My Jewish Pride

and Mayim Bialik’s treif tears

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My shirt says something like, “live, laugh, love” with some duty attached to it, or maybe that’s just the imperative case. I’m not house trained in Hebrew. Anyway, it’s not what the English says in smaller print on the shirt, which is a quotation from the Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Tarfon: “You don’t have to finish the work, but you can’t opt out of contributing to it either.” Approximately. Shirt from Monique Caulfield, birdwatching socks by the Isaacsons, kilt by Rebecca Lyle Texas Fashion Consultants, glasses courtesy of Blake Ketcham Wool & Weaving.

Let me ask you something: when you see this photo of me wearing a kilt and T shirt with a large-font Hebrew phrase on it, do I strike you as someone ashamed to be Jewish? Do I strike you as someone ashamed about anything? In addition to being rather obviously an Ashkenazi Jew, I have worn this T shirt openly, publicly, without shame, fear, or incident in New York City from Coney Island to Harlem; in Los Angeles from Venice to Rosemead, SGV; at No Kings marches, pro-Palestine marches, anti-Tesla demonstrations, anti-ICE protests; and into businesses and on trains and buses across the country from Portland, Maine, through Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis, Arkansas, New Orleans, all across Texas from Dallas to Alpine, through Albuquerque, through Tucson, back to Hollywood.

I’m also proud of my collection of Jewish folklore in translation and my studies of Jewish liturgy, theology, social thought, and medieval theater.

part of my collection of Jewish folklore, clockwise from the pair of blue books on the left: The Ma’aseh Book, volumes I and II, 2nd edition (London 1932), translated by Moses Gaster; The Legends of the Jews, by Louis Ginzberg, volumes 1-6; The Book of Legends, sefer ha aggadah from the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Bialik and Ravnitsky, translated by Braude; volume 7 of Ginsberg’s Legends, index to volumes 1-6; The Carpet of Solomon, by Sulamith Ish-Kishor; Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, Stern and Mirsky, editors

This is not to say I have no shame. I have shame about my looks, but not enough to do much about it. I have shame about not being a great thinker, artist, or writer, and although I have valiantly tried to fake it till I make it, the horizon of my existence is fast approaching. Not fast enough for some. Sometimes not fast enough for me. But the moment when I become a “made man” is so much worrisomely closer than is that fateful morning eons ago when I was pitched howling into this world.

My pride in being Jewish was recently impugned by someone who replied to something I posted: “you claiming the ADL or FBI’s figures [on the percentage of US hate crimes targeting Jews] are incorrect is so offensive to us Jews who are actually very proud to be jewish (sic), regardless of our feelings on Israel.” I am actually very proud to be Jewish, missy, so watch it. As for “claiming the ADL or FBI’s figures are incorrect,” let me give some context.

A ferociously bigoted anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, pro-Zionist friend (yes, friend) recently claimed that, although Jews represent only 2.4% of the US population, they “account for 70% of the hate crimes.” First, I’m sure by “account for” he meant as victims, not as perpetrators. Second, 70% of hate crimes in the US or anywhere else in the world seemed to me outlandishly high.

And I’m sure the recent stabbings, albeit non-fatal, baruch Ha-shem, a couple weeks ago on Manhattan’s upper West Side, of a Jewish man and an Asian man by, allegedly, 51-year-old Raul Martinez, who shouted “Allahu akbar” – both times – didn’t do much to offer my friend any clear-headedness regarding evaluating evidence.The New York Times ran a whole report on “Jewish Fears” and “questions about Mayor Mamdani’s responsibility for setting the tone.” That’s how important Jewish fear is in our mass culture. It gets a New York Times story. So, people are paying attention.

I checked my angry friend’s figure and, lo and behold, I was right. Jews aren’t victims of 70% of hate crimes. The figure is closer to 16.5%. The FBI and Anti-defamation League’s claim is that Jews represent 70% of religiously-motivated hate crimes¹, which are, by the same organization’s statistics, around 23% of total hate crimes. Doing the math, which I’m not that much better house trained in than in Hebrew, but nevertheless adequate, Jews “account for”… I mean, are victims of more like 16.5% of hate crimes. Or more accurately, 16.5% of hate crimes are antisemitic in nature. Not 70%. Not that antisemitism isn’t increasing in an anxiety-producing way, but an exaggeration like that is indicative of the outsized importance the persecution of Jews plays in the Jewish imagination of Jews ourselves.

So much so, that if a Jew should probe the accuracy of a statistic, he can be indirectly accused of not having enough pride in his Jewishness. Which is understandable.

