But the front line shifted and my rifle got lifted, had to fight the war on my own

[sovay]

I am sick of the amount of anti-Semitism in the country I live in and the planet I live on. Last year I made a post in which I noted that while I had experienced relatively little direct anti-Semitism in my daily life, I had nonetheless assimilated the idea that being a responsible Jew in a majority non-Jewish society meant pretending the whole thing was a non-issue unless a non-Jew happened to mention it, in which case it was permissible to agree politely before turning the conversation to some other, non-Jewish axis of marginalization which was actually valid and worth combating, as opposed to some guilt-tripping specter of the oppression Olympics that everyone knew had magically melted out of existence with V-E Day. I concluded that was pernicious bullshit. That hasn't stopped a great many of my fellow Americans from behaving, whether from belief or opportunism, as though it's true. I believe it was around the time of the Chicago Dyke March that I had the thrilling first experience of being told in so many words by some white dude on Facebook that Jews forfeited the right to participate in public discourse when they engaged in genocide, which he followed up by calling for the death of Israel. I'd have gotten it sooner, and maybe on a daily basis, if I were on Tumblr or Twitter. This isn't even the conspiracy theories and the hate crimes; this is just the second-order gaslighting. It didn't happen. It doesn't happen. And if it should happen, well, you deserved it.

James Agee had mixed feelings about Gentleman's Agreement (1947). That's all right; I have problems with it myself. But I have mixed feelings about his mixed feelings. He praises the film's writing, directing, and acting; then he acknowledges that while "[m]uch of its more serious stuff, about Anti-Semitism, is very good and very heartening too . . . [i]n a way it is as embarrassing to see a movie Come Right Out Against Anti-Semitism as it would be to see a movie Come Right Out Against torturing children." If he means that it's embarrassing because it's clumsily done, I might give him that. I don't remember the movie being subtle, and it is the particular kind of earnest Hollywood unsubtlety that, if you are already aware of the problem, can leave you feeling well-meaningly whatever-the-broader-social-justice-equivalent-of-mansplained-is at. But if he means that it's embarrassing because everyone knows anti-Semitism is wrong in the same way that everyone knows child-torturing is wrong and therefore it is unnecessary to educate anyone about how wrong it is, in fact not everyone does know either of those things, and some people are extremely invested in not finding out. They have become especially vocal in the last couple of years. They have become especially active.

I tell people that just because one of their friends got hit by a freight train doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt that they got hit by a car. In the ongoing conversation about sex and consent, I don't find it controversial to say that a lot of things can be not assault and still not be acceptable. Just because we haven't reached the worst-case scenario doesn't mean that everything is fine. So we aren't experiencing Shoah 2.0; it's still not all right that we have an Illinois Nazi about to win the Republican primary. (He will almost certainly get wiped off the map by his Democratic opponent, but it's still setting a precedent.) It's not all right that I no longer have to tune my ears to dogwhistle frequency to hear the rising levels of Jewish conspiracy in public and private speech. It's not all right that I'm still afraid every time I post something alluding to the existence of anti-Semitism that some friend-of-a-friendlist stranger will wander by and give me grief for it, or worse, people I know and trust will tell me to stop being so sensitive. Or I'll say something about Pesach and get asked how I can take pride in being Jewish when Israel, which has also now happened to me, thrillingly.

This post brought to you by encountering in quick succession first the news that the president of Poland has signed into law the bill criminalizing acknowledgement of his country's complicity in the Holocaust and then an internet critic complaining that Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo looks too Jewish. I think most people who aren't trawling for an excuse for Holocaust denial can agree that the first of these things is a problem. The second looks as though it should be dismissible; first of all the critic's conception of Han Solo as a "casual-frat boy-with-an-attitude" looks more like projection than canon and secondly Harrison Ford, parent and original of that scoundrel swagger, is, don't even bother to wait for it, Jewish. But since what the critic is actually saying is that the identifiably Jewish Ehrenreich is thereby insufficiently manly to play as iconically masculine a character as the implicitly gentile (in a galaxy far, far away) Han Solo, it's not any more dismissible than other racist complaints about casting, like Noma Dumezweni's Hermione ruining Harry Potter forever.

