The Inconvenience of Antisemitism

My earliest encounter with antisemitism was an inconvenience.

In elementary school, I wanted to join the Brownie troop that so many of my friends participated in after school. Even though I asked, and even though it seemed a reasonable request, I wasn’t allowed. It was when I was a few years older that I found out that the troop leader, who lived in my neighborhood, was antisemitic. My mom, and the mothers of my Jewish friends, had to make the difficult decision to protect their little girls from inevitable hurt by dispensing the smaller hurt of telling us no without an in-depth explanation.

As I got older, I encountered antisemitism in different ways, some more personal than others. I was asked pointedly why I killed Jesus (I promise, I did not) or I was the target of Jewish “jokes” that felt anything but funny. I was micro-aggressed, a word that was not part of our vocabulary in the 90s, by teachers and fellow students. In high school, I lost a public speaking competition for a scholarship offered by a local organization. It sounds innocuous enough, but even the parents of other competitors thought I was a shoe-in to win (and said as much before winners were announced). After not even placing in the top three, it was in the car on the way home that my mom noted I was wearing a Star of David pendant on my necklace. It may have been completely unrelated, but it was impossible to not question.

Nothing, though, prepared me for the antisemitism I would encounter as an adult - in workplaces, in public, on social media. Here’s the thing about being a Jewish woman of Eastern European decent (what we call Ashkenazi), especially one with her non-Jewish father’s last name: no one thinks I’m Jewish at first blush. We’ll explore later if that’s a privilege or not (spoiler: it’s not), but it means that my identity is cloaked, and I am thrust into situations and conversations that may otherwise not happen if I had a stereotypically Jewish last name like Feldstein or Shapiro.

The increase in antisemitism throughout the world since October 7, 2023, isn’t isolated to large incidents of violence. In fact, most manifest in day-to-day encounters and subtle reminders that Jewish people, who make up approximately 0.2% of the world’s population, are still considered “others.” That’s not a typo - less than one percent of everyone alive on the planet is Jewish. The Jewish population has always been small, and it would be impossible to overstate the lasting devastation of the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

What has caught me most off guard during the last eighteen months is how the conversation around antisemitism moved to the mainstream... but only in passive ways. In the Chicago area, where I live, there is a series of billboards along major expressways sponsored by JewBelong, an organization that celebrates Judaism and denounces antisemitism. The Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, launched a Stand Up to Jewish Hate campaign with the NFL, which included public service announcements during commercial breaks of games.

The first time I saw one of the ads, I turned to my husband and said, “In case you’re wondering, it is weird as hell to watch a commercial asking people to not hate you for your religion.” My husband, notably, is not Jewish.

So why do I flag that the billboards and ads are passive? It’s hard to experience the increase in antisemitism (and discourse) and not feel at least a little confused, too, by the lack of unified reaction. In 2020, after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, people organized. There were protests, diversity committees were formed in workplaces, and people had long overdue, challenging conversations about being Black in America. [And that deserves a whole conversation, too - the dismantling of those groups, the lack of financial support for efforts, the lack of defined goals…]

I can’t explain why increased antisemitism and its associated danger hasn’t garnered the same reaction or urgency, and I wouldn’t begin to try to understand it. I do know, though, that it in at least one case, a community I am part of was promised a conversation about antisemitism, and it never manifested. So a local leader became a hero briefly for making an unfulfilled promise, while Jewish community members were left once again perplexed by the lack of actual support and action that could lead to change.