Message from Ms Rachel, nominated for “Antisemite of the Year” by Stop Antisemitism, one of the great guardians of Jewish safety

Nonetheless, I call into question my rabid Zionist friend’s statistic, and rightly so. Then I further call into question the FBI’s and ADL’s statistics, because lately both are prone to bias toward reading antisemitism (along with other subversive motives) into actions and speech that are plaintive of Israeli crimes against humanity.

Not that there’s no validity to some of even that reading. But given the aforementioned outsized importance of persecution in the Jewish imagination, married to Israel apologists’ outsized financial largesse in the government, their enabling by the openly fascist Trump administration to own and control ever more news media, their habitually outrageous denials, rationalizations, and righteous indignation at news documenting occupation, apartheid, lethal targeting of journalists, medics, hospitals, children, purposeful starvation, malicious, premeditated, violent attacks against Palestinians in their businesses, homes, and persons, it’s not unreasonable to question their statistics.

And the idea that it reflects in any way on my pride at being a Jew makes me want to vomit fire directly into Ben-Gvir’s mieskeit punim [מיעס פּנים].

Now, 16.5% is still well out of proportion with 2.4%. Far less than 70%, but still out of proportion with how many Jews are in the population. I should be forgiven, considering the dubious source of the statistics, for wondering how many of those crimes are against unique victims and how many are repeat crimes against the same victims. Why would I question this? Do I think Jews are born liars? Do I believe there’s no shocking rise in antisemitic hate crimes? No.

But given the penchant for Israel’s advocates here in the USA to distort facts and outright lie, including not just the ADL but the Trump administration itself, as well as the sickeningly flagrant threadbare credibility of a certain Bari Weiss’s Free Press and now, for Pete’s sake, the same Bari Weiss’s CBS News, and the throwing around of the pro-Israel lobby’s weight in US government policy and the tendency of the legacy press to soften if not cut the viscera out of legitimate reports of Israel’s culpability in starving Gaza of food, water, medicine, and electricity, not just recently, but since 2006, how can anyone fail to suggest fact-checking those who beat the drum against antisemitism?

Bari could’ve sworn she was kissing his ass.

Or, to put it more simply: the very powerful Israeli state and its lobby in DC, backed by the very powerful USA and its less and less trustworthy press, none of which have stellar reputations of treating legitimate criticism fairly, regularly lie to make Palestinians, civilian or aligned with an army or external state, appear to deserve extra-legal punishment, and the Israeli state appear justified in committing militaristic violence up to and including human rights crimes without accountability.

DEE-FENSE DEE-FENSE DEE-FENSE DEE-FENSE

If you feel this is wrong, and that only Palestinians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and other such bodies lie while Israel is merely trying to defend itself against overwhelming opposition, I understand. Hasbara is very powerful, and, especially among us Jews, appeals to our sense of moral righteousness and duty, not to mention martyrdom and self-pity.

Even I, whom many would accuse of harboring unqualified prejudice against any action taken by the Israeli state to control more land and the people in it, or to empty the land of the people in it who aren’t Jews — even I can find myself backsliding into gullibility when an argument leans almost invisibly on the postulate that Jews are singularly victimized, not just in Western society, but all throughout history. That if not chosen by God to bear this burden, along with His Torah, then at least we are chosen by the other nations as the scapegoat of first accusation.

And there’s no doubt that the Shoah stands as a uniquely evil detour of civilization into a pit of bleakness. Sui generis as they say.

You know what there are no statistics for? Hate crimes against homeless people. More than a third of homeless people experience violence. Imagine if even casual statistics from law enforcement showed that one in three Jews experienced violence. But violence against homeless people is not categorized a hate crime. So, no story about homeless fears in The New York Times, no story about billionaires or politicians badmouthing poor people thereby setting a bad tone. Of course, that’s not a Jewish problem. Is it, you problem diagnosers?

But I ask you to consider this:

Imagine you’re a Black person aware of United States history. You know that a huge proportion of people categorized as “you” were kidnapped, taken in chains as cargo across the ocean, during which middle passage many died, stripped of their language and religion, made laboring prisoners, sold away from their spouses and children; that this went on for hundreds of years and led to the largest, most momentous shedding of blood in US history on its own soil; and that even when legally freed you were persecuted, you see videos of your people right now being harassed and killed by cops and vigilantes, you see that compared to your percentage in the general population you’re overrepresented by more than twice that in prison² and cop-involved fatalities.