I have no clever conclusions. I am sick of things getting worse. And I am sick of the manifestation of things getting worse that tells me that I'm not allowed to say so. Pain is not a zero-sum game.

Comments

[newredshoes]

I feel you so hard; tonight I got in a Twitter round-robin with a dude who simply COULD NOT UNDERSTAND what would be upsetting about Christians appropriating the term "mishnah" for something called "Bible imaginations." A literal rabbi got in on the discussion and he still could not understand what was making us ~so unreasonable.

♥

[coraline]

All of this. So much all of this.
I feel ill :(

[gwynnega]

Yes to all of this, unfortunately.

[kore]

He’s around four inches shorter than Harrison Ford, for one thing. Sure, he’s trying to generate the old cavalier swagger and is half pulling it off, but his eyes are dark and drill-bitty and he’s, well, you know, Jewish. All my life Han Solo has been a tall, WASPy, casual-frat boy-with-an-attitude, but now he’s suddenly a 5′ 9″ Rabbinical student with narrow shoulders, doing his best to give off that devil-may-care and offering a passable substitute, but he’s not Han Solo.

Oh, SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY?

I dunno, maybe it's all in our heads. Surely the president* normalizing and emboldening this kind of violent prejudice has nothing to do with it.

[muccamukk]

Did James Agee think that equally heavy-handed To Kill a Mockingbird was trite for pointing out that racism was bad? He probably would now, since we're all post racial and stuff. For Land's sake!

I'm really sorry about the rest of this. I think people need to get their shit together on it.

[asakiyume]

I'm sick of things getting worse too. Each awful thing that happens is another wound.

[thisbluespirit]

I have no clever conclusions. I am sick of things getting worse. And I am sick of the manifestation of things getting worse that tells me that I'm not allowed to say so. Pain is not a zero-sum game.

Yes, I mean I have nothing to add - it is awful, and it shouldn't be happening (and it's not aimed at me, so I really can't talk) - but, yeah, the place where you get to where somehow you're not even supposed to complain because (who knows) can make everything so much worse. ETA: Which is to say, yes, indeed, complain all you like. It needs complaining about.

<3

[coffeeandink]

Yeah. :(

[lemon_badgeress]

I am sorry. It is not right. None of it is.

[redbird]

Yes. Pain is not a zero-sum game.

I'm also sick, more viscerally than I used to be, of the people who will say "we'll [maybe, if we're still interested] work against your oppression after you've helped us work on all our issues," and who then see a specific goal reached and think "mission accomplished," go sit down on the couch with a beer for a much-needed rest, and never get up again.

[moon_custafer]

As a gentile, I know I don’t even see the bulk of it; but for what it’s worth, I’m noticing things too, now that the dogwhistles are lowering in pitch.

(You recall I mentioned that a wealthy couple in Toronto had been found dead in their home last December? The police finally stated a few weeks back that yes, it was a double homicide, and released a few more of the details. It’s been bothering me from the start that they were Jewish and I don’t know whether that was a factor. No one seems to be asking if it was – even the wilder conspiracy theorists seem to be trying to pin this one on Hilary Clinton or some such – but it seems to me that anyone with a personal or financial motive to kill them would have tried to make it look more like an accident; and a crime of passion would have been less… deliberate. Which IMO leaves thrill-killer(s), or person(s) trying to “send a message.”)

[heliopausa]

And I have seen th... am seeing! the growth of such horrible attitudes and manifestations of them in my own country, too. And what redbird has said (just above - I've just read it) is really true - there's no way that a victory in one aspect of the struggle against wrong can justify thinking "That's it, we're done. We can relax now".

[moon_custafer]

Re-read your review of Gentlemen's Agreement, and am arrghing all over again at the trope of the white-middle-class character who's there to represent the theoretical viewer.

I’ve occasionally seen a variant of this in movies that aren’t explicitly about Social Issues and, while less pernicious, it’s still pretty annoying. I suspect even audience members who do look like the “audience stand-in” don’t identify with them, because who wants to identify with a character whose sole function in the story is to have stuff explained to them, or to goggle at the funny/interesting/superpowered rest of the cast?

