attackfish | On the Geography of Pain, and Good God, Could the Title of this Post be more Pompous?

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On the Geography of Pain, and Good God, Could the Title of this Post be more Pompous?

There are two ways I wanted to start this essay, and both of them sounded like such little things. Which is the point, I guess. This essay is about the little things that add up, and how deeply unhappy I am living in the South, and why I am out of here like a shot as soon as I am able, in spite of the fact that the family I dearly love is here.

I grew up in California, and it wasn’t until I was twelve that I even heard the word “Kike”. The girl who called me that would end up spray painting it across another girl’s house when they were in high school. There was no question that her feelings and her prejudices were not shared by anybody else. The school bus on Tuesdays dropped a load of kids off at the orthodontist’s office, and on Wednesdays, dropped another load off at the Synagogue for Hebrew school. There were always plenty of Jewish kids around. It was something that just was. In California, I was discriminated against, and very badly, because of my disability, but my Judaism, my Jewishness, was never even something to comment on. It never made me feel afraid, or under attack, and I thought about it when and how I wanted to, the weight of history seeming to be light on my shoulders.

Then I moved to New Mexico, where all of a sudden, nobody wanted to chase me out because of my disability. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost like paradise. Except that in paradise, there wouldn’t have been swastikas everywhere. I’m not talking about the nice friendly ones on the city’s pre WWII architecture, or in Indian restaurants. I’m talking about the ugly, black Nazi swastikas drawn in sharpie on the backpacks of nice white Christian kids, or between the pages of my high school textbooks. The year before I moved, Elie Wiesel came to speak at my school, and the night before he came, students broke in and spray painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs all over the school. Special care was taken to make sure that the lockers of every Jewish student were particularly well adorned.

So yeah, that wasn’t a whole lot of fun. And now I’ve moved again, to Alabama, and I haven’t heard the word “Kike” or seen a swastika outside of a documentary since I got here. It should be really great, shouldn’t it? I should feel really safe.

I don’t, which I’m sure surprises none of you, since I’m writing this essay. This spring, when I was trying to decide whether I was going to try to teach the Passover story myself, or let my students watch “The Prince of Egypt”, I was at the grocery store, buying the things for Seder dinner. And I got a Passover card for my mom. The cashier took the card, looked at it, and with a really big, sweet smile, asked if I was holding a Christian Seder. I smiled back and told her I was holding a just plain Jewish Seder. It took me a while to figure out why I was so bothered by this, or why it stuck with me. There have been a lot of little things like that since I moved here.

(I hate Christian Seders anyway. I hate that I’m supposed to be flattered that someone wants to get to know my culture better by celebrating our holidays without a single Jewish person around, and oh it was so authentic, we sung all the right prayers. You know what, don’t sing my people’s prayers if you aren’t singing them to our God.)

In Huntsville, where I live, and where my father and brother and sister grew up, there are dozens of buildings and landmarks scattered all over named after Wernher von Braun. It’s rocket city, and he’s a hero. But I can’t help but think every time I drive past something with his name on it that the skills he used to help the Americans into space were the ones he learned building V2 rockets for the Nazis, using Jewish slave labor. The city I live in honors a member of the Nazi party who participated enthusiastically in the Holocaust and the murder of millions, so long as he could play with his bombs and wring out every drop of usefulness out of my people before they went to their deaths. And no one talks about it. No one acknowledges it happened.

I’m starting to understand in this small way at least, what it must be like to be black in the South, where every monument and city park is named after someone who made their wealth from the bodies of black people, or fought to uphold slavery, or killed blacks for voting, or fought to keep black kids from going to school with white kids, where the suffering of black people is celebrated in a thousand little ways. And where you know if you say anything about it, you’re told to stop making a big deal about it. It’s such a little thing, and anyway, it’s history. I used to get angry when I would hear that there was say, a state park named after the founder of the KKK, but I didn’t realize the raw, sickening pain it brought until it was against my people. And I have only gotten the smallest taste of it.