That you’re more likely to die bearing children. That you’re less likely to have inherited generational wealth, while you know of many instances when successful Black enclaves, thriving against all odds, were firebombed out of existence by whites colluding together with local government. And there’s a record of the USDA cheating you out of farmland and loans. And red lining was a common real estate practice within generational memory.

And you see that the very home continent you were stolen from has been pillaged of its riches by imperial Europe, and the post-colonial West works to continue the process, assassinating your reform-minded leaders.

And Black people keep showing up dead, hanging from branches of trees. In mimicry of the time-honored tradition of lynching and mobs of white people photographing lynchings as if they were joyful picnics. If you haven’t seen one of the many photos of white people proudly posed around a mutilated body of a Black man or woman, the effect on the viewer is not dissimilar from photos of piles of Jewish corpses, victims of mass murder the Nazis almost obsessively recorded as if proud of themselves.

And suppose you saw the recent hangings of Black men and women blithely labeled “suicide” and ignored in the media and swept aside by the police. Even while whole states have negated elections of Black public officials and the same Trump government funding Israel’s rampage is officially erasing evidence of your people’s persecution at the hands of the white majority?

And The New York Times doesn’t publish a whole story about “Black fears” and Trump’s setting a national tone of belligerent guilt-free racism.

Would you not consider your people sui generis victims among the “wretched of the Earth?”

Happy KKKampfers defending their right to exist - music recommendation: the Billie Holliday song by Jewish composer Abel Meeropol, “Strange Fruit”

The maturation of the civilized human has historically, and civically, been a process of de-centering oneself. Copernicus and Galileo took our planet from the center of the cosmos and awakened us to fact that we are simply one planet among many. Not special.

So, when Mayim Bialik, excuse me, Dr. Mayim Bialik, aka Blossom, aka Sheldon’s girlfriend, aka the least favorite Jeopardy host, goes on TV and gets teary-eyed that someone wearing a “Zionism is racism” T-shirt walked near her car, I am seriously embarrassed. On her behalf. It’s a T-shirt with a sentence on it that one might angrily disagree with, but if your eyes are open to what the word Zionism has meant and what the actions motivated by it have been since even before the 20th century, you would have to admit that, whether you consider it true or not, it’s not an inarguably invalid position from the point of view of a certain large, non-monstrous sector of humanity.

And, yes, I understand any woman has every right to be intimidated by any man, no matter the T shirt. However, looking at the interaction with hindsight, the feeling was unwarranted. And a decent person might be circumspect about that, rather than wallow in an unmanifested, hypothetical victimization like a young child who had a bad dream.

If you go on mass media and cry about such a thing, pointing to it as evidence of your main concern about humanity’s inhumanity to its fellow humans — forgetting for the moment your general habit of excusing Israel’s years of criminal mass violence against its Palestinian population — you reveal yourself to be callous, cowardly, and self-centered. And just weird. You dreamed the man with the T shirt was a danger to you. And you insist it was real because comparable events have happened to others. I’m sorry, but that is not a respectable response.³

In that same Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Hillel, one of the all-time favorites, says, “If you’re not for yourself, who will be?” You know what, Rabbi, many will be. You’d be surprised. And I know you might say, no one came to our aid in the Shoah. You know that’s partly because of acceptance of Nazi propaganda. And it’s not entirely true. Every half year or so I learn of a non-Jewish hero, or a Jew who joined the partisans, or a failed plot to assassinate Nazi leadership, that I had never heard of before. And it’s not like that area doesn’t fall under my reading diet.

All of us are ourselves, by the nature of self. But “if you are only for yourself, what are you?” I’m ashamed to name it.

I’m ashamed to name it because, in my opinion, responsibility for the rise in violence against Jews, as well as that against every other group marginalized and stigmatized by the powerful and violent and those who side with them, can be laid at the feet of the inability to see outside the center stage on which too many of us, even the best of us, habitually place ourselves.

And the reason I find this important is my conviction that we will need each other to come together and fight the power we ourselves have allowed to dominate us and define our reality, our identities, and what we value.

1. Seems an oddly cherry-picked and fungible category easily tailored to a talking point. When three Arab men were gunned down in Vermont for speaking Arabic, would that have been added to the religiously-motivated hate crime stat, or to the racial, ethnic, ancestry-motivated stat?

2. Jews are less than 1.5% of the prison population, an underrepresentation by about half.

3. Imagine the fear of the family and friends and anyone perceived to be of immigrant persuasion to the fate of, eg, Silverio Villegas González, written of in a reminder recently by colleague David Isaacson