exposing antisemitism

You'll have to be more specific about what it is you don't want me to do, anon.

We need more non-Jewish allies.

To those of you who aren't Jewish, we desperately need you to speak up. When an antisemitic attack happens, talk about it. When you witness antisemitism online or in the real world, confront it. When you see Jewish people talking about the antisemitism they face, amplify their voices.

To dismiss his evil as a symptom of insanity is to dismiss the responsibility that society holds. We want to call him crazy because we want to distance ourselves from his evil, we want to see ourselves as above it.

But his violent act is a symptom of a larger problem. The vast majority of people do not commit mass murder, but the fact of the matter is that many people in our society do hold the same sorts of antisemitic and xenophobic ideas. The Pittsburgh shooter knew other people who hated Jewish people and refugees, and it helped him feel justified in his beliefs.

The fact of the matter is that although this is an extreme example of antisemitism, antisemitic acts have actually been on the rise in the United States and abroad.

Casting off our culture or religion will not save us from antisemites. It will not solve antisemitism. It will not solve anything. It will only remove from us our cultural and religious heritage and force us to take on aspects of those who have persecuted us, but as even the most assimilated Jews have been subject to antisemitism, even then we would be subject to antisemitism.

Don’t tell me you’re “just anti-Israel” if you stop Jews wearing yarmulkes or Stars of David to question them about their political views.

Don’t tell me you’re “just anti-Israel” if you think of even the smallest of Jewish children as instruments of violence.

It has become fairly common to lump Judaism and Christianity together under a single banner. A “Judeo-Christian” religion, “Judeo-Christian” countries, “Judeo-Christian” philosophy.

This terminology is largely incorrect and is often perpetuated with the goal of giving credence to Christian philosophy and practices by pairing them up with the older Jewish religion through an appeal to antiquity fallacy that is meant to hold up Christianity and imply a positive relationship between Judaism and Christianity that simply has existed neither historically nor in the modern era.

Christian philosophy is not Jewish philosophy. Christianity separated from Judaism two thousand years ago and practitioners of Christianity and Christian institutions have done everything in their power to separate their practices from Jewish ones, their history from a Jewish one. Their methods? Everything from the rejection of Mosaic law and established Jewish holy days to political repression and murder.

The Judaism of today is very different from the Judaism that existed at the time that Christianity first emerged. Judaism has continued to develop over the past two thousand years and so any holdovers from Judaism that Christianity may have somehow retained despite forcibly throwing off all elements of Jewish practice would be almost unrecognizable in the face of the developments that have occurred since then. Rabbinical Judaism, Kabbalah, Jewish rationalism . . . none of these existed in their present form two thousand years ago. None of these things are Christian.

People frequently invoke the Holocaust when speaking of large-scale discrimination in the modern era, and at first glance, this might even make sense. After all, if people are subject to abuse for an arbitrary aspect of themselves that they cannot change, if they are threatened with death due to these characteristics, surely the comparison is apt? No.

There is only one Holocaust. There will only ever be one Holocaust. It was a specific moment in time that transpired as the result of countless years of oppression and discriminatory practices, coupled with a political climate that bred it like an opportunistic infection.

No one but Holocaust survivors are Holocaust survivors. No one but Jews are Jews. No one but the Rroma are Rroma. No one but the Nazis are Nazis. No one but Hitler is Hitler.

Comparing anything to the Holocaust, no matter how terrible, does nothing but minimize the real, actual human tragedy of the Holocaust. Real, human lives, human stories, human hopes, brutally taken, murdered, ripped apart. Families, gone. Towns, gone. History, culture, gone. Lives, gone.

On many occasions, non-Jews have asked me how exactly I’m Jewish. They know a little about Jewish law, just enough to know that if someone’s mother is Jewish, they’re a Jew too. They might know that being Jewish has a religious component and an ethnic one as well and that these two components may not match up.

So they ask questions like “which of your parents is Jewish?” or “so, are you like, ethnically Jewish or is it just your religion?” or “so, are you like . . . Jewish-Jewish or???”

This is not an attitude I’ve encountered much in the Jewish community. I have hardly ever been asked by another Jewish person to tell them just how Jewish my lineage is or asked if I’m a convert or anything like that or something invasive about circumcision. In my experience, it just doesn’t come up that much except in matters of marriage and minyanim and battei din. The questions are much more frequently along the lines of “did you go to Jewish day school?” or “what synagogue do you go to?”  or "are you shomer negiah?"

But non-Jews seem to be unduly concerned with this question. They want to know just how Jewish exactly are you really? and the person being questioned has to pass their litmus test for determining Jewishness, never mind that a non-Jew would generally be unaware of certain details of Jewish intracommunity issues such as who exactly is Jewish? In general, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew and the question of who is a Jew should really be left up to Jews to decide because this is very much an intracommunity issue.

But apparently, ninety Jews in a country of 25 million people is ninety too many for Yemen, and now these last remaining Jews of a lineage stretching back millennia are faced with the ultimatum of either throwing off their Jewishness or fleeing to a country they have never known.

Only decades ago, the population of Jews in Yemen numbered in the tens of thousands. Today, only about a hundred remain. The rest have fled to other countries that were more hospitable to them due to a combination of antisemitism, war, and the ease of making aliyah.

The few remaining Jews of Yemen have recently been told to convert or leave the country by the Yemeni Houthi, who seized control of the capital of Yemen in January 2015. The slogan used by the Houthi rebels includes the phrase “damn the Jews,” raising concerns about the safety of the last remaining Jews of Yemen.

Houthi leaders claim that the slogan used does not come from a place of antisemitism and ill will towards the Jews of Yemen, but a place of hatred towards Israel. The ultimatum the Houthi rebels have given the dwindling Jewish community in Yemen, however, paints a different picture.

The Jews of Yemen have lived in the region for roughly 2,500 years. After the birth of Islam in the seventh century, the Jews in the region had a weak but mostly peaceful relationship with the Muslims living alongside them, though pogroms did break out from time to time.

In the 1800s, situations started to take a darker turn for Yemen’s Jews as a series of decrees placed harsher restrictions on Jews and Jewish orphans were removed from Jewish communities for Muslim families to adopt, essentially tearing young Jews away from their people, culture, and heritage. Violent antisemitism in the form of riots and pogroms took place following the creation of Israel, and emigration of Jews from Yemen turned from a trickle to a flood.

Violence and oppression has become commonplace and expected by the Jews of Yemen. As their numbers have dwindled, they have become only more vulnerable to the effects of antisemitism. Multiple cases of murder, beatings, and forced conversions have become the lived reality for the Jewish community in Yemen, and with the recent ultimatum from Houthi rebel leaders, the situation looks all the more dire.