Love Thy Neighbor (Except the Jews)

As a grandchild and child of Holocaust survivors growing up in a predominately Caribbean-American community, I forged alliances with many of my neighbors because we were victims of this “white privilege’ thing together.  In those days, it was not called “white privilege”, but “White Flight”. A period of attempted integration of the Urban ghetto of Crown Heights, which resulted in white people fleeing the inner-city enclaves for the greener grass (well, ANY grass) of the suburbs, which coincidentally occurred when the Jews and the Blacks moved into their turf. My neighbor Sandra and her family were from Haiti and were the sweetest souls I’d ever met and my friends and I would play “Double-Dutch” jump rope outside with the twin daughters of the local Baptist pastor, who lived a few doors away.  We all got along famously, except when we got tired of the twins always winning, even though I still insist that white girls CAN jump.  Nevertheless, we were respectful, understanding and always knew that we suffered very similar histories and discrimination throughout the world.   We felt lucky and blessed to be free to play on the streets, to practice our respective religions and most of all, the miraculous fact that our parents worked hard for us to live the dream they had never experienced.  We lived in two family private homes on a beautiful block and were like many “normal” American families.  We learned to blend our cultures into the rainbow mosaic of NYC.   Other than a few muggers, we felt safe.

Sure, there were many incidents of anti-semitism when I was growing up.  In fact, there wasn’t a week that some kid on a city bus who would see us parochial Jewish girls in our uniforms wouldn’t try to hit us, steal from us and call us “dirty Jews”.  It was just an accepted fact of life.  We didn’t report “hate crimes”.  We didn’t write articles, letters to the editors or post it on our walls.  We just took it and accepted it as something our people have been dealing with since the beginning of time.  At that period in NYC, crime was rampant.  No New Yorker was unscathed, so we let it slide, figuring it was part of living in the Big Apple.  After centuries of progroms and recent European extermination, this was nothing to protest.   Boy, were we wrong.

As I grew older, I began to understand the latent anti-semitism along with the overt type.  As a Shabbos observer, I needed to leave early on Fridays at every job I had, during the winter months, when Shabbos would come in at 4:30 pm.  Even in “Jewcentric” NYC,  I had a very hard time.  I was always a hard-worker, overly conscientious, always staying late to complete my work.  Working long after I needed to, but that wasn’t acknowledged.  What was “stressed” was the fact that I got to leave early and take off days for the “endless holidays you people have”.  Somehow, whenever I needed to leave on Friday, my boss would dump work on me right when he knew I had to go.  This was not a one-time occurrence, but rather a consistent obstacle that plagued me my entire life.  The fact that I couldn’t work on from Friday night to Saturday night constantly hindered me.  The worst part of it, was the discrimination I received from a good deal of my fellow secular Jews who thought it was outrageous to keep all these outdated traditions.  What they didn’t realize and were doomed to re-experience, was that during the Holocaust, no one cared if you were assimilated into the German culture, married to a German or couldn’t even recite the “Shema”, you were sent off to be gassed.   Just like the African-Americans who came from slaves and fought for their place in a society that afforded them equal rights, we never really felt that we belonged.   For when you are a Jew, you always have a genetic knot in your stomach, a visceral warning signal that things can revert, in a blink of an eye or in recent times, in a tweet, a protest and even worse a terrorist attack.  Because when you are a Jew, your life is NOT equal, regardless of what anyone says.  You deserve it, because you “funded the slave trade”, “run all the banks” and kill innocent Palestinians.   Today, it’s Palestinians, yesterday it was Gentile children to use their blood for Matzah and the day before that it was killing our fellow Jew, Jesus.  We are not “white Privilege”, but rather the universal scapegoat, since we were kicked out of our original home, Israel.  Even now, when we finally have a place of our own, we are ridiculed, boycotted and demonized.   Europe has once again been lost to anti-semitism.  It is dangerous to be a practicing Jew, to attend synagogue and Hebrew School wearing a yarmulke.  Every shul and school has armed guards.  Sound A little familiar?

I ask you. Where are the protests? The marches? The Bended Knees for the discrimination we face.  The fact that we couldn’t own anything in the America of the past.  That the Klan hung us along with the Blacks and other minorities?  Where are the Social Justice warriors when it comes to the rampant Jew hatred that is happening right now?

That’s right.  Nowhere.

I will never be silent as I watch our society descend into an age old destructive pattern of xenophobia.  I will stand beside all who are discriminated against, regardless of race, religion or political affiliation, but I refuse to throw my people under the bus for political correctness.  We are ALL the same.  I think people have truly forgotten that.