And already I’m sick of living here, and would rather go back to New Mexico and the swastikas, because here, instead, it’s okay to be Jewish, but you know, don’t say a word against a man who helped kill millions, and really, everybody would feel more comfortable if you were just appropriating Jewish culture, instead of being a part of it. And it’s all these stupid little things that don’t stop.

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Thank you for writing this. It's really the little things that matter.

I've never lived in the South, but my parents have, and I've driven through it on a road trip. But when I tell people that I wouldn't feel safe telling people I was Jewish while driving through the South, sometimes they look at me and are like, "Really? Even today?" Yes, even today.

(PS, you might want to know, you wrote Jewish Sedan instead of Jewish Seder in the supermarket paragraph.)

Don't get me wrong, I don't feel physically unsafe, the way I did in New Mexico, but I keep getting the feeling that everybody I talk to would be a whole lot happier if I weren't Jewish.

*facepalm* Oops. I have a Japanese sedan, affectionately named Shlomo, does that count?

No, I understood. But the idea of "I'm Jewish" not being ok with everybody in the US, and different degrees of not ok. The whole idea is sometimes foreign to people who grew up in liberal cities. (I drove through a large chunk of the South on my roadtrip, (including areas that I probably shouldn't call the South but do because I'm a mid-Atlantic east coaster), so I ranged through varying degrees of uncomfortable.)

Where on the mid Atlantic? Mom's from Philly, and she's starting to make halfway incoherent jibbering about getting her Yankee Jewish but out of here.

I'm just outside DC currently. I grew up outside NYC and outside DC, pretty much half and half. DC has a huge Jewish population, plus I think it's a really great place for young adults. I would say the weather isn't great but you've been living in Alabama, so nevermind.

(I've been to a lot of different cities lately, and I tend to look at them with an eye to, do I want to live here? So if you're interested, I could give you a breakdown of various places. But I don't want to talk your ear off...in written form.)

I've got plans to move to northern Colorado as soon as I have my teaching degree, which I'm really happy about. I miss the West too much.

Colorado has mountains which is awesome...and that's pretty much all I know about it. Good luck in your future move!

Thanks! I hope you settle somewhere you like.

I can only imagine how very anxious this makes you, how disturbing it is.

As you already have being female against you, and dealing with (other)chronic pain(s, this is too heavy.

Alabama is like way too many places here these days.

Love, C.

And that's aside from the fact that as soon as I moved I went back in the closet. Mom and I have already been plotting our escape.

I've had to deal with a lot of Christian seders and I finally figured out how to explain it to them in a way that they got why I found it noxious.

"Would you like to learn some of my family's traditions?" They all nod eagerly.

"We leave the door open the entire night, because of blood libels. You see, Jewish people were persecuted on Passover, so we leave the door open to prove we had nothing to hide. And also, so we could look out and make sure no one was planting a body in front of our home. In Spain, many Jews forced to convert to Christianity would risk torture and execution to keep a tiny part of it, so they would leave cards on the table, so that any Christian servants would think they were just playing games. In the Holocaust, Jews starved to death before eating leaven bread. Would you like to include those traditions?"

Usually, that shuts them up.

*slow clap*

One of my best friends has cousins and grandparents who still believe in the blood libel. She made sure to joke with me on the phone where they could hear it about having real Christian baby blood this time, not that imitation Buddhist baby blood again. She ate Seder dinner at my house every year we were in New Mexico.

Wonderful of your friend to be so sensitive and to end the cycle of misinformation.

What I don't get is why they don't just join a Jewish family for Passover? Most Jewish communities are pretty welcoming and happy to host people. I've hosted many families with my parents, including a Catholic priest, Baptist members of the United States Army, a Palestinian Muslim couple who needed a place to stay. No one has a problem, as long as they're respectful.

I almost choked when one neighbor informed me she's making a traditional Passover meal of pork roast, crescent rolls and lobster. I don't care what you serve when you steal my culture, and I know many Jews do eat those foods, but those aren't traditional foods of Passover. When i asked her if she planned to get bitter herbs, salt water, and charoset, she had no idea what I was talking about.

