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

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

It's amazing, isn't it? I'm always fascinated by the levels at which American Jews experience their heritage.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Yet they come in all shapes and sizes as well, from the strictest torah jew, wearing long sleaves, tallit, kippah, etc who keeps kosher and davens every day to the tank top wearing, punk haired reform jew who eats bacon cheeseburgers and never goes to temple. Both consider themselves Jewish. And they both are.

My temple was vandalized a few years back (with anti-Semetic and homophobic (the Rabbi is a lesbian) graffiti.) It was scary. And you do have to watch out.