Pandemic Diary: The Virulence of AntiJewish Hate
My Latest Entry in My Instagram Essay Project, Which Will Be Titled ‘A Book of Plagues’
T-shirts sold on Amazon. Worn by Proud Boys in D.C. during Trump rally on Saturday. “6mwe.” Six million were not enough.* // Graffiti in Forest Hills. Swastika painted on an Idaho memorial to Anne Frank. // Trump campaign board member, convention speaker tweets conspiracies. Enslavement of the goyim. Jewish money. She was canceled. // House candidate touts QAnon. Conspiracies about “wealthy, all-controlling globalists; and the ancient ‘blood libel’ of requiring blood of Christian children.”* She’s endorsed. Elected. // The Rothschilds lurk in the imagination. George Soros. Jewish money. An international cabal. // “The danger of antisemitism never fully disappears,” writes Stephen Eric Bronner, “and, in any event, the political risk in making the opposite assumption is too high.”* // Eleven dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Another in a California synagogue. Another at a Kosher deli in Jersey City. // Chabad member is run down at menorah lighting in Kentucky.* Menorah bulbs shot out at Dartmouth. // “I don't want to make more of it than what it is,” Jeff Sharlet posts on Facebook. “Anti-Semitism is always at least a low simmer in the U.S., but rarely more.” But “very little of it compares to the scale of hatred faced by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, trans people, and many others.” // Sharlet. Half Jewish. Was called names as a kid. Got into fights. I’ve been called kike, and referred to as a “good kind of Jew.” // I light the candles. Say the prayers. I’m not religious. Call me agnostic. Skeptical. But the symbols are important. I light the candles most nights. I’m a Jew every night. // But fear is not part of the equation. Not for most of us. White skin confers privilege, even when stopped by a cop for speeding. // Still, there’s the dual-loyalty charge. The conspiracies. The questions. A sign at a protest: Jews as “the real plague.” // All of this floats just below the surface. Bubbles up occasionally. Boils over in violence. The risk is always there.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaletwrites/
Sources:
Bernstein, David S., “Anti-Semitism, Trump, And The Republican Convention.” GBH 89.7, 28 August 2020, https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020/08/28/anti-semitism-trump-and-the-republican-convention Accessed 17 December 2020
Bronner, Stephen Eric. A Rumor About the Jews, 2000, St. Martin’s Press, e-book chapter one, https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=934046316
Eads, Morgan. “Chabad of the Bluegrass member injured in attack before menorah lighting in Lexington.” Lexington Herald-Leader, 13 December 2020, https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crime/article247814240.html#storylink=cpy Accessed 17 December 2020
Palmer, Ewan. “Neo-Nazi Shirts Worn by Proud Boys Supporters Sold on Amazon.” Newsweek, 15 December 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/nazi-amazon-proud-boys-holocaust-1555192 Accessed 17 December 2020
Whitfield, Stephen. “Why the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is still pushed by anti-Semites more than a century after hoax first circulated.” The Conversation, 3 September 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-is-still-pushed-by-anti-semites-more-than-a-century-after-hoax-first-circulated-145220 Accessed 17 December 2020