Yeah, lovely seder.

There was a lot about her family situation that was really really ugly and abusive that I don't feel comfortable talking about, but let's just say it was a given that she was never going to get through to them, and the best she could do was try to make they feel as stupid about it as possible. Plus we were really morbid fifteen year olds.

Seriously. Here in Huntsville, it's understandable, as the Jewish population is realllllly small. Less than 750 Jewish people out of a population of about 410,000, but still! The temple has never once been reproached by a church curious about Passover, much less any of the families.

PORK AND LOBSTER? FLUFFY CRESCENT ROLLS? TRADITIONAL? HULK SMASH!

Though, I do get the feeling somebody may have played a prank on them, which makes me giggle a little.

I will never understand what the big deal is about being Jewish. Maybe I'm just clueless, but I just don't get what people's problem is, or problems. So people are Jewish, big deal. I don't get it. And I guess I'm happy because I don't and hope that I never do.

I'm going to NMSU currently and I have been fortunate enough not to see it. Then again, if it's not staring me in the face I don't really notice things. I am hispanic and not blind to what people think about my people, or as a woman, or as a Christian, what people who claim to be Christian do in the name of God. So when someone looks at my last name or my first, which sounds and looks middle eastern, and gets that look in the face, I'm fortunate enough not to notice.

I'm so sorry this has happened to you. I wish that we, as a country, would stop worrying about all this PC bs, and start talking about the issue full out. We can't just keep pretending that if we don't openly offend anyone, then everything's okay. It's not, and pretending it is is ignoring that big, huge pink elephant in the room.

There was a teacher in Ohio, I think it was Ohio, that taught this wonderful class on bigotry, racism and sexism and talked very frankly about these real issues. One white student complained, and they shut down the class. Not even a week later they fired him.

Sigh.

There have been essays and books, and all kinds of answers to that question, but I think it boils down to us being the only non-Christians European Catholics and later Protestants interacted with regularly within Christian controlled areas. Thus we were the only really different ones.

I think it's more of an Albuquerque white kid thing than one common to the state as a whole. Maybe throw in Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

That's the thing, there's politically correct so as not to be a raging asshole, and there's politically correct to cater to the privileged groups. The former is good. The latter is just one more method of oppression.

Amen to that. Sigh, I hate, hate. I just with people would stop and think before letting things that were taught to them take over their rational minds. It's drives me crazy.

BTW, I'm going to do a documentary on that man to expose the ugly, ugly truth, that and about bigotry. Let's rip these secrets wide open, take them from the shadows and onto the light.

I would be excited to see it.

Heh, if you don't stop showing me the wrongs of the world I'm going to consider you my muse for my documentaries. :-P

Fate worse than death, I'm sure.

indeed. :-P

It has finally come to that I can never think of moving to US. I just hear so many bad things from there.

If someone tells me that they are jewish, I react to it the smae way if they tell me they are catholic, orthodox or muslim, i.e. "Oh, okay. Whats your favourite movie?". Well, thats because huge majority of Finns are lutherians or atheists, so it only surprises me a little.

But seriously, not nice and I am so sorry that you have had to face this.

I remember when I was with my friend in Budapest and she wanted to go to see a catholic sermon (or orthodox I am not quite sure) but I felt so uneasy that I managed to get her leave. I am not comfortable being part of religious ceremonies that aren't of my faith, I always feel like I am insulting them. I would need an explicit invite, and even then I would be unsure and uncomfortable.

One of my other friends is pagan and she spent Midsummers eve at our cottage, and when she said she wanted to do some rituals and preferably alone, I abliged and didn't look at her and didn't listen. She wanted to practice her faith alone and I wasn't insulted to not be part of it.

Sorry about the rambling.

