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attackfishThere 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.
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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1/2
Date: 2013-07-31 02:43 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-07-31 02:44 pm (UTC)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.
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-01 11:37 pm (UTC)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.
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-02 12:06 am (UTC)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.
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-02 12:38 am (UTC)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/).
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-02 12:51 am (UTC)*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.
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-02 01:55 am (UTC)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?
Re: 2/2
Date: 2013-08-02 02:37 am (UTC)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.