For the last several months, virtually every diagnostic conversation I have had with friends ends with an agreement that we Americans have a problem with fear. You know those conversations -the talks where you critique all the things from all the angles until you manage to distill the problem, or at least articulate the question.
We sacrifice real safety for a false sense of security, generally fed by unfounded fears. When I was doing graduate level study on urban crime and prevention techniques, I learned about the massive gap between the Incidence of Crime and the Perception of Crime. Certain places, people, situations are skewed as more dangerous, or as safer choices, when the data reveals an opposite picture.
The reality has only gotten more stark in the last 20 years. Entire neighborhoods are written off as blighted by reputation alone, same with parks and open spaces. News reports mislabel neighborhoods where crime happens everyday. Every incident north of where I live, for example, happens in Five Points regardless of where anything actually occurred.
Households are arming themselves at alarming rates, perhaps believing that a handgun keeps you safe, when every data point collected tells the opposite story -the presence of guns radically increases injury and death. We wall ourselves off from each other when opening up our notion of community is actually what is required for safety.
Some of these metrics are vague or fuzzy because we don’t have much comprehensive data or consistent reporting or collection. But there are some overall systemic thresholds for the rise of fear and violence. Gun sales is one, obviously.
Also on the list of historic bellwethers are acts of violence against Jewish communities. I’d also argue that for the past several decades, we can add backlashes against the Muslim community that follow similar trends, but there is not as much scholarship there. The story of how Jews have been treated, and what that treatment foretells in history is long and studied.
I don’t have a Sunday morning pulpit but I do guest preach regularly -or did before Covid. I was deeply honored and shaken to preach the day after the shooting in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue in the fall of 2018. I ditched my prepared sermon and preached about the Tree of Life itself, and what it means to honor Creation and work towards tikun olam, the healing of the world.
Donald Trump had been President nearly 2 years by then, and strange rumors about Jews and Jewish culture were on the rise. The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, VA, had occurred the year before, and a good friend had been one of those activists trapped in a church, surrounded by Neo-Nazis carrying torches, screaming anti-Semitic catch phrases, and threatening violence.
A month after I preached, Rep. Marjorie Green Taylor blamed massive California fires on Jewish space lasers.
Everyone laughed, and at some level, that disturbed me more than anything else. We often attempt to cast as foolish that which we fear or despise, and I think that’s where Rep. Taylor is coming from. But it was how dismissive my friends were that was so off-putting.
Laughing off or mocking anti-semitism doesn’t actually undermine its power the way satire and other humor often can. In fact, it normalizes the process and makes pointing out the trends just another example of political correctness run amok instead of the valid metric we know it is.
The brilliance of Jewish humor in this regard, for instance in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, is that it simply presents the anti-semitism in all its absurdity. This award-winning and hysterical musical had as its working title the name of one of its great songs “Springtime For Hitler.” It doesn’t mock the anti-semitism; it allows the hate to eat itself on stage as fuel for laughter.
I started talking about these increases in hate speech against Jews, and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. And for the first time in a long time, there was little to no follow up to any conversation starter I threw out there.
Now, I am used to saying controversial things, or naming those issues others would prefer I not discuss. I used to be the only white person I knew who spoke openly about white privilege and white supremacy, and now the conversation is normative. I, and many many other people, figured out how to talk about the hard things.
My often awkwardly negotiating of how to do this usually includes speaking out about specific concerns before they are dismissed as panic or hysteria. Claiming that any articulation of a concern is hyped up propaganda is a typical deflection technique and so I try to get ahead of this.
The increased anti-Semitic violence in the United States is like this, I suppose. It seems obvious to me that it’s on the rise, and history clearly tells us this is a sign and signal of an increase in violence overall, and fear. The root of it all. Fear.
I grew up in Memphis, TN, and I have been thinking a lot about what that Southern childhood brought me. So many gifts, and high among them has been lifelong relationships with practicing Jews, cultural Jews, intellectual Jews. I wasn’t really aware what a special thing it was that a friend brought her grandmother to school one day, who told us a very scary story about being our ages and running from streets and streets full of glass.
My friend’s mother’s mother had survived Germany’s Kristallnacht in 1938, and her family had fled to the United States.
Broadly, there is a spectrum of observance, practice, and political sentiment among the various Synagogues and Temples of the Memphis region that taught me early on that Jews are not monolithic as a people. I have always known for instance, that to criticize the political actions of Israel, or to advocate for rights of the Palestinian people, is not itself anti-Semitic or against Israel. There are Jews of all political and social stripes, Jews of every race and ethnicity.
As I grew up, I learned more about the facts, and about how Jews have been treated historically by Western culture. My friend’s grandmother’s shining eyes have never left my mind. I can still sense her deep sadness and confusion at how her neighbors, people she and her family had known all her life, could do this. Whenever I heard anti-semitic rhetoric, slang, or sloppy syllogism from my friends growing up, they were always the same people who used the N word. But they were also neighbors and friends.
Underneath all of this hatred and vitriol is a fear that those we have harmed desire to bring the same harm to us. That we will get what we deserve. It’s an essential lack of faith in the humanity of others because we have been so inhumane. It also means that we haven’t learned the lessons of the Holocaust, a primary of which is that we all have the potential to be monstrous, to allow evil clear passage, to take the path of least resistance directly into a gas chamber.
We are all something to be feared -humanity can be vicious. But we are also all the solution. We have both the ability to harm and the ability to heal. We can make the choices that renew and regenerate rather than destroy. But we have to face our fears, and be aware of what is happening around us.
And so I talk. I nudge.
I try to make spaces where these conversations can happen.
Join me.