I have always maintained that for Jews, Europe could always return to the days of the 1930s and 40s if many factors were left unchecked. With the rise of the far-right due to counteracting a rise of Islamism, ultra-left representation and the decline of Christianity, Europe is on a tenterhook when it comes down to how antisemitism is spreading. Viruses, as we have found out more than ever, spread and infect people in the cruellest of ways. Despite what some might say about myself, I abhor and detest racism: it is an evil that leads to the most unimaginable of horrors. The far-right use it as a tool against their 'enemies', and given half the chance, would happily use what the Nazis used to decimate any ethnic minority. What we always find is that whilst racism against black people, Asian people, Hispanic people is often taken with varying degrees of seriousness, I always find that the world's oldest hatred is often undermined and pushed aside in serious discussions about racism, and that of course is antisemitism.
The reason why I write this is because of a recent experience of mine, which came from fellow Jews. I recently wrote an anonymous statement for a Twitter site that wanted Jews to document their experiences at university about any antisemitic incidences that they had suffered. Naturally, I had some of my own. In 2014, during the height of Operation Protective Edge, the Oxford University JSoc (of which I was a member), had suffered subtle, but undeniable racism. As part of a new code of ethics as given by the university's Student Union, all societies were made to sign new agreements for a new code of conduct that they must abide by. These things happen, and the JSoc President was more than happy to sign it, until there was a condemnation of Israel and Zionism in the list and a call to support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. What transpired was that we were the only society meant to do this and it was naturally agreed that this was deeply racist as Jewish students and was against our view as a pro-Zionist organisation. Though we were allowed to continue operations, we were heavily discriminated against as an organisation and were to not advertise directly as a society during Fresher's Week that autumn. We were pushed into a corner, and perhaps it was just my paranoia setting in, but many of the organisers diverted potentially interested students away from us for this reason. Eventually, things did calm down and the Student Union was more forgiving, but it had not stopped there. JSoc was never directly involved with this, but a few of us (excluding the President) had raised money for IsraAID, an organisation that would raise money for the homeless under a Jewish banner. We were headed by a former Israeli student at the university who was still involved with charity fundraising in the area and his wife. We had flyers around the university that had been ripped up and thrown away by students known to us involved (as far as we were aware) by either a university-based chapter of BDS or Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) or a local organisation within the city. Again, things like this are going to happen, but that was until our organiser's wife had returned home and found that ham and bacon had been left on the front doorstep of their home not far from the St Hugh's College campus. Our organiser (who I will keep anonymous for the safety of his family), had contacted Principal Elish Angiolini for answers, and all that came in reply (after six weeks, by the way) was 'we'll look into it.' I wasn't looking for a condemnation or even an apology, knowing for well that it wasn't Principal Angiolini's fault for what had happened, but we had all expected more than just that as a response. However, this came as no surprise to me years later, considering what the university had allowed the disgraced Oxford University Labour Club to get away with for years unchecked. Yes, the incident had happened off campus, but it had started at St Hugh's where I had been in halls of residence. Quite frankly, though I was mostly anonymous and wanted to keep a low profile to get through my studies, I did not know whether I was a walking target in someway as I continued to wear a yarmulke and observe Shabbat. For a few weeks, I did not wear one just to be on the safe side, and luckily, that had been the end of that for a while.
Why did I therefore bring up my fellow Jews to start with? Well, the same Twitter site recently saw a JSoc member, who had become a member after I graduated, recently dismissed the comment and claimed that it was 'fake', prompting the Twitter page to delete it, despite knowledge that the member was not at Oxford as the same time as me. The incident that I discussed did not even involve JSoc and I didn't mention about the code of conduct incident, just the IsraAID one. In this era of heightened racial tensions, and at a time when Jewish voices need empowering to discuss our experiences of racism on university campuses, I was surprised to see that off one 'account', my own experiences could be diminished in such a way. I have heard the term 'two Jews, three opinions' many times, and it is one that my grandfather recounted frequently when he was still alive, and we as Jews are known to argue amongst each other, but the one thing I know that we do best is look out for our own. To me, this was a betrayal of what I had always believed in and led me to think about how prejudice has shaped my own life and what final conclusion I have come to regarding antisemitism.
I remember about a year ago a hashtag called #MyFirstAntisemiticExperience, and it told the story of many Jewish and even some non-Jewish people who recalled the first time that they knew what antisemitism was after experiencing it first hand. My earliest memory was being about five or six years old, going to school at a Jewish Day School that I attended in Copenhagen. A group of Middle Eastern looking boys, perhaps about sixteen years old, had been on the corner of a road where my mother had been taking myself, my twin sister, my older brother and younger sister (who was in a stroller at that age) towards the school. My brother and I in our yarmulkes looked very obvious and stood out like a sore thumb, whilst my mother in her shawl looked also very distinguishably Orthodox (though we are Reformists). I distinctly remember one of the boys, or perhaps all three or four of them, making a gun gesture with his fingers and shouting 'dode joder' (Die, Jews) at us as my mother tried to hurry us along. I had very little understanding of what was happening, but the look of determination and relentless embarrassment on my mother's face got us to where we needed to be. I talked about this to my mother only a few months back, and whilst she didn't remember this specific incident, she did recall young Middle Eastern looking men giving her filthy looks whenever she entered shops for how she looked. Even at her first workplace where she was a sign language teacher, she recalled the disgust that her colleagues had given towards her when she wanted time off from work to observe holidays that were coming up with her family. It was subtle, not oblivious, but she said that was what 'being a Jew was all about: accepting it, because you can't change it and nobody will care.'
