Please Listen

sparrowsapling:

There was an article making the rounds recently titled, if I
remember correctly, “I don’t know how to explain that you should care
about other people.” It was a good article, but that’s not what I want to
talk about now. I remembered the article title today in the midst of many other
frustrating thoughts, and what I came out with was this:

I don’t know how to explain that you should care about Jews.

We are not some distant hypothetical, some Hollywood
stereotype, some far-removed historical figures. We’re not just a religion that
celebrates Chanukah instead of Christmas, or basically all just white Europeans.
We’re a diverse, distinct people in a world that simultaneously wants us to
shut up about it and will never let us forget that we’re different.

We are not your rhetorical device. “You wouldn’t get
away with saying that about Jews.” But people do, make no mistake; maybe
you just don’t pay attention when it’s about Jews. “The ____
holocaust,” you say while wondering why Jews talk so much about their own
Holocaust. “It’s like being a Jew in 1930s Germany,” you say, not
thinking for a moment about what it’s like to be a Jew now.

We are not your ultimate villain, the whitest of white
people, the bankers, the conspiring media, the puppetmasters behind every evil
of the world. We are rich and poor people, successful and unsuccessful people,
people in positions of power and people who are struggling. We do good things
and bad things, just like everybody else, and the bad things are not
representative of every Jew or part of some vast conspiracy.

We are not pretenders, trying to claim victimhood. We are
people who have stubbornly survived through centuries, millennia of oppression
and have the memories of it in our stories and our own DNA. We are people who
remember when our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and on back for
generations saw the winds turn and found themselves no longer welcome in the
places they called home, and often in danger. We understand the subtleties
bigotry can take, the way anti-Semitism is so woven into the fabric of society
that it’s often easy not to see it if you have the privilege not to.

There are many just causes in the world, and there are many
Jews who fight for them, but who will fight for us? When you talk of Nazis,
white supremacists, the alt-right, will you remember that Jews are a target
too? When people rail against bankers and the media, against globalists and
corporatists, or descend into more overt conspiracy theories, will you remember
how those concepts have been and still are weaponized against Jews? Will you
speak out against them?

And when Jews say that we are scared, will you listen? Or
will you shrug off our fears because the problems we face are more subtle than
those of people of color or Muslims or other minorities? Will you ignore that
Jews account for a vastly disproportionate percentage of hate crimes because
those crimes aren’t violent, or if they were, nobody died, or if they did, it
was in another country and it wouldn’t happen here?

When Jews say that something is anti-Semitic, will you hear
us? Or will you listen to the people who say that it’s an overreaction or an
excuse to silence criticism, forgetting for a moment that privilege can mean
not seeing oppression or prejudice right in front of your face? Will you insist
that it’s only anti-Zionist without stopping to consider why so many Jews
outside of Israel experience “anti-Zionism,” or why you think it’s unequivocally
correct to hate Israel, or whether you even know what Zionism is?

And what about when Jews dare to speak positively about
Israel? Many Jews live there, or have relatives there, or have visited there,
or simply believe that the country has a right to exist, which is all that
Zionism means. That doesn’t mean we think the Israeli government or its
citizens have never done anything wrong, or that we don’t think Palestinians
have rights too. But the situation is complicated, and if you can’t believe
that, perhaps you should consider why you’re so willing to accept that once
again, it’s all the Jews’ fault, and that once again, we need to pick up roots
and go. If you think that Israel is uniquely evil in the world, or uniquely
worthy of constant criticism, perhaps you should consider why people spend so
much time and energy hating the one tiny little Jewish country in the world. If
nothing else, consider why Jews who are doing nothing but being Jewish are so
often expected to answer for Israel before they can be a part of spaces on the
left, let alone bring up anti-Semitism.

I would hope that non-Jews who claim to care about social
justice will listen and care and speak up for us, but my experience and that of
many other Jews is that they often won’t. There will be millions of “Je
suis Charlie” tweets and barely a word about the attack on a Jewish
supermarket, to say nothing of the attacks on Israeli Jews that are sometimes even
celebrated, no matter who the victims are. There will be, appropriately, anger
at politicians who make racist or sexist or Islamophobic comments but ignoring
or even justifying of anti-Semitic remarks.

The same people who insist that it’s not for white people to
say when something is racist or straight people to say when something is
homophobic and so on will suddenly argue with Jews about whether something is really anti-Semitic. People who normally
say that intent doesn’t matter if you hurt someone suddenly insist a person isn’t
anti-Semitic unless they really meant to be. Besides, they’re just telling the
truth about how Jews are rich and powerful, plus Zionism is such a great evil
that Jews deserve everything they get

Right-wing anti-Semitism is a frightening thing, but
left-wing anti-Semitism is frightening in a different way. It’s people who say
that we should care about and fight for all oppressed groups forgetting us, or
outright saying, “No, we don’t need to fight for you.” It’s telling
Jews that we’re not allowed to speak out, and not allowed to be ourselves. It’s
telling us that all the standards which apply to other people don’t apply to us,
sometimes in words and sometimes in actions. It’s telling us that because
Israel exists, Jews around the world are not worthy of protection. It’s showing
us that when the Nazis come for us again—because to them, we’re not a part of
the white world they want—our supposed allies will just look away.

This may seem melodramatic, but you have to understand: Jews
have been expelled from one country after another, over and over throughout our
history. Jews have faced discrimination and fear and violence, and fled only to
experience the same thing somewhere else. If we’re worried, it’s because
history has taught us that it’s not paranoid; it’s realistic. We’ve learned the
hard way that when it comes down to it, most non-Jews won’t fight for us.

I keep hoping I’m wrong about that. I keep talking about my
Jewishness so that people who don’t know other Jews will see that we’re people,
different in some ways and the same in many. I keep pointing out anti-Semitism
and keep trying to educate people who seem to have good intentions but don’t
understand how anti-Semitism works, how it hides itself away. I keep telling
people I’m scared and hoping they’ll listen and care.

But the silence is so often deafening and I don’t know what
else to do, let alone how to convince the larger world to care about Jewish
struggles and Jewish fears, and to talk about them. I don’t know how to make people
so aware of other types of privilege understand how privileged they are not to
see anti-Semitism, and to leave their unconscious biases about Jews unnoticed
and unquestioned. I don’t know how to explain that Jews deserve to be taken
seriously and to exist and to feel safe. I don’t know how to get non-Jews to
care, and sometimes I wonder if there’s any way I can.