27/11/2024
“Immediately after October 7th, before Israel responded to Hamas’ brutal declaration of war, the war on Western Jews grew more visible.
The first line of attack was social media. Overnight, my feed transformed from babies, cocktails, and beaches to flippant Jew-hatred, shared exclusively by people who had never set foot in the Middle East.
When two fellow Brooklynites shared antisemitic posts, I felt an idiotic flash of superiority. I knew something they did not, based on my lived experience. Lived experience was progressive currency, and I was flush with the Jewish kind…
But antisemitism is a conspiracy theory which states that Jews are liars. Thus, either my lived experience was a lie, or I was lying about it.
Like a Jew.
If someone told me that I had shared something racist, I would take it down immediately and educate myself so I never posted something offensive ever again until the end of time. But as all Jews now know, this is not what happens when you tell someone that they have shared something hurtful and antisemitic. Instead the offending party always responds, “No I didn’t.”
The next line of attack materialized as organizational statements. I was walking the trails in Prospect Park — I walked miles in the park that fall, propelled by an epigenetic need to keep moving. I did not know yet that Jewish trauma runs through my veins, or that Jews all over the world were experiencing the same feeling — the creeping fear of “Here we go again…” paired with a sense of “Are you f*cking kidding me?!”
In each and every generation they will rise up against us. Does it have to be now? Because I already have a lot on my plate, to be honest…
Anyway, when the organizational statements hit their targets, I was deep inside the park. My phone exploded with Jews who were very extremely upset about statements, or the lack thereof. Left-leaning organizations had badly miscalculated after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, each attempting to outdo the other by voicing their grief and boldly declaring that White policemen murdering African Americans was BAD. Super bad. Don’t do it, America.
Now, after receiving news of 1,200 incomprehensibly gruesome murders in Israel on a single day, the same organizations were receiving an object lesson in antisemitism and finding themselves to be not as bold as they thought. Since Jews are rich and control everything, maybe a little Jewish murder is okay? Maybe they even brought it on themselves and kinda deserve some murder?”
I now realize what it was like to be my ancestors, feeling public opinion building against the Jews, powerless to stop it. We thought we were free, but maybe we have always lived in the "shtetl."
