American Judea

The first time I experienced anti-semitism, I was about six years old. My father, an aluminum siding salesman, brought my brother and me on a visit to a client who lived on a farm in the country, about 30 minutes from where we lived in Milwaukee. We were excited to meet the farmer’s children and see the cows, horses, cats and dogs.

I hit it off immediately with the farmer’s daughter, who was exactly my age. After we’d spent about an hour playing together, I casually asked her, “What temple do you go to?”

I had naïvely assumed that she was Jewish, perhaps because she had dark hair. She looked Jewish to me, and since I was accustomed to being around Jewish children, I didn’t for a moment consider the possibility that she might not be a Jew.

“What?” she said.

“What temple do you go to,” I repeated. “Synagogue. You’re Jewish, right?”

“NO,” she said, a strange look crossing her face. “Don’t tell me you’re a Jew.”

“Of course I am,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

I’ll never forget the way her face reddened and the wrinkles formed on her nose as she scrunched up her face in disgust, as if I’d suddenly just squatted down in front of her and taken a big, stinky dump.

“YOU’RE a JEW?” she spat the words as she backed away from me, holding her arms out in a defensive position. “Get AWAY.” The fun was over.

Just a few seconds ago, we were like best friends. What the hell had happened?

_____________________

Years later, when I was a teenager, I went to a dance sponsored by the local Jewish youth organization. I was Jewish, my date was Jewish, and our friends who went with us to the dance were Jewish….

…all except one, our friend Elizabeth.

When our large group arrived at the dance, the organizers refused to let Elizabeth in. The reason? She was not Jewish.

Shocked and embarrassed, we argued with them. How dare they refuse entry to our friend, when this dance was supposed to be open to the public. How dare they disciminate against a fellow American based on her religion. How dare they treat a a child — we were all only 14 years old! — this way.

How dare they treat a non-Jew the way non-Jews had treated us for centuries.

The organizers would not be persuaded. They were acting to protect what they obviously believed to be a fragile and vulnerable Jewish identity from outside invaders. We turned around and went home, disgusted, and never participated in this organization’s events again.

We had just experienced the disillusionment that comes with witnessing the oppressed becoming the oppressor.

This wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed narrow-minded, exclusionary behavior by “my” people. As the product of a Jewish father and a blonde, formerly Christian mother who’d converted to Judaism, I’d never felt quite comfortable in the synagogue or at Jewish-themed events. I remember certain comments about how I didn’t “look” Jewish, comments about my too-blonde hair and too-blue eyes, comments about my mother not being a “real” Jew because she was a convert, and how therefore I wasn’t a real Jew either.

The feeling was like being in a club that doesn’t want you for a member. Why in the world would you want to join?

I knew deep down that something was wrong here, but this was the reality I lived in, and these were the people I had around me until I became old enough to leave home and live on my own, which I did as soon as I turned 17.

Until I was 13, I, along with all my Jewish friends, had to go to the synagogue every Sunday morning for Jewish Sunday School. For three painful hours that seemed eternal, we had to study the Bible, attend religious services, and sit in wooden chairs in small, cramped rooms and absorb Zionist indoctrination as the sunshine, chirping birds and smell of fresh mud and grass taunted us through the windows.

Most of my friends put up with it because they knew that, once they reached 13, the torture would be over. They’d have their coming-of-age ceremony, their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and the payoff would come: a big chunk of money as a reward.

I didn’t want a Bat Mitzvah because that meant extra hours of studying every day after school for at least a year, and I’d had enough. I envied my cynical friends for the thousands of dollars they would receive for their troubles, but I knew that this was not religion. This was a product of the bourgeois environment we lived in. This was about ostentation, money, class, and power. It was an early-life business lesson.

The real reason I passed on a Bat Mitzvah, however, wasn’t because I had integrity. It was because I simply couldn’t stand being cooped up inside anymore. I wanted to join the school gymnastics team. Luckily, my parents let me.

Still, my father insisted that we attend High Holy Days services every a year. He explained that he did it in memory of his father. I understood that, but it seemed like there was something rotten about the synagogue that we attended. It reeked of cologne and bad breath, an extravagant compound that kept growing in size as the years went by. I adored the rabbi, who was a kind, thoughtful, moral person, but he was drowned out by the masses of bejeweled, perfumed and fur draped congregants that swamped his synagogue.

The thing I enjoyed most about the services, besides being by my father’s side, was the music that accompanied the Hebrew prayers. It was beautiful and mournful, and the operatic voice of the female cantor conveyed centuries of suffering, perseverence, and wisdom. I came close to believing in God in these moments.

In one particular prayer, the rabbi recited, one by one, a list of the trials and tribulations that the Jewish people had suffered. After each slaughter and persecution, the congregation had to repeat: “We are the Jews. We cannot forget.”

I knew what this meant. Only forty years before — within both my parents’ lifetimes — the Nazis had wiped away 12 million people off the face of this earth, half of them Jews.

My dead grandfather Jacob’s entire family was among them. They lived in the Vitebsk ghetto in Belarus, and in 1941, the Nazis invaded the town and murdered every single one of its Jews, dumping the bodies in the river.

