We Know What This Is

#BlackLivesMatter, period. They matter because human rights matter. They matter because black history IS American history. They matter because American history all too often repeats itself, and we must do better. Billions of people around the world are standing up in the wake of horrific scenes of police brutality. Murders like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and George Floyd have rocked a nation fed up with systemic inequality and oppression the likes of which would drive any sane person to seek revenge for the blood shed. Yet the fight for equality persists. Voices are being lifted up to heights never before seen. Protests continue to this day and show no signs of fear from either the global pandemic of the coronavirus or the omnipresent threat of police escalation and white provocateurs that have turned many a peaceful protest violent.

Amidst this sea of voices however, one community in America, or at least in my hometown of Atlanta Georgia, remains largely silent. Oh there are individuals and organizations within the community that stand with their fellow Americans in seeking justice for those innocent black lives snuffed out by those sworn to protect and serve. The community’s leaders however have so far kept their heads down and their lips hushed. I unfortunately speak of my people, my community, the American legion of white Ashkenazi Jews. Jews that should know better and speak up. Now while Jewish people, especially in America, remain secular and cannot in that way be looked upon as monolithic, shared history accounts for a lot.

Jews have always had a complex place within American history. Whenever the subject is broached many are quick to point to Hammerstein as the father of American theatre. People like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby along with the duo Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as the progenitors of American superhero comics, a cultural staple that has transformed American media into the juggernaut it is today. Beyond these notable names we are known by our business acumen. Bankers, businessman, accountants, there seems to be no limit to how high a smart well educated Jew can rise in this country, but there in lies the problem.

For far too long white Jews specifically have forgotten key aspects of our history, so drunk on the delusion that the hard times are over that they lose themselves in the view atop their lofty pedestals. Fact is, we have always been outsiders and we always will be no matter how many accolades are thrown at our feet.

I know this because depending on when great granddad and grandma came to this country, they were most likely trying to flee from Nazi Germany before things got really bad. Bad in this case referring to the holocaust, that old chestnut of history other white Americans love to quote as a somber piece of history yet do nothing to understand the events that brought it about in the first place. We know different though, we know how subtle, how creeping, and how systematic the effects of Nazism were in Germany. This is why we think we owe America our lives and why we must keep our heads down and not rock the boat, for we don’t want to experience the pain our families went through when they were made a target.

But we’ve always been a target. From the moment we tried to leave by the ship load and were turned away from America’s ports. The land of the free and home of the brave fearing that our presence would bring about war and disillusion to the sovereign and, at the time, neutral Christian country turned us away. This incident lives in infamy as the “Ship of Fools” and it has never once been mentioned substantially by any US President sitting or otherwise in the past 20 years during Holocaust Remembrance Day. Some might say it’s not important. Families were still allowed to come here either before or after that incident and America still stopped the Holocaust, or so the story goes in some circles, so why complain?

The reason is quite simple; America has never welcomed us. While it’s soldiers liberated concentration camps and fed our disenfranchised in WWII, on the home front we received nothing but contempt from a populace so consumed with isolationist rhetoric that from the moment our people stepped off the ships our story of what was happening there fell on deaf ears. This is why holocaust denial is and remains an issue, because by the time we arrived, Americans didn’t want to help, they wanted us to be useful. So even as we were denied homes, jobs, common welfare, even as we were spit on called and called “kikes” we persisted. We traded the skills we used throughout Europe for a modicum of decency and worth. We became bankers, lawyers, businessmen out of necessity and rose through the ranks of American society by necessity because if we didn’t, we feared being persecuted or worse sent back home to die.

This is why we happily own the label of “model minority” a back handed complimentary title that is all too often shared with the Asian American community, a group of people American Jews have more in common with than we realize. Like many Asian Americans we came to this country trying to escape chaos back home, we sought stability, safety, liberty, justice, and freedom. Because of this we play the game of the rest of white America pretending that because the majority of us are pale skinned and have “proven” our worth we don’t have to worry about being painted with targets anymore.

But we of all people should know that the target doesn’t disappear just because we have small seat at the table. Far too often are we held up by that “model minority” label, given as free examples of how immigrants can succeed in this nation. Yet for all that bluster this does nothing but hurt us as America has its sights on us at all times, weaponizing our historical professions as stereotypical standards by which all other minorities/immigrants must be held too. This is just as dehumanizing as calling us “kikes” while turning our ships around at the ports. Whether we are less than the average white American or greater than the average person of color we are an “other” either way. This is why media is filled with offensive stereotypes of shrill banshee like Jewish women and effeminate nasal congested Jewish men. We are seen as so high up on the totem poll to be considered good enough fodder to be “knocked down a peg.” By that same logic though we are also considered enough of an “alien entity” that other white Americans can from the safety of their privileged positions laugh at us without shame associated with mocking other minority groups.

