An ode to antisemitism

Antisemitism is a shapeshifter. History has taught us that. It is visionary, creative, trailblazing, brilliant and clever. It is manipulative, calculating, cunning, and slick. It is furtive, picking up old tropes with generational presence and gravitas and repackaging, reprogramming them to operate in the twenty-first century.
The narrative goes: The Jews’s right to their homeland is now racist, part of the evil of colonialism. Holocaust inversion, boycotts. A fight cloaked in social justice. Wait? What? Jews are for social justice. We marched with MLK; we flocked to South Africa to fight Apartheid, and we stood on the streets with Black Lives Matter. We are the professors in gender studies. Pick a side, they tell us. Zionism is now on the wrong side. Pick a side! You cannot be for social justice if you believe in the right for Israel to exist.

Antisemitism is, as Irish author Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, “a light sleeper.” It has crept up on us while we slept. Years and years of increasing statistics of rising hate and antisemitic incidents, news of foreign funding pumped into our universities, backing tenured professors, and mirky Antisemitic language by our politicians (Wait! Did she say that? In America?) While we slept, while we sat back and watched. Sent articles on WhatsApp to our friends and families and said, “Can you believe that?” Debated – argued – we love to do that. Is antisemitism the same as anti-Zionism? Who is more antisemitic, the extreme left or the right? Who is more dangerous? Who should we vote for? We took off our kippahs in public; we shut our mouths. We assimilated. Is assimilation antisemitism if we do it because we have to?

What about the children? How can we talk to our children if we don’t even understand what is happening? Our children are heading off to college campuses and hostile high schools —Ground Zero, left to battle words and sometimes violence with no education. Our sheltered Jewish children are not taught about antisemitism in school. Why should they understand it? These children will be called colonialists, racists, and white supremacists.

And the workforce, cryptic emails from offices and departments we had never heard of. Oversight committees, reeducation, keep your opinions to yourself. It reminds me of the dementors in Harry Potter- shapeless, monstrous, sucking out our souls. We are instructed on how to speak, how to teach, and how to act. Everything must be equal. But what is equality? Can we live in a totalitarian society without our government being totalitarian?

Jews, we are lost. We have lost our footing. All of us. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, unaffiliated, intermarried or not. While we slept, we were being defined. Now, we are told how to think about our religion, history, and America, our country.
We always thought we were Americans. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” You took us in. A little late, but you did. Broken and destitute, we did not speak the language or understand the culture, but oh, America! You gave us hope; you gave us pride. America, what a glorious nation. We loved it all —opportunities, freedom, and, of course, baseball. Oh, the sights and sounds of Dodger Stadium! Only in this glorious country could my father, a Bergen-Belsen survivor, wearing a button-down shirt on a hot Los Angeles day, sit next to me, his little girl, with a bag of peanuts in his hands, passionately rooting for the Dodgers to win.

In our Jewish schools, we flew the American flag and proudly put our hands on our hearts to say the Pledge of Allegiance. We are Children of the ’80s and ’90s. None of us felt conflicted. We stood proud. Flag waving, saluting the troops, fourth of July fireworks proud Americans. But what does it mean to be American today? Fellow Americans, what does Antisemitism tell us about ourselves? Why should we care? Questions with no answers. We know the soundbites. Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. Antisemitism starts with the Jews but never ends with the Jews, Elie Wiesel reminds us. It is a social and cultural disease, a psychosis. How does it end? How does psychosis end?