Not scared.

     One of the most fascinating aspects of my several conversations with 107-year-0ld Black Chicagoan Edith Renfrow Smith was related to her recollections of the Civil Rights era.  While the typical — almost inevitable — stance of people alive during that troubled time is to puff up whatever relationship they had to the great struggle, she was 180 degrees opposite: it didn't affect her. Not her concern. I was dubious, almost incredulous, and pressed her on the matter — c'mon, you said you couldn't shop at Marshall Field's. What about that? 
     “I don’t want to go there anyway,” she said defiantly. “They don’t have anything I want."

    She had decided that these issues didn't affect her. And that was it. She was going to live her life as a full person as good as anybody else — "Nobody's better than you" — and if others chose to think differently, that was their problem, not hers. 

     My personal take on being Jewish in America is something similar. It isn't that anti-Semitism doesn't exists, or isn't spiking in reaction to the war in Gaza. I see that. It's just that, personally, it doesn't touch me. Maybe I'm oblivious. Or just lucky. The anti-Jew mob, with their torches and nooses, was going east on Monroe when I was walking, hands in pockets, whistling west down Madison, admiring the buildings.

     Part of it was growing up only a couple decades after the end of World War II. At times, it seemed like the whole religion was about the Holocaust. A sort of death cult. Judaism was Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto with pauses to light candles and spin dreidels. I hated that. It felt suffocating.

    The reality has to be more complicated than that. Maybe because, when I meet anti-Semites, I immediately discount them, because their scorn is coming from a hater. Consider the source. It isn't about me, it's pus from a wound. Their wound, not mine. Nobody is a hater because they're so brave, and Jews are the oldest, largest, easiest target in the world. That collegiate Americans would decide to sign on to Team Anti-Semite is sad, but also typical, the familiar blend of enthusiasm and ignorance that so defines the young.

     Now that I think of it, I get anti-Semitic screeds almost every day — gathering unread in my spam filter, waiting to be flushed away.  Most aren't even read. Flushed away with the rest of the shit. If I do happen to notice one, they seem more mentally ill than anything else. Who cares why a mentally ill person you never met decides to fixate on something? If the source of that fixation happens to be me — what are my responsibilities toward that person? None. I'm not a doctor. 

     Why let the poison in? Why be any more conscious of their presence than you have to? You can't make them go away, or change. People in marginalized groups have the distressing tendency — and I think this is really what Edith Renfrow Smith is pushing back against — of acting like they're auditioning for the people who despise them. I'll get notes from Jewish readers ponderously chiding me for this or that opinion because they feel that it makes the Jews look bad in the eyes of anti-Semites, as if the haters are coolly evaluating us, and forming conclusions based on our behavior. When in reality they start out by hating us and cherry pick facts they feel shore up that hate. This isn't a contest. 

     Israel's actions in the war in Gaza are just an update on the Jews killing Christ. The bad thing that Jews did that permits them to be locked in their synagogue before it is set it on fire. That rationale, the specific bad thing Jews did changes, but it is always there, and always will be. If the creation of Israel — the naqba — was such a shock, then what did the Jews do wrong in 1947 and 1946 and 1945 and 1944 and 1943 and 1942 and 1941 and 1940, what was our crime then that so agitated so many people against them? Oh right nothing. Mere existence. Their original sin. Our original sin. We're heeeeeeeeere! 

     The photo above was taken in September in the tiny Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, now a tourist site.  I was taken aback — somewhere between surprised and aghast — to see they'd put up a big yellow Magen David in the middle of the street, the way the Puerto Rican stretch of Division Street in Humboldt Park is marked by a stylized PR flag. 

     The yellow star? Really? Maybe it's unintentional. Historical. Maybe it's trying to take control of the touchstone used against you, the way gays repurposed "queer." Maybe there's some other cultural factor at work I don't understand. But I found it ... confusing, at best. The Germans used this exact device to single us out for abuse ... and now we embrace it. Okay then. How's that workin' for you?

      Maybe that's my approach. I don't embrace anti-Semitism, I register that it's there, intellectually, then step around it, like a turd on the sidewalk. The less I think about that shit, the happier I am. I suppose I could be afraid — people obviously are afraid. I see that — and I don't want to discount their fear. It's awful to be frightened. But that's also what the haters want. Not being afraid, not even caring, seems the best revenge.