*hugs*

The majority of people in the US react the same way you do, at least outside of the South, where they just really don't know what to do with you. There's always that small group of people that ruins it. And the thing is, I hear Switzerland, Spain, and Austria especially right now are not pleasant places to be Jewish, so it is what it is.

I spent a lot of time in Catholic ceremonies as a kid, because my next door neighbor and best friend went to Catholic school, and her mother babysat me a lot, so if the kids were supposed to do any kind of performance, I got taken with to watch my friend. It was always just a little uncomfortable. The thing is, I would never contemplate holding a Jewish "Catholic" mass for kicks, so why to people feel it's okay to do that with Judaism, or Paganism, or Hinduism, or assorted American Indian religions, or... No.

God for you giving your friend privacy! if I'm with someone who isn't Jewish when it's time to do something Jewish, I'm always afraid it's going to turn into show and tell, when I just want to be alone with my faith.

I did tell ehr to go behind the shed so she would have absolute privacy and I wouldn't even accidentally see anything.

I haven't heard anything special about those countries, but Hungary has been quite alarming. And the romani situation has come up more at least for me.

Seriously, I feel uncomfortable whenever I have to go to church and there is a communal prayer, I can't imagine what it would be like anywhere else!

Yeah. I was actually quite happy that she didn't invite me to it, as it is not my faith and I wanted to give her faith my respect. Watchig it and being part of it if I didn't belive in it? Hell no.

I get extremely uncomfortable when I'm at someone's house and they want to pray over dinner, much less anything more in depth than that. I grew up seeing religion as a very private matter. You don't force it down someone else's throat, and you don't try to butt your way in.

*Shudders at the Romani situation* Bigotry against them seems to be remarkably durable and socially acceptable.

:( I'm so sorry.

Christian Seders... what? WHAT? This is a thing? How do they even exist? Why?

Evangelical Christians who think they own my culture? Well, since the last supper was a Seder, we want to celebrate it like Jesus did! I guess.

That's another thing I don't understand. Don't anti-Semites realize Jesus was a Jewish man, and a liberal one at that? And that all his disciples were Jewish? How does the fact that other Jews killed him erase that? If anything they should be hating on Italians or something. Cognitive dissonance, racists haz it.

Edited 2013-07-31 11:37 (UTC)

It depends on which group of antisemites you mean. Traditional intellectual Christian antisemitism claims that Jews were not evil and sinful until the death of Jesus, whereupon God cursed us to suffer for his death. Jesus might have been born to Jews, but he wasn't a Jew, so the logic goes, because he purified the Jewish faith. the Jewish faith is only wrong and bad because post Jesus Judaism refuses to accept the obvious truth of Jesus. And since Jews and Judaism were right there when Jesus was preaching, and since many Jews of that time did convert, Jews who remain Jewish are somehow more perverse than any other non Christian faith.

Medieval antisemitism was based primarily in ignorance. How many people really knew Jesus was Jewish given the lack of educational opportunities? Jews were different, and therefore an easy target for blame when things went wrong. This was ramped up in times of great social pressure, such as the Plague, and also during the Crusades, when many soldiers wondered why they were traveling to the Holy Land to kill infidels when there were so many Jewish infidels close to home.

Also, Jews were restricted by the Church and by various secular authorities to a limited number of professions, most prominently, money lending. Nobody likes the person making them pay back their debts. Many kings found it useful to whip up antisemitic fervor when their debts came due to keep their creditors from being able to exact payment. Also, in Poland, the king made Jewish people his tax collectors, a situation which persisted for several hundred years. Unsurprisingly, Poland was a hotbed of antisemitism well into the modern age. Jewish people are still prominently associated with banks and banking in people's minds, and several Occupy groups had to deal with some nasty liberal antisemitism because of this.

