Microaggressions. Is there a Jew who hasn’t had it happen? ‘Why don’t you celebrate Christmas? It’s really a secular holiday.’ ‘But you don’t look Jewish!’ ‘Why is your food so gross?’
I had a lot of antisemitic shit happen at Cambridge during my online degree, (menorahs are ‘golden candlesticks’, calling a menorah a golden candlestick is somehow the same as marginalia of Jews being forced to eat pig feces, here’re some swastikas with no context or explanation, we all know what the inside of a church looks like, the terms literally being called Michaelmas, Lent, and Candlemas, Hadassah and the ADL, among others, aren’t legitimate sources, etc) but it was getting ON the courses where the strangest microagression occurred.
An online friend offered to teach me how to Zoom for my family’s first quarantine Seder. Despite acting as a semi-professional hobby, I do stage, not film, so I’m rather uncomfortable on camera. My friend is explaining the Zoom features, like screen sharing, etc, and then out of nowhere she says, “You’re lucky that you’re Jewish. Christians don’t hate people who believe in G-d. They only hate us pagans.”
Reader, I was dumbfounded. How you draw this conclusion (Jews killed Jesus is like the main rallying cry for antisemitism. We don’t believe in the same deity. Was there some neo-pagan pogrom/Holocaust/banned-from-over-100 countries even I had never heard of? Was some neo-pagan’s entire paternal line exterminated like mine was?) I played Mary Warren in The Crucible. The witch trials weren’t about paganism. It was about a plethora of mass hysteria and Puritanical control over the Massachusetts colony.
I didn’t say anything. To be honest, I’m often the token Jew in school and social groups and I’m sick of being the ambassador of my people.
This happened almost three years ago and I’m still pissed about it. I never confronted her. I honestly hate confrontation. As far as she knows, we’re fine.
Well, I’m not. People hate Jews. They hate us if we’re left or right or pro or anti Zionist or if we support this candidate or that candidate or this team or this actor or whatever. When people come after Jews, and please don’t kid yourself into thinking it’ll never happen again, they’re not going to quiz how woke you are before they murder you.
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
jbbartram-illu
andulkaphoto
gummygunk
