What Terrifies Me

 Almost exactly seven years ago, I sat on the seat of my bike on the Charles Street sidewalk at the western corner of Penn Station, uncertain and afraid, as Park Heights Avenue squared off against North Avenue. Closer to Penn Station was a protest against the Israeli occupation. Farther away from the station was a demonstration in support of the IDF. On both sides were people I knew who provoked a terribly complicated web of desires - for approval, respect, esteem, love, and all the rest.... and I knew that by yet again not fully taking a side, I'd get none from either.

Like Larry David in the Palestinian chicken episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” I felt, perhaps I was, directly in its center, with friends on either side, and tried to drive out visions of somebody pulling out an Uzi or pushing a button on a suicide bomb and mowing us all down. Demonstrations like that are exactly how civil wars get started.

Every Israeli military operation is like a holiday ritual for me in which I’m purified through a trial by emotional fire. I have experienced many visions of hell over the years, one of the more comic ones is what inevitably happens when Israel comes up. For years, I'd go about North Baltimore, which views me as the token Jew who mounts unconscionable defenses of Israel, then go back to Pikesville, which views me as the token progressive who mounts unconscionable defenses of Palestine. It used to be intellectual fire, but I made sure to read up so that I know more about the 'matzav' than anyone who talks to me to the point that the statistics can flow off my tongue without awkwardness.

Nevertheless, the tragicomic terror remains. As far as terrors go, it's obviously not much. My person is in no way threatened, but I have all too much experience that one wrong word on this subject of subjects is hours of verbal combat followed by followup fights that don't cease for years. People come up to me and ask me to 'explain' why people who disagree with them believe what they do, and inevitably I say something they find offensive, at which point they explain why people who disagree with them are so clearly wrong and they're so clearly right.

People who are not Jewish, hell, people who are, do not understand that Jews live in the cracks of history. We should not be alive now, we shouldn't have been alive since the Romans destroyed us after the Bar Kochba Rebellion in 135 AD, so the morality of our living in any place at all will be called into question, and it is only a matter of time before we're called into question in the United States - I can only pray that it doesn't happen until after my baby nephew is at least Bubbie's age and his children are safely elsewhere.

Jews are the world's unwelcome guests; we don't belong anywhere. How do you think, for those of you who know what it is (and you all should), the 'Wandering Jew' became a popular medieval legend?

The Wandering Jew is the Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to crucifixion, and is therefore condemned to wander the earth for all time until Jesus comes again. It was a myth which explained to Christians that there is a people expelled from country to country for well over a thousand years, whose suffering is eternal, and nevertheless, entirely deserve it.

No matter where we end up, there is always a reason good enough to throw us out. Every culture thinks itself having learned the lessons of the past, but every culture eventually comes to the same conclusion - that Jews are parasites, that we secretly control the reins of government to advance our own interests, that we bribe public officials to favor us. In every country the underclass thinks we collaborate with the establishment to oppress them, the establishment thinks we collaborate with the underclass to subvert them.

Had the Nakba happened to us, it would have been just a small and fitting coda to a much larger event, (and hell, the Nakba DID happen to us. As many Jews were thrown out of Arab lands as Arabs were thrown out of Israel) but since it happened to someone else in a manner that was partially of our doing - and not entirely, no matter what you think you know - we're now told that because of our murder at the hands of Nazis, we of all people should be held to a standard nobody else is.

And all the while, the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century is STILL happening directly to Israel's northeast - a crisis caused by the very Arab Spring people were so keen to welcome ten years ago and then pretend it never happened. As many as 594,000 dead in Syria and 6.6 million refugees (!), nary a single protest since 2011, not a single article shared, not a single demand that people speak up for them. Where is your rage for them? Where is your passion for social justice? Where is your demand that