Post Reconquista Spanish antisemitism said that it wasn't being Jewish that was the problem, as much as it was not being Catholic. After the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to create a religious national unity in Spain under Catholicism, in contrast to Spain under Muslim rule. This was difficult, because under Muslim rule, Jews, non-Catholic Christians, and of course Muslims had flourished, and therefore, there were a whole lot of them. They had to be gotten rid of in a fairly drastic fashion. Further, since the justification for the rule of Catholic monarchs was that they were divinely granted power by a Catholic God, and the church and state were irrevocably linked, non-Catholics were seen as potential traitors, prone to infidelity to their country, infidels. This prejudice traveled to the Americas, where many Spanish Jews fled to escape the long reach of the Inquisition. As the Inquisition spred into each new Spanish possession in the Americas, Spanish Jews traveled to stay ahead of it. Many of them settled in modern day New Mexico, and a substantial percentage of the Latin@ population of New Mexico is of Sephardi Jewish descent.

scroll down for the rest.

Modern antisemitism tends to several different strains. There's the people who follow the traditional Christian antisemitism I described first, and then three other forms. The first two are racialized antisemitism, the antisemitism of the early 20th century Nazi party, and the antisemitism of modern neo-Nazi groups. Racialized antisemitism, the idea that Jewish perfidy is in the blood, and cannot be shed by conversion, or being raised in a gentile house, or whatever, is hard to square with being Christian and Jesus being of Jewish birth, and the two forms of racialized antisemitism both have a different way of dealing with this.

Classic Nazism actually promoted atheism and Germanic paganism, hoping to root out this Jewish deception of Christianity. Hitler himself was an atheist, and many of his inner circle held Germanic pagan or mystical beliefs. They worked to unravel the ties of the German people to Christianity, and wean them away from it.

Modern neo-Nazis however are often virulently Christian. They often follow Christian Identity beliefs, which along with claiming the non-whites are evil for biblical reasons, (usually that non-whites are the descendents of Cain, or that Adam and Eve weren't the first people, but instead the first white people, and non-whites were "the beasts of the field". Some Christian Identity folks hold with both, saying that non-white non-Jews are of the inferior "beasts of the field" stock, whereas Jews are descended from Cain, who was the child of Eve and Satan as the serpent. Thus while other races are simply animals and inferior to whites, Jews are particularly evil, and in league with Satan. They also believe the Flood was not global, but instead a localized punishment in ancient Israel, to kill off white people who had been mixing with other races. To deal with the whole "Jesus was a Jew" thing, they believe in so-called British Israelism, the belief that white people are descended from the tribes of Israel, and that after Jesus, the diaspora had dispersed them across Europe. Meanwhile, the children of Cain (or a small group of Turkish "beasts of the field", or whichever racial identity a particular CI sect ascribes to the Jews) usurped the title of the people of Israel and tricked the world into thinking that we were the Hebrews of the bible. Because of this thinking, many CI adherents try to "reclaim" Jewish practices like Passover, which they believe that the false Hebrews like me sully, which adds another level to my distaste for Christian Seders.

The most common form of modern antisemitic hate by far is a nonracialized antisemitism. It is the form that really doesn't need to make any logical sense. It's the "Jews are weird, and not like me, and my parents hated them, and my grandparents hated them, and maybe they kill Christian babies to make their matzo or Passsover wine or something, and, you know what, they just make me uncomfortable." They don't stop to consider that Jesus was Jewish. This isn't a belief they question. It's mostly unconscious.

Edited 2013-07-31 14:44 (UTC)

*jaw drops* Oh my goodness, and I thought I'd already seen the pits of irrationality people can sink to. The wild beliefs required to sustain hatred are really something else. I agree with you the so-called reasons are just a rickety structure designed to uphold mostly subconscious hatred. I can't believe how much you know about the hatred of your people (the distinction between religious and racialized antisemitism was never clear in my mind before), but I guess it was necessary.

Many of them settled in modern day New Mexico, and a substantial percentage of the Latin@ population of New Mexico is of Sephardi Jewish descent.

I did not know this! Fascinating. But then again this is the same NM with all the swastikas, so sadface.

The so-called reasons are just a rickety structure designed to uphold mostly subconscious hatred.