[pameladean]

I have seen what you describe and it frightens me too, but I'm not directly in the line of antagonism. Not that line, anyway. I'm so sorry. I feel such profound rage; but it's hard to find for it a channel back at the miserable creepy people who are spreading this garbage and inciting hatred.

P.

[vandrendehare]

Trying to come up with a comment that contributes something more conversation-forwarding than support to you and a desire to bounce that film writer's face off their keyboard until they have qwerty for a unibrow, but I am coming up empty.

[strange_complex]

Just here to express solidarity and sympathy. We have the same pattern in the UK, with this being just today's example. It scares and upsets me, and I am not Jewish, so I can hardly begin to grasp how much more terrifying it must be for people who are. I try to hang onto the hope that we can all teach and argue our way to a better world where everyone sees each other's shared humanity first. But even that is a hard battle some days.

[ashlyme]

I'm so sorry. It's vile. I'd like to kick that film critic in the keyboard. *hugs*

[dhampyresa]

I'm sorry. *hugs*

[rinue]

Alden Ehrenreich is the only reason I'm thinking of seeing that film. I love every performance of his I've seen.

I feel like there's no degree of WTF sufficient to capture the many levels of dumb in the idea he's too Jewish to be Han Solo, who is never canonically revealed to be not Jewish. Full extent of Han's religious discussion is "there's no mystical force controlling my destiny" and "hey, may the force be with you," neither of which in my mind preclude Judiaism the religion. Ethnically speaking we don't see his planet or his relatives, and he's introduced listening to the Mos Eisley cantina band, which has clear klezmer influences (a song which has been covered by Klezmer Kollectiv). Also, Harrison Ford has Jewish heritage.

I've pretty much talked myself into Han Solo is Jewish at this point. You were looking for heroic Jewish space captains a few months ago, if I recall, and I propose one is Han.

[radiantfracture]

All I can say are things that you know. I am sorry. This is awful. Thank you for writing these painful things out to be shared. I want to answer you as well as you write, but I can't.

I (winner of World's Clumsiest Anti-Colonial Ally three years running, gentile, trans dude) know that we (collectively, north & southern nations of this sprawling land mass) refuse, systematically, rudely or *so* politely, to grant humans the authority even to report on their own experience while oppressed--

--and that while we *could* take the far right's own word for it instead, since they say over & over (& into cameras) how essential anti-Semitism is to them --

-- rather it is always explained how you are mistaken and they are just kidding, or there is some other way in which neither statement really counts.

Precisely because of this kind of airlessness that you describe so well, in my classroom I often am confounded about where to begin to show my students the places where these loops can be teased open, in order to give the students some chance to knot their understanding of the world back together with more of the pieces actually inside it. (Understanding here seems to be a hybrid between a shoelace and a handkerchief full of marbles). I often am wholly at a loss.

I hope or fantasize or make excuses that maybe, even in failing, I get closer, but how much closer? And not quickly enough.

You are excellent.

[cyphomandra]

I am sorry. And you should not have to wait for every other injustice to be settled before your own pain can be considered.

We have low level anti-semitism here; I’m still appalled by the University that was happy to award a master’s degree to a thesis denying the Holocaust, but on the other hand our last but one prime minister, John Key, was a non practicing Jew and was in power for nearly nine years with, I think, one incident of Nazi graffiti on his campaign posters, and although I didn’t like him or his party’s policies (tax cuts, privatization, dismantling of the social safety net, public transport etc) a lot of New Zealanders did. We now have a left wing government and I like the policies more, but I’m concerned about anti-semitism as in addition to the world alt- right movement extending its tentacles over here there are quite a few anti-Israel types on the left; a music star (Lorde) recently cancelled her concert in Israel after protests.

[selkie]

I am late as usual, and I don't know as I can contribute much to the discourse, but I read a book about Ewen Montagu this week just to feel better about things. (It also had Ivor, total Commie, but most stymieing to Sixta because he was really, really, super into table tennis. And always had been.)

Vi a gilgul liegt in mir, I am slightly afraid I am wasted on this modern tiki torch hate, will be possessed by the spirit of ((Jason Isaacs as)) Tuvia Bielski, and end up with a rap sheet for assault of hate-tourists on the public transit.

[nenya_kanadka]

<3