To grow up Jewish in America is to have the Holocaust burned into your consciousness ever since you can remember. It’s in conversations, in your religious education, on TV, in the movies, even in comedy. It’s Schindler’s List and Steven Spielberg. “We are the Jews. We cannot forget.” Since I couldn’t find my belief in God, to me, the Holocaust was the most important part of being Jewish.

The history. The suffering. The never-ending cruelty and persecution.

Thus I never understood how this acute sensitivity to our own suffering couldn’t transfer to that of other people. Growing up, I remember that when Jews described the Holocaust death toll, it was almost invariably “six million Jews”. Yet six million more people died along with the Jews: gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents, children with misshapen ears…  I understood that the Jewish death toll was absolutely disproportionate and atrocious. Yet my people’s hesitancy to acknowledge the twelve million who perished always seemed, to me, to diminish us.

When I was a teenager, I became aware of what the U.S. government was doing in Central America, and what it had done in South America in the decade before — in Chile, in Argentina. My government was funding repressive military dictatorships that were, right this moment, slaughtering innocent civilians. My country was supporting governments that sent death squads to slaughter priests and nuns in El Salvador and commit genocide on the Indians in Guatemala.

Millions of men, women and children were being killed. And the Jewish community I belonged to – my Jewish community — stood by in silence.

Where was the outrage? Where was the protest? Surely those who had experienced genocide only 40 years ago would be the first ones to rise up against it if it happened again. Wasn’t that what we were always saying?

I realized that, in the comfortable community that I belonged to, the only Holocaust that really mattered was ourHolocaust. Not that of a South American or a Central American or a Cambodian.

I don’t mean to generalize. There were, and still are, many Jews who did do something. They formed organizations, they raised money, they visited those countries, they tried to bring the injustice to the world’s attention, and they tried to stop it.

But the community as a whole ignored them.

It was depressing. How could people be so self-centered, so narcissistic? Where was the empathy? How could they do exactly what they still resented the rest of the world for doing in the 1940′s: stand by and do nothing?

Black students were being actively discriminated against in my school. Everyone who was white seemed unconcerned. The Jews had been instrumental in the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. Why didn’t the Jewish students raise their voices against the prejudice happening right n front of them?

I also began to question Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians. The Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The human rights violations.

The answer I often got was brisk and angry: “How dare you criticize Israel. We are the victims here. We went through the Holocaust.”

Yes, but does having been victimized give us carte blanche to victimize others? Do we have no obligation to stop the chain of suffering?

Growing up, I learned that questions such as these were commonly met with accusations of anti-semitism (if the questioner was non-Jewish), or self-hatred (if they were a Jew).

Off-limits were challenges to Israel, Jewish leaders, or powerful Jewish organizations. To ignore this rule was to risk being labeled a Jew-hater or an anti-semite.

It was this corruption of our history and our values, this arrogance and self-centeredness that frustrated me.

“What is best for the Jews?” was the question I constantly heard growing up. I always thought, “Why doesn’t anyone ever ask what’s best for humanity?”

The longer I lived, the more these things bothered me:

The prostitution of our past suffering to justify our current immoral behavior.

The refusal to re-examine our values.

Our tendency to separate ourselves from the world instead of using our insight and experience to change it for the better.

Our blindness to injustice that’s there for all to see.

The naval-gazing. The insularity. The distrust of non-Jews. The tribalism.

I knew some Jewish kids in school who were only interested in befriending other Jews. They were only interested in Jewish issues. They were Jewish-obsessed. They seemed to be the product of brainwashing by their families. They railed against Mercedes, Krupps and the idea of ever visiting Germany. It goes without saying that they distrusted anyone who wasn’t Jewish. They behaved as if it were the 1940′s and we were all under attack.

Their mentality was, Because of what we’ve have been through, we must be this way now.

I remember thinking: YOU have been through nothing. You live in a beautiful home in a safe neighborhood in the richest country in the world. You have more food than you can eat, you wear designer clothes, and you will go on to one of the top universities in the country. What suffering have you known? What anti-semitism? You are yearning for an identity, like all of us are. But instead of going out into the world and discovering yourself, you’ve simply drank the Kool-Aid your parents served you.

At 16, I joined Amnesty International and organized a letter-writing campaign in my high school on behalf of a numerous political prisoners. The next year, when I graduated, I enrolled in a college seven hours away, in Ohio, and lived in Austin, L.A., and New York. I worked with the victims of America’s not-so-covert wars in Central America. I lived in refugee shelters in the Latino neighborhoods of Austin and South Central L.A. I met people who had lost their entire families to the death squads, child soldiers who had been forced to fight with the Reagan-backed “contras” of Nicaragua. People who were missing fingers and noses, who had to reconstruct their lives in a strange new country and learn a strange new language. Almost all of them were in the country illegally, with no rights whatsoever, and at risk of deportation.

These people taught me how to speak Spanish. Thanks to them, I can write this blog (however imperfectly), do my shows, and live in this country.

It’s funny to me how in Catalunya, Spanish is seen as the language of the oppressor. In my experience up until now, it has always been the language of the oppressed.

I never lived in Milwaukee again. When I’d go back to visit once a year, it felt like it had all been a dream.

But somehow living in Catalonia brings it all back.