Many Ashkenazi recognize this of course, but many more ignore it or even embrace it. Why? Because they want a place at the table. They want to be like Jared Kushner and have the president's ear while he raises his Jewish grandchildren born of a goyim mother yet somehow considered Jewish all the same. Oh yes, the community was all too happy to accept Kushner as one of their own and claim that his seat at the table was proof positive that America or at the very least President Trump had the community’s interests at heart. Those notions were quickly dissolved when Steve Bannon, a man known for his public anti-Semitic philosophies, was made a part of Trump’s inner circle. Jewish leaders across the country decried his inclusion and I say the same thing now as I did then: anyone who had a problem with his appointment should have spoken up long before then.

The moment Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president he spoke of Mexicans as criminals and rapists. He spoke of registering Muslims to a national data base, and he spoke of national Zionistic agendas including resolving the conflict in Israel to a one state solution. I say any one of those things should have been a crimson red flag, a warning sign against encroaching fascism, the same kind that united Germany against a common “enemy” and set our people on a course of disenfranchisement and death.

Yet for many elders in the community, talk of Israel and the resolution of a sole state was enough of a rallying cry to drown out the voices of dissent. We may have heard talk eerily similar to Hitler’s fill the theatre at Trump tower but we ignored it just like we ignore the cries of Palestinians every time talk of Israel comes up. Again though, I’m not surprised as the land of our ancestors remains hotly debated within the community. Its easy to get sucked into that debate and forget the fact that we live here, not there. By extension, we forget the fact that because we live here we don’t own America’s successes, we share in both them and in America’s failures. We talk of Israel and America’s support for the Jewish power post WWII and beyond, but forget that America routinely test fires its latest weapons over the Gaza Strip in shows of “solidarity” with the “ancestral land.” We talk of the great contributions we made to the American economy and world markets while forgetting that men like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky in the Jewish mob built the financial backbone of organized crime in this country for many generations. We talk of Rogers and Hammerstein but forget that without black innovations in the world of dance, music, and fashion, we would not have the media landscape we have today.

Still we still adhere to our “model minority” image. Its why we yell at our TV screens as images of the “scary” protestors flash on screen. We all too quickly decry the protests as self-defeating nonsense that will ultimately make them all a bigger target. All the while forgetting that we are still targeted. We are living in a country shaped by our actions and by the actions of those who profited off of our otherness while demonizing our presence up until the point we became useful. We have watched as Jewish cemeteries are defaced, Nazi’s parade down the streets, and hate crimes reach staggering numbers daily as other Jewish leaders in governance are attacked for supposed inclusion in a “world government,” itself another offensive stereotype.

All of this and yet we can’t seem to fathom how all of that affects other minority communities? We can’t seem to grasp that the same jack boots that forced Anne Frank into hiding are the same jack boots that stood on George Floyd’s neck? More to the point, can we not see how all of this good vs. bad minority nonsense effects how we see black people?

The white Ashkenazi Jewish majority, regardless of sect or secular nature has always had a rather dismissive take on Jewish people of color, ranging from the passively racist to the outright grotesque. Throughout my own upbringing I was exposed to the Yiddish slur shvartze. It means black, not in a good way, and used to refer to any dark skinned person, especially a black jew. Growing up, I only heard that word in a Mel Brooks movie so I thought it was a joke. Only later on did I learn that in many other Jewish families, if a black person stepped across the threshold of their home or god forbid wanted to marry their daughter, hell was raised and in some cases the cops were called, and a scene by now all too familiar to America played out right in the drive way during Seder dinner. This isn’t even fully addressing the issue black Jews face when they try to pray at a majority white Ashkenazi temple. Or when the subject of black Jewish history is brought up.

This is the legacy of our people. As much as we want to hide behind our secular nature, our model minority privilege, and or pretend that because we made it out of of Nazi Germany we can now live in peace, the truth is we can’t. We can’t ignore the swastikas on the signs of alt-right militias, the inflammatory us vs them rhetoric of an authoritarian president, or the systemic brutalization of black people. As a final point, before now we saw concentration camps pop up on the border. Did we ignore it just because we weren’t in them? Regardless, we can’t ignore this issue now. Black lives should matter to every Jewish American because we know what fascism looks like. We know what this leads to and Jared Kushner having Trump’s ear won’t change that. We’ll never be “club members” so let’s instead try to be the allies we wish we had in 1941. Listen, learn, and do better.