On Being Jewish

[taffimai]

versaphile just posted an entry on Jewish history, and I needed to quote this:

It was all barbed wire and skeletal figures in striped pajamas and frightening lighting, and the message was they want you dead. They want you dead and you must remember this, because it's happened before, and it will happen again, and you're going to see barbed wire from the wrong side if you don't watch out.

Because, yes, that's it exactly. That's the tension that lives in the gut of every Jew in America and Europe and everywhere that's not Israel. Any educated Jew knows this at a visceral level.

I'm going to compare it to my experience of being gay, because that's all I've got with which to compare it. I worry that I won't get a job or an apartment just as much as a gay woman as I do as a Jew. I worry that some hate-ridden homophobe is going to decide to make an example of me just as much as I worry about skinheads and neo-Nazis. But when I think about being rounded up and imprisoned or executed for being gay, it doesn't really hit me. I know it could happen, and I know that there are places in the world where it does happen, but there's no real emotion associated with it. But as a Jew? Bone deep terror and an absolute certainty that it's only a matter of time.

That's what I want people to understand about being Jewish.

Comments

[viola-jen.livejournal.com]

I had to learn some stuff about Jewish culture to write my dissertation (which was to do with Aaron Copland and identity issues) and I'd love to learn more. Maybe I should read books :) Which books should I read?

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

Here are a few good ones to start out with, depending on your level of knowledge:

Jewish Literacy
Cultures of the Jews
A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People
Living Judaism

Let me know if you have questions or want to chat, k?

[viola-jen.livejournal.com]

Yay! Things to learn :)
I'm out of the habit of random learning because everything for the last few years has been either part of my degree or guilt-ridden degree slacking! Now am I free to read many books. And will absolutely question and chat in due course :D