How I learned to stop apologizing for being a Jew

[Beastly Boy]

I grew up immersed in American Jewish education. Through sixteen years of Jewish day school, my teachers trained me in names and dates: the pogroms, the expulsion from Spain, the aliyot, 1948. I learned to love Israel with a kind of righteous certainty. At seventeen, I stood on the train tracks of Auschwitz wrapped in an Israeli flag, convinced that Jewish survival deserved any cost.

I arrived at college idealistic, certain of my convictions, and desperate to be on the side of justice. My professors taught me that Zionism is a colonial project, depicted Jews as European interlopers, and described Israel’s existence as dependent on the continual subjugation of Palestinians. They said, Zionism was “a structure, not an event.”

--snip--

At Stanford, like many other colleges and universities, students and professors reduced the Jewish story to a footnote in someone else’s manifesto. The intellectual left, which once claimed to welcome me, consistently dehumanized my community. And required me to do the same. Intellectual engagement demanded advocating for the literal murder of Jews. And my classmates they rolled their eyes when I named their bias: Antisemitism.

--snip--

If I could tell Jewish students one thing, it would be this: You don’t need to shrink yourself to fit someone else’s definition of solidarity. You don’t have to choose between your people and your conscience. You can carry the whole story—even when it doesn’t fit on a protest sign.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-apologizing-for-being-a-jew/?
More at the link

[AllaN01Bear]

1. thank you,.

[ChazII]

2. Another thank you

for your spot on comment.

[marble falls]

3. I was fortunate. I grew up with Jewish friends, in a Jewish neighborhood in Akron. I got to talk with ...

... their parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents (Warren Glick's great grandfather was over 90 in the early sixties and told me about leaving Czarist Russia, about pogroms in Bylorussia, about the twenty year terms when the army drafted people).

I learned from survivors about the Holocaust, Irv Finer's mom told me about being in the camps, I saw her tattoo. Irv had his father's tailors tools, and photos from Poland before the war. I never understood how he had those. I later found out after being released from the camps, they walked to their homes and dug up possessions they had buried in the dirt under their floor boards, and walked to West Germany to a Displaced Person's camp and waited five years to be sponsored to come to the US.

Harvey Gold ( the person I've known the longest in in my life I am still in contact with), his father was Ike Gold who was Secty/Treasurer of the IRWU, told me about his family coming in early 1900s, and the struggle to "get ahead". He got his help from the Workman's Circle, a labor group that offered schooling in reading and writing and helped each other find work and shelter.

https://workmenscircle.org/index.html

You have nothing to apologize for. I am sorry you (and others) have been put in that position.

[lostincalifornia]

4. I learned this lesson much younger growing up Jewish in the midwest, where slurs and stereotypes against

Jews were commonplace.

[Ken Dayenu]

5. Thank You

What is going on in Gaza, West Bank, Israel, and the world make it painful to be a Jew today. I appreciate your posts, Beastly Body. It helps my morale.

Link to tweet

/photo/1

[Beastly Boy]

6. Good to hear your voice here, Dayenu

Welcome to DU.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

7. Welcome to DU

[LetMyPeopleVote]

8. K&R

[Behind the Aegis]

9. I never have.

When I was in college, anytime Israel was involved in something, anti-Semitism spiked. This of course, was pre-internet, well, at least widescale use. I grew up in the deep South and the idea we "killed Jesus" was big, probably still is among certain groups. I never backed down, even after a death threat.

I don't back down from racists. I don't back down from women-haters. I don't back down to homophobes. And much to the chagrin of certain individuals, I don't and WON'T back down from anti-Semitism, anti-Semites, or those who defend either!

Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”