I don't want to be a fascist, I'm not Aryan

[sovay]

In general I don't think that I have experienced a lot of anti-Semitism in my life. There was the famous time in high school when a student asked me if my family celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah and I started to give her a serious answer about my parents' concept of both-ways children before it turned out that she just hadn't wanted to sound racist by saying that she thought I was Jewish because of my nose (I got to tell her that the nose was from my father's Welsh-Irish Catholic side of the family) and the awkward time at Yale where I found myself being consulted as an authority on Judaism despite coming from a minimally observant family and having absolutely no ability to explain the decision-making process behind Israel's foreign and domestic policies (yes, technically I could apply for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, but I certainly don't have it now and anyway it wouldn't make me an automatic member of the Knesset) and the intermittent, unsurprising displeasure of encountering stereotypes in various media (never do things like a Nazi Assyriologist, E. Nesbit!). I've had slurs applied to me, of course, but never by anyone who had power over me or whose opinion I valued. I've never found swastikas drawn on my door. No one ever dropped by my office hours to see if I had horns.

And yet somewhere I seem to have picked up the idea that to talk about anti-Semitism as a Jew is somehow in bad taste. It is tacky. It is greedy. It is in some essential way false. It is taking attention away from people who are really marginalized and making the conversation all about my people and their special pleading. Seriously, why do Jews always need to make themselves out as the victims? There hasn't been a Holocaust for more than seventy years. The world said never again. You've had all the privilege ever since. Can't you let it go? But Israel! And so despite all the recent and blatant fuckery like the White House's soft-pedaled Holocaust denial (Deborah Lipstadt literally wrote the book on that) or the vandalization of the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in St. Louis (Linda Sarsour and Tarek El-Messidi have raised $115,000 and counting in repair money) or Sean Spicer scolding the Anne Frank Center for not being impressed by 45's quarter-assed admission that anti-Semitism is bad (the Anne Frank Center drilled him a new one), I realized that every time I post publicly about some manifestation of anti-Semitism in America, I am waiting to check my comments and find someone deploring me for characteristically calling out only Jewish causes and ignoring all the other, more pressing forms of racism in the world. I am waiting for friends to write me off and feel a little sorry that I turned out not to be capable of intersectional social justice after all. derspatchel listened to me and said, "You're afraid they're going to All Lives Matter you."

Which I think means that I have actually experienced quite a lot of anti-Semitism in my life. Just in a sort of sideways, impersonal, radioactive way, where nobody said any one thing and I still got sleeted through with this sense that being a responsible Jew in a majority non-Jewish society means behaving as though anti-Semitism is not a living problem or exists only in parenthesis of the many ways people can be horrible to one another. It's all right to agree if a non-Jew draws attention to it; it's letting the side down if you say something yourself. On no account suggest that anything is uniquely experienced by Jews. Nobody wants to hear that Chosen shtick. I am pretty sure this is pernicious bullshit. (Now that I write it out, it is pernicious bullshit that reminds me strikingly of the Obama-era figment of a post-racial America, where God forbid anyone should suggest that the presence of a Black man in our highest elected office was not in fact a magical panacea for ongoing centuries of institutional racism.) It's just pernicious bullshit that kicks up my blood pressure on a basis that is more frequent than it should be and I am annoyed that it's in my head. I don't even know that I can blame it on Tiny Wittgenstein. Real-life Wittgenstein went around Cambridge one night after the institution of the Nuremberg Laws apologizing to his colleagues for not having told them that he was Jewish (according to the Nazis, anyway: he had three Jewish grandparents, but since the non-Jewish one was his mother's mother, the rule of matrilineal descent put him out of the running as far as halakhah was concerned), but I've always had the sense that confused them more than anything else.

Nota bene: this post is not in any way informed by my experiences at the trans youth support rally last night. Everyone there was awesome. I started noticing the anxiety shortly after the election when swastikas started flying like wild blueberry muffins, but it took until a few days ago for the specific issue to articulate itself. I spent a couple of days wondering if I should put up a post at all or if that would only let me in for exactly the kind of criticism I've been afraid of—who died and left you a persecution complex? I finally decided that my friendlist is not composed of terrible human beings.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

It's likely that when one belongs to a victimized group, cause to complain arises so frequently that one starts to worry about sounding as though one is overstating things? (Meanwhile abusers likely encourage this feeling, or at least take advantage of it.)

Probably also true of people with chronic illnesses.

[sovay]

It's likely that when one belongs to a victimized group, cause to complain arises so frequently that one starts to worry about sounding as though one is overstating things?

I really think the country I live in—and many other countries, I suspect—want to believe that progress is just as good as a solution. We elected a Black president? Racism is over! The gender pay gap is down to eighty cents on the dollar? An end to misogyny! We have high-profile trans actors? Marriage defined more inclusively than one cis man and one cis woman? Celebrities revealing themselves as non-straight? You can put down the pride flags now, the need for gay liberation is past. (And they probably would say "gay liberation," even though I believe that now refers to a specific historical movement rather than the contemporary front of queer/GLBTQIA rights.) It is breaching the social contract to disturb this fiction, just as it is ruder to call someone a racist than it is to express a racist sentiment. Are there university quotas on Jewish students? Can a golf club legally refuse you membership? No? Then anti-Semitism isn't a thing anymore! I'm sure it all goes back to privilege and resentment and zero-sum games, the conviction that a marginalized group cannot gain rights without the dominant group losing them in equal measure; it's what we saw win the election. If the problem is solved, then no further ground needs to be ceded, so let's agree that everyone is satisfied and we live in the best of all possible worlds. If you persist in pointing out that all these forms of marginalization and oppression still exist (plus a few not covered by this paragraph), then not only are you troubling the dominant group's self-image of magnanimity and tolerance in having made the concessions that they have, you are triggering their fear that they'll have to accommodate even more, which is just terribly demanding and unreasonable. This is how we get male audiences interpreting movies whose gender ratio is two-thirds in favor of men as wall-to-wall-ladies, because anything more than one woman with a speaking part is a feminist takeover. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I agree with your theory that repeated complaints become unbelievable to people who never wanted to admit the persistence of the problem in the first place, but I think there are issues even before we get to the stage of belief. The reportage itself is bad enough.

(Meanwhile abusers likely encourage this feeling, or at least take advantage of it.)

After I had made this post, it did occur to me that Sean Spicer specifically accused the Anne Frank Center—metonymically, Jews in general—of never being satisfied with the addressing of anti-Semitism, always moving the goalposts, always making other people keep apologizing to them. Not letting it go. Which is pretty much what I was talking about, so, yes, I think so.

Probably also true of people with chronic illnesses.

Yes.

[moon_custafer]

It's also just occurred to me that *any* complaint of anti-semitism can be claimed, by someone who doesn't wish to hear it, to fall under the popular formulation* of Godwin's Law.


*as opposed to Godwin's original version

[sovay]

It's also just occurred to me that *any* complaint of anti-semitism can be claimed, by someone who doesn't wish to hear it, to fall under the popular formulation* of Godwin's Law.

I'm actually pretty sure I've seen this happen.