🧚‍♂️🔥🌈

The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.

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Because you don’t consciously attack us (and listen, we appreciate that) but you still participate in a LOT of behaviors that make us deeply uncomfortable and let us know we’re not welcome.

My whole life I’ve been told “oh gosh I never would have guessed you were Jewish! You don’t look it!”, which tells me that 1) you have a clear idea of a stereotypical Jew, and 2) you live your life with the absolute view that unless someone is visibly setting themselves apart that all people in your space are either religiously or culturally Christian.

I’m not orthodox, or even particularly conservative, and I often get “well you don’t have a Jewish name” (I do) or “gosh! You don’t act like those other Jews”. I get “you don’t keep kosher? So you’re not really Jewish” or “well you’re a bad Jew then”. I get “well we all believe in the same Old Testament, right?”

I get told that my hair would look better straightened chemically, because my big Jewish curls are “unprofessional”. I get told that my cultural foods are gross by people who gladly eat bagels and babka and rugelach and matzoh ball soup. I get told my patterns of speech are aggressive or impersonal or comical. I’m told that “all Jews stick together”, and asked about Israel, a place I’ve never been to.

I am told that you are an ally because you watch a lot of documentaries about the Holocaust. Then you’ll tell me facts you learned, as though I didn’t learn them from the cradle, from the mouths of survivors. They’re a fun fact to you, they’re a warning to me.

In media we’re all rich, or we’re weak, ineffectual, anxious. We’re a joke. When one of us is great, we’re great, but we’re “from a Jewish family”, never actually a Jew. When one of us is terrible, though, they’re a Jew. When something bad happens, it’s a new Holocaust, and when it happens to someone we are told “imagine if it happened to Jews!” as though we don’t live that, as though we haven’t lived that for centuries.

When we say “this is antisemitic, we feel uncomfortable” we are told to shut up and sit down and stop existing in the space because we make people feel uncomfortable, or we’re told that it’s a joke, or it’s made to be a joke. Jewish space lasers, amirite?

So yes, there’s a very good chance we mean you. All we ask, all we ever ask, is that you listen. We ask you to try. We ask you to pay attention.