Exactly. And trying to make them make sense from the outside is doomed to failure. They don't make sense, and they're only sustained by their adherents' wish to justify their prejudiced feelings.

I'm a polisci major and sociology/criminology minor, and once upon a time, I thought I wanted to work for the Southern Poverty Law center. Now there's one thing UNM's polisci and sociology/criminology departments do really really well, and that's social movements and race relations, because a lot of our professors, funnily enough got their starts in the Chican@ and American Indian rights movements.

It's actually really kind of cool to talk to people about how they always ate bitter herbs and honey apples for Easter, but didn't know it was for Passover, or how their grandmother wouldn't let them eat pork, because it would make them sick, but they've tried it and never had a problem with it. You have no idea how many times I've had a guest over at my house for Passover and have them exclaim that it's so familiar. It makes it a really strange place to be Jewish, on one side, there are a whole lot of anitsemites, on the other hand, you have this tremendous outpouring of crypto-Jewish cultural rediscovery.

Antisemitism in New Mexico is in my experience really really white. And given that a whole lot of Latin@s in New Mexico know about and are proud of their crypto-Jewish roots, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a covert way to be anti-Latin@, which is a bad thing to be in a state where Latin@s are the majority.

That sounds like literary gold right there, hidden histor and cultural/spiritual exploration with a parallel historical sequence following the ancestors who fled from Iberia and immigrated in search of safety, opportunity, or both. Well maybe not literal gold, maybe a few rabbis and Jewish grandmothers will buy a few dozen to a few hundred copies and that's it. But still, it's such cool material. It ought to move a few more copies if it's marketed as YA or genre, maybe with crossover appeal to Hispanic readers esp. with a good Spanish translation. Or alternately a really trashy one with heaving breasts on the cover.

Why aren't you interested in working for the SPLC anymore? They seem to do good work, though working for a nonprofit... yeah (http://workingatanonprofit.tumblr.com/).

Or alternately a really trashy one with heaving breasts on the cover.

*giggles*

It would be a hell of a research project. But if I wanted to go that way, I would definitely also tell the story of why the Inquisition didn't become powerful that far north. It involves a married couple of serial killing American Indian servants, and a priest who became convinced it was witchcraft, and a massive Inquisitional investigation that resulted in four hangings. The married pair of poisoners, a shaman who as best I can tell was absolutely nuts from taking too many hallucinogens, and the priest who started it all, mostly for being too stupid for words. After that, the governor just about kicked the Inquisition out, and there never was another Inquisitional investigation.

I became extremely depressed in college, and part of what pulled me out of it was realizing that my previous career path was exposing me to way too much human darkness. I ended up becoming really fascinated by small children, so I'm going back to school for early childhood ed, and becoming a teacher.

It involves a married couple of serial killing American Indian servants, and a priest who became convinced it was witchcraft . . . After that, the governor just about kicked the Inquisition out, and there never was another Inquisitional investigation.

o_O MIND. OFFICIALLY. BLOWN. You know it's true, too, because there's no way anyone can make this shit up.

And good thinking--working with kids definitely makes for a far better quality of life than researching hate groups. Given demographic trends (mucho Latino kiddos!) I'm speculating that becoming fluent in Spanish would be a good investment, especially in the Southwest and West Coast. I mean, even in D.C. years ago when I was in law school, a lot of the really interesting volunteer opportunities listed Spanish skill as a requisite or preference, and I remember thinking I should start learning Spanish if I was going to stay in the States. I came back to Korea, though, so now I'm taking Chinese. :) Are you also interested in special education?

It's definitely one of those stories. It's like the noodle incident of New Mexico history.

I am looking into going into special ed, seeing as I have so much experience from the other side of it, and understand up close and personally many of the kinds of support kids in that position need. I was also looking into language and speech development, since I'm good with languages. I'm a bit ashamed with myself for never learning Spanish. I lived in New Mexico for ten years, for crying out loud, but I'm sure I could pick it up.

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On the Geography of Pain, and Good God, Could the Title of this Post be more Pompous?

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