hello. From a Jew, may I just say HELL YEAH THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF THE ONLY NON JEWS SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ANTISEMITISM FR
I do what needs to be done.
It's scary, and I'm a non-confrontational person. While it can't compare to what it's like to be openly Jewish online, or worse, in person, it does stress me out. I worry about liking or reblogging posts from my favorite small fandom creators in case they follow me back to my blog and the Free/Pro-Palestine superposition collapses and I find out which kind of Free Palestine they mean. Is it going to be ignored altogether, like and move on, "die zio dog", instant block?
It's both trivial and not. Tumblr is important to me, and so is the fandom on it. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is, and unfortunately speaking about antisemitism gets you treated like they treat Jews (if they don't just assume you're Jewish to begin with).
It wasn't, and isn't an easy decision. Jews on Tumblr have become extremely isolated, and so have the few gentiles who stand with them, which takes a toll on a person, moreso for me because I am, at heart, a coward. And it isn't a single decision either, it's a thousand choices.
I'm not Jewish. I could escape the isolation and the vitriol if I really wanted to. I could suppress my empathy, block every Jew I come across to make things easier on my conscience (out of sight out of mind), scrub my blog of anything related to i/p, and go back to being an unremarkable fandom blog with occasional lukewarm soc-Dem takes on Orange Man bad. I make that choice to stay and it's a hard one.
And it's not like the Jews don't have a choice to avoid antisemitic violence.
Scrub your own blog of any mention of Judaism. Stop wearing the Star of David, the kippah, or any other visual signifier of Judaism. Stop reblogging posts from other Jews celebrating Sukkot or Yom Kippur. Move out of Jewish communities. Stop advertising that your restaurant is kosher. Stop going to synagogue. Avoid areas known to be hubs of Jewish activity and daily life. Never speak Hebrew around anyone who might recognize it. Hide your fear for your friends and relatives in Israel. Turn your back on the history of your people, a history that survives because of hundreds of generations of Jews fought to preserve it. Turn your back on the culture of your people, whether it has been yours for five years, or your family's for two thousand. Cut all association with am Yisrael, and then have it rendered all for naught because of your name or your features or because some crazed obsessive tracked down the one thing you forgot to delete.
Perhaps one day, possibly sooner than we think, they're going to come for me directly. My self-expression will be repressed because cross-dressing is a sexual offense now, and I'll have to bury my pride pins in a desk drawer somewhere or else risk being arrested for "promoting immorality". But when that day comes* the leftist spaces that promised community during the fascist Apocalypse will accept my heels and my skirts and my pins and my preference for dick over pussy.
Well, that day is here for the Jews, and for the most part the left has made it clear that the Kippah and Magen David are not safe for Jews to wear. They have made it clear that a Jew is not a safe thing to be. Even if you swear up and down that you hate Israel and hate Zionists and agree to be their token Jew, and so buy yourself time and acceptance in the small cadre of comrades you know, it won't protect you when the Molotovs start flying from people who know nothing about you except that you're a Jew. And when you're put in the ground, they'll say how tragic it is that Israel's actions are causing so much Jew-hate before they go back to baying for all Zionists to die.
I made a hard choice, and now every day I chose to renew it. But for nearly all Jews, there is no choice, because they refuse to gouge out so much of what makes them themselves to make themselves palatable to the gentile left. I won't say any saccharine bullshit about how their tremendous ordeal inspires me to . . . yada yada, because that's not how this works. But as long as the Jews remain, whether they are joined and defended by a handful of gentiles or entire continents, I hope to have the courage in me to do what is right. And to anyone else seeing this who is standing at that crossroads, I hope you find that courage in you as well. Even if you do not today, there will be more to come. As long as there is good to be done, it is never too late.
Sorry that this is so long, and kind-of a downer, and kind-of self-centered. I am glad that what I do is helping in some way to fight back the despair. I will probably start posting less frequently about the issue, because I have ambitions for this blog beyond being The Goy Antisemitism Blog™, and because actively engaging with and writing about antisemitism is physically draining, especially when discussing it as a current problem and not the topic of a historical lecture. When I burn out, I usually burn out hard, so like, I'd rather not. But I have the impulse control of a coked-up squirrel, so we'll see.
* unless queerness has been recast as bourgeois extravagance, which, like, any day now, y'know