My youth was thankfully forgiving in terms of antisemitic incidents, but as my mother correctly said, was something that I just accepted as being normal, and to this day, experiencing antisemitism is just an experience that I have grown to accept. At the same Jewish Day School, we had an armed guard outside who was not Jewish, as far as I am aware, but just a pleasant man who had a duty to stand on the front gate every day. In my childlike naivety, I never questioned as to why he was there. Three times a year, on average, we had mass evacuations from the school building, and we were given drills on how to stay away from windows in case they shattered, stay out of sight and hide under the tables. What they were preparing us for were bomb threats, and like I said, we had these up to three times a year. Credible bomb threats too, not just average drills. I was probably about ten when I first noticed that the nice guard on the gate wasn't just a nice guard, but was an armed guard, poised and ready to shoot anybody on site who was willing to harm a bunch of children under the age of thirteen for their ethnic background. When I left the Day School, I went to a mainstream comprehensive where I was only one of three Jewish students in attendance (the other two were my siblings). I was visibly un-Jewish as my parents didn't want me wearing my yarmulke, nor did they want me even mentioning my faith in case I was discriminated in someway. I kept it quiet until it came up randomly in conversation, around Yom Kippur, which happened to land on a school day and I was not in attendance for 'religious observation'. None of my peers thought much of it, which made me feel more confident in my faith, and only minor incidents such as a few bullies making false rumours of me having some 'disease' and discouraging my friends from being near me. It was nothing major, and over the years, I've learned to grow a thick skin around the issue. One Christmas, I remember our choir teacher taking me to one side and making some comment about wanting to exclude me from any Christmas concert because 'your parents are the type to complain' about it. On the contrary, my parents were very supportive and I willingly went to all Christmas concerts for the rest of my school life. As part of a predominantly Christian society, one had to assimilate, and that is what I did.
Just like with the recent Twitter debacle, I found that it was mostly people I considered to be my likeminded peers that I felt have given me more of a reason to call out on their antisemitism than the white supremacists or neo-Nazis that just call me a few names online. Words have no meaning unless they do something. Calling me a 'kike' or a 'yid' (believe me, I've heard it all) does nothing to me. Words are empty, not violence. Free speech is what matters, and believe me, what I've heard and seen is just the tip of the iceberg. What it comes down to is simply accepting abuse, and it is something that I have come accustomed to. Remember, it never ended with the Nazis, and antisemitism is being tolerated far too much in polite society. When I lived in Germany, I had peers who said that they were 'ashamed of their history' for what happened during the Holocaust, which I never understood. Why apologise for something that you had no part in? We have modern activists from the white, middle class who apologise for slavery, but not for the 1290 Edict of Expulsion or the massacres that took part in London (1189) and York (1190)? It seems what we are entering is a New Antisemitism, by which blaming the state of Israel as a Jewish state is a smokescreen for something much more sinister. When antisemitism is not taken seriously by so-called 'anti-racists' and it is seen as nothing more as a 'Zionist ploy', the plot begins to thicken about where these people stand. It began with the boycotts of Jewish stores, calling the Jews the 'eternal enemy' and blaming them for the failures of the old and current leaderships. Whilst the far-right are obviously explicit in telling us this, the far-left are more tactile and sneaky about it. They can substitute the word 'Jew' for 'Zionist', share Shulamit Aloni memes (without context, by the way) and scream buzzwords 'genocide' and 'concentration camps', because they know the context behind them in demeaning the Shoah. They openly defend Holocaust deniers (Paul Eisen, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc.) and make the links that the Nazis did between Jews and the control of the media, public records and governments, instead sneakily replacing the word 'Jew' with 'Zionist'. The mask is slipping on these people, and the further it slips, the more the face is revealed. It is no wonder that the work of far-right racists is also shared and seems similar to that of far-left racists.
I take heed my mother's words about accepting abuse, because at the end of the day, nobody will care. Us Jews need to look out for ourselves, and it is for that reason why I see the very existence of Israel as a necessity against the rising extreme factions of the political divide now creeping in Europe and the United States. It's very much a shame for European Jews, unlike our American cousins, that we cannot have a certain weapon that we could use to defend ourselves and be perceived as a threat against far-right and far-left racists that wish to do harm to us. Alas, we fight the good fight, but words sometimes are not enough. I don't believe in taking to the streets and fighting against the mobs: I believe in a quiet life for us all.
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