Tom Lehrer was right: “Everybody hates the Jews”
A casual conversation turned into a confrontation—and I wept to a song I was never meant to take seriously.
The air was thick with cigar smoke, the kind that lingers on your hands long after you leave. Perched on a barstool, I made small talk with a Black man in his forties, an IT professional, who’d struck up a conversation. It began with harmless flirtation—playful, ordinary, human.
Then he asked what I do.
I hesitated. I told him I am a scholar, a researcher. He pressed: What do you research?
I knew what might happen if I answered, but I couldn’t dodge forever without leaving. Finally, I admitted it: I study antisemitism.
The warmth drained instantly. His expression hardened. “So you’re racist,” he concluded. “You waste all your energy and resources talking about Jews instead of caring about Black people, who are actually oppressed.”
I tried to steady myself. “Wait,” I said. “I study critical race theory. I teach ethnic studies. I absolutely know Black people are oppressed.” I thought I was building a bridge, signaling solidarity.
He leaned in, sharper now: “Don’t you dare try to speak for Black people. You have no right. You don’t understand persecution.”
Something inside me broke. Astonished, I replied, “Jews have been murdered, too.”
“The Holocaust is nothing compared to slavery,” he retorted. “It doesn’t matter in the face of what happened to my people.”
I left quickly, fleeing into the night, and walked until my legs decided not to move. On the Atlanta Beltline I collapsed, hunched over, sobbing into my knees. A casual conversation in a smoky bar had become an accusation that left me mercilessly undone. I wept to a Tom Lehrer song I never meant to take seriously: “And everybody hates the Jews.” Then I texted my dad: “Why does everybody hate the Jews?”
Lehrer released these words in 1965 as part of his satirical piece “National Brotherhood Week.” The entire song mocked America’s shallow attempts at tolerance—where racism, antisemitism, and bigotry were papered over with a week of civic niceties. His point was that beneath the platitudes, the hatred remained. Jews, he sang, were despised across the spectrum—by liberals and conservatives, Catholics and Protestants, Blacks and whites. It was satire. But that night, curled on the Beltline, it didn’t feel funny. It felt prophetic.
I still remember that night—the sudden turn, my collapse of faith in humanity. What does it mean that studying antisemitism can be read not as a fight against oppression but as a betrayal of it? That even attempts at solidarity—to say yes, I see your suffering too—can be heard as appropriation, arrogance, theft?
In progressive spaces, I’ve seen these dynamics before: Jews asked to prove our virtue by apologizing, by disavowing, by putting our own history last. But this wasn’t an activist circle or a campus protest. It was an everyday encounter—a stranger, a moment that turned—recasting my life experience and my intergenerational trauma as racist harm.
I walked into that establishment hoping to get out of my house, to interact with people, to be regarded as a person. I walked out forced to accept that, for many, talking about antisemitism will never count as justice. To name Jewish experience with sympathy is to invite suspicion. To research our own survival is to risk being cast as complicit in others’ suffering.
And now, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that night feels less like an isolated personal collapse and more like a warning sign of something larger. Dr. Charles Asher Small, Executive Director at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), once said: history shows us that when antisemitism spikes, it is not only about Jews. Rome expelled its Jews as its power fractured. Spain drove them out on the eve of its decline. In Weimar Germany, Jews were scapegoated before the republic itself fell to pieces.
Lehrer’s satire was written in an America that congratulated itself on “brotherhood” while barely disguising its hatreds. My encounter in a smoky Atlanta bar, and now the political violence surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination, both expose the same truth: antisemitism signals more than prejudice. It signals instability, the unraveling of a larger order.
The smoke of that night still lingers. I left that bar in tears. But what broke me wasn’t the insult—it was the reminder that Jewish survival is still a story too many refuse to acknowledge, and that justice, in America, has lost its meaning. If spikes in antisemitism are the canary in the coal mine of empire, we would be foolish not to listen right now.
