A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Sixty-Nine

Last night, I acknowledged my trepidation at raising questions around the subject of anti-Semitism, and pointed towards my underlying fear of having these comments dismissed and ignored as irrelevant.  This is, I think, a common fear among those who face bigotry and oppression, and I am certain that aspects of the experiences I have had are not unique to me or to my being Jewish, but I do think it is worth acknowledging that I had the luxury of growing up in a city with a large and thriving Jewish community, and was largely aware of these ideas from a distance until I was older and moved to other parts of the world where Jewishness is less common.  

For example, I, like many Jews who grew up in the late twentieth century, was not all that familiar with the concept of the blood libel.  I think that the first time I can recall being taught about it explicitly was during my college years.  It may be that I had encountered the concept at some point before that, but this is my first distinct memory of learning about the concept, and I am quite glad I had that exposure in that classroom, because it was in another classroom, while I was myself teaching college, that a student in a humanities class stated to me that, "Jews put Christian blood in their matzo."  I was taken aback and rather horrified, as one might imagine, and did not really know how to respond, beyond stating that this was a heinous and untrue claim that had been used to justify centuries of persecution, but I also realized that I was not all that capable of changing the narrative, seeing as a person who believes that already might question my honesty on the matter, yet, when I spoke to the school, asking for help in addressing this incident, I was told straight out that they felt it was just a matter of the student needing to learn, and that I had already handled it in my class.

At other times, I have had people I consider close friends refuse to take a stance against outright anti-Semitic statements.  In school, I had, as I mentioned yesterday, numerous classes which glossed over or skipped fully passages that revealed a hate for Jews.  I recall spending a few minutes discussing the anti-Semitism of George Orwell while reading Down And Out in Paris And London, how the teacher (himself Jewish) brushed the issue aside as irrelevant to the classes purposes.  Another teacher acted similarly while reading Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  It is a matter that I always have found to be dismissed out of hand and without consideration.  Even today, I see these issues are often pushed to the side in our culture.  I think of comments I've heard prominent figures today make, sometimes quite directly, not to mention the growth of hate movements that clearly place Jews as a primary target, and I have to wonder: if this has been my experience already, what is to come if things continue in the way they have been heading?