It matters not which group is in the crosshairs, prejudice inevitably rests on the adjective “all.”
Currently Jews are targeted. In the wake of the deadly exchange of missiles between Israel and Hamas, synagogues have been vandalized in Phoenix and Chicago.
In Times Square, a man wearing a kippah, the distinctive head covering of Jewish men, was beaten unconscious in broad daylight. In the nearby Diamond District, where jewelry salesmen wear the distinctive black garb of ultra-Orthodox Jews, a woman was burned by fireworks thrown from the back of a pickup truck. And a Yiddish newspaper that covers the ultra-Orthodox community has received reports of Hasidic Jews being verbally abused in Monsey, New York.
Violent and abusive acts never make sense. But in this case, they make even less sense because American Jews’ responses to the 11-day battle between Israel and Hamas — an organization pledged to its destruction — have been anything but uniform.
For example, let’s look at the verbal abuse in Monsey.
Those upstate Jews are Satmar Hasidim, instantly recognizable by their black clothing, who are opposed to Israel. Their thinking was shaped long before the current wave of Middle Eastern violence, and is more fundamental: They believe a Jewish state can’t be established before the coming of the Messiah. Collectively, they are among the largest of Judaism’s fervently pious sects.
Many American Jews have protested Israel’s response to Hamas in recent weeks.
Jewish Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a resolution to end U.S. arms sales to Israel. Dozens of rabbinical and cantorial students signed a letter chastising Jews who don’t stand with Palestinian victims of the Israelis. J Street, a Washington, D.C., think tank, has long been a forceful Jewish voice for a peaceful solution to the Holy Land’s conflicts.
Yet I wouldn’t bet on those facts being able to overcome an age-old predilection to hold Jews collectively responsible whatever ails the world. Its roots run deep.
The Gospel of Mathew says that, having called for Jesus’ death, the Jews cried out: “His blood be upon us and on our children.” To me, it seems improbable that my distant ancestors would be bloodthirsty one minute and, the next minute, plead guilty and ask for their children to be punished. But for two millennia Christians have read that verse and considered Jews unworthy of living alongside decent people. And sometimes not even worthy of living.
My forebears were exiled from England by King Edward I, a ban that has never been formally revoked. Jews were locked up in medieval ghettos and massacred by Cossacks in 19th century Russia. When Napoleon freed the Jews of Rome’s ghetto, the Pope protested that “the dogs,” as he called them, “were running wild.”
In America, antisemitism was fueled by automobile magnate Henry Ford who published “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in a newspaper he also owned. Though a crude forgery, it described a Jewish plot aimed at world domination. During the Great Depression, Father Charles Coughlin preached hatred of Jews over network radio to millions of desperate listeners.
I graduated fifth in a high school class of 1,000, yet I thought applying to Northwestern University a waste of time. It had a quota on Jewish students. So did Ivy League colleges. Jobs for Jewish professors were rare except at public universities. So were admission privileges for Jewish doctors at most hospitals
Until a post-World War II developer said Jews were welcome to buy his Skokie properties, the suburbs were off limits to families like mine. Evanston’s first synagogue sneaked in thanks to non-Jews who pretended to be the buyers.
I can imagine it being tough for younger readers to process my childhood memories. They seem like a description of some other planet. That is because America has fulfilled the promise that drew my grandparents here: freedom from Old World hatreds and a better life for their descendants.
I’ve been a professor at several universities. St Olaf College hired me because the Lutheran school wanted to diversify its faculty. I explained Judaism to its radio station’s audience. My side job at the Tribune has been advising executives whose children get invited to a bar mitzvah: How should the kid dress? What’s an appropriate gift?
My family is wondrously de-ghettoized: It includes Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics, atheists, admirers of the Buddha, married gays, Spanish, Thai and Czech speakers.
I’d like to think that means antisemitism is on its deathbed. But it has a history of lying dormant, only to be reanimated in troubled times. Witness Germany in the Nazi era. And the current assaults on American Jews.
I don’t assume prejudice slumbers only in hooligans’ brains. Other minds — as we’ve long seen ― can house the dormant form.
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