On Love and Antisemitism

“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

When I was fifteen, my high school put on a production of The Sound of Music. Although I love the musical and was delighted to be in the pit orchestra, my strongest memory of the production is not of the uncomplicated joy of “Raindrops on Roses” or some particularly elegant eight bar phrase, but of the curious chill I felt watching the two Nazi banners that our crew had created descend slowly from the ceiling for the Von Trapp family’s concert performance. I had watched the crew paint those banners the week before, stretched outdoors on a bright spring afternoon, the red a stark contrast to the late spring finally blooming around us, and felt a similar sense of detached unease. Unease, because of course, by fifteen I knew all about the Holocaust and the Nazis. But detached, because that was not the world in which I lived. I had never seen a swastika in real life before, after all. The terrors of my forbearers, although a constant weight on my shoulders, were not my own to feel.

Still, watching the banners descend, I did feel… something. Pondering it further, I realized it was not unlike the feeling a good villain in a movie or a book brings when you’re really absorbed: fear, yes, but fear surrounded by a safety blanket, because at any moment you can shut off the television or snap the cover shut, and return to a world without them. It was not really fear—just a quiet thrill of horror, one that vanished as quickly as the curtains returned to the ceiling during the set change.

To grow up without fear is one of the greatest privileges in today’s world. At fifteen, I had not yet realized this.

Nine years have passed, and strangely, I no longer feel a chill at the sight of a swastika—not because I feel safer, but because it’s become so ubiquitous in news stories of white supremacist rallies and storefront or grave vandalism that I’ve become desensitized. They have folded themselves in my world, and I have begun to forget that it once shocked me to see them displayed so openly on the ground even as props. I am still not afraid. But I have begun to wonder whether that is simply a sign that I am a fool.

Last night I met a friend to grab a box of pizza, with which we intended to celebrate the end of Passover. As we were walking back up Amsterdam Avenue, a man ran up behind us and began shouting. I wasn’t sure whether he was shouting at us, at first, and I had no desire to engage him further by turning around to make sure, but then he said something about measles and I realized that yes, he had to be. I had only just begun to wonder what we might do to lose him when a passerby intervened, telling the man to leave us alone. Distracted by my friend’s attempt to continue our conversation as if nothing was happening, I heard only snatches of the argument we left behind—“I’ve got something to say to them!”—“Well, go be drunk somewhere else!”—and we walked another half a block before the shouting ceased and I thought it was safe to turn around and call back to thank the man who had intervened on our behalf.

He looked a little surprised when he realized we were talking to him. “Yeah, of course,” he said, already turning the corner. “I’m sorry you guys had to deal with that.”

The incident left me with a great deal to think about. First on my mind was the fact that I had only been singled out in this case because I was with someone who presents visually as Jewish: at the time, my kippah (yarmulke) was hidden under my hat; my friend’s was not. Not everyone can hide the signs of their difference as easily as I—and even my friend—can: a hijab is much less flexible; a skin color is unchangeable. I often choose to hide signs of my religiosity for reasons of privacy rather than reasons of safety. All the same, had I been on my own, my desire for privacy would have enabled me to avoid this encounter.

Second was the contrast between this and an incident that had happened to us several months before, when we boarded a subway and a man in our car began a long rant about the Jewish conspiracy and plan to assume world domination. Once again, my kippah was covered with a hat and my friend’s was not, but there were two differences: one, the man’s rant was not directed at us but at the person next to him, and two, no one said or did anything. Perhaps it was the bystander effect; perhaps it was that the policy on the New York City subways is to pretend that you cannot see or hear anything besides your companion and your phone, even when what you are hearing is damaging or dangerous. Perhaps it was both. We switched cars at the next stop.

That someone spoke up this time surprised me: it had not occurred to me that there was a way to defuse the situation without our doing anything. I was surprised, too, however, at the situation itself. I had not seriously entertained the possibility that such blatant aggression could ever appear here. Micro-aggressions, yes: that was what I had classified our encounter on the subway as and accounted for other stories of anti-Semitism that I had seen online, particularly in recent weeks in response to the measles outbreak in Brooklyn. But someone shouting at us on the street in broad (figurative) daylight? I had never seen that happen to anyone before (excluding, perhaps, catcalling, which is a serious form of harassment in its own right but also felt fundamentally different to me in that moment, though no more excusable). And indeed, I do not think it happened as often to Jews ten years ago as it does now—but it has happened and continues to happen to other people, and the fact that I have not seen it reflects only the privileges of my place in the world and my blindness.

I felt some hesitation in putting a quote from James Baldwin before this essay, because although he wrote many thoughtful pieces on antisemitism, the above quote is not about that. Baldwin lived in a world where Jews were already largely indistinguishable from the rest of whites, and his astounding capacity to look beyond himself and his own and to recognize the vulnerability of the Jewish position* reflects a clear-eyed vision of the world that continues to escape most of us. The African American experience in America is incomparable to the Jewish experience, its suffering far deeper and its consequences far greater. But Baldwin is right about the problem whites—and I include in this category those Jews whose skin identifies them to the public as white, even as they struggle to carve out a space in society that stands apart—have with love. The silence from those people on the subway came from that deficit, and so did the anger of the man who ran to shout at us. But so too does the fact that I only see such anger and hatred when it is directed at me, and not as it occurs on the fringes of my world every day.

Flicking through the news several hours later as I waited for the bus home, I saw, belatedly, that there had been a second shooting at a synagogue yesterday, and I wondered helplessly how more love for the human race could possibly help lead us through moments like these. In this age of polarization, it is much easier to turn our backs on the perpetrators of such violence, and much harder to find room in our hearts for love. I settled instead, in that moment, for pity. The world is a terribly broken place for all of us, these days. How much more broken it must be for some, to drive them to acts like that?

Antisemitism is as bound up in the white nationalist movement as race and gender are,** and the fact that such atrocities are occurring is a serious cause for concern not only for the Jews but for all who dare to hope for a more just and equitable society. I am deeply sad, yes, and I am most certainly concerned, but I am not yet afraid. The world I want to build is one where more children are raised without fear, not one where I teach my children to be more afraid than I was taught to be by my parents. Such a vision can only be reached with more love.

And this, in the end, is where I get my hope, after days like that and in times like these. Yeah, of course, we were told. I’m sorry you guys had to deal with that. The man on the street did not expect us to thank him, nor did he hesitate to act when he saw that we were in trouble. So long as there is love in the world like that, I will not be afraid.

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* “Jews, as such,” Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time, “until I got to high school, were all incarcerated in the Old Testament… It was bewildering to find them so many miles and centuries out of Egypt, and so far from the fiery furnace. My best friend in high school was Jewish. He came to our house once, and afterward my father asked, as he asked about everyone, ‘Is he a Christian?’—by which he meant ‘Is he saved?’ I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said coldly, ‘No. He’s Jewish.’ My father slammed me across the face with his great palm… I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine, or anyone, was to be tormented forever in Hell, and I also thought, suddenly, of the Jews in another Christian nation, Germany. They were not so far from the fiery furnace after all, and my best friend might have been one of them. I told my father, ‘He’s a better Christian than you are,’ and walked out of the house.”

** See Eric Ward’s “Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism” for an analysis of this relationship.