responsible humans — no doubt, on both sides of the aisle. But there’s also this, documented in countless studies: Bad news, horror, and negativity travel faster and are more readily believed and spread than positive ideas and actions.

And lest we forget: Antisemitism is often the gateway drug for bigots. It has always been easy to hate Jews. Sixty years after my high school graduation, little Jewish girls and boys in K-12 schools are subjected to an unprecedented 106% percent rise in antisemetic incidents.

I breaks my heart to watch this video of Jewish teens in Los Angeles, filmed in the wake of Kanye West’s string of antisemetic remarks. At least I didn’t see swastikas in my schools. At least I wasn’t subjected to hateful trolls on social media. Hopefully, what doesn’t kill them will make them stronger.

This is your problem, too…

Injustice begets injustice. No matter how you identify or affiliate — as a Republican, a Muslim, a person with a disability, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a senior, a person who grew up believing Jews have horns — you could be next.

In a recent MSN segment noting that the escalated violence against Jews threatens democracy, Rabbi Noah Farkas, President and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles explains:

“What might start with antisemitism, might end with misogyny to xenophobia, anti-Asian hate, anti-Black racism. White supremacy fuels all of it.”

Antisemitism threatens us all — not just you and me, our children and grandchildren, but the whole of humanity. Studying the centuries-old phenomenon and other atrocities, the ADL notes that hate builds from the bottom up in pyramid form. Unchecked everyday slurs and micro-agressions lead to out-and-out violence and murder, even genocide.

Source: Anti-defamation League

…and you can be part of the solution.

This past April, when PBS reporter William Bragham interviewed Jonathan Greenblatt for The News Hour, the head honcho of the ADL noted:

…we should keep in mind that antisemitic acts were going down in the United States for almost 15 years, and then ,in 2016, they started to move up. And we’re now at the point where we have nearly triple the number of incidents today that we did in 2015.

It is no coincidence that Donald Trump, now breaking bread with bigots, was elected President in 2016. But he is not the threat. With or without Trump, it can get worse — and not just for the Jews. Hate comes for everyone.

The xenophobic, hate-mongering radicalism of our time will not miraculously go away or morph into something better. History unfolds, it doesn’t just happen.

We humans have to nudge history in the right direction. By “we” I mean those of us who are hopeful and even-handed — who are willing to listen and to take just one small step to help affect change. Part II of this story will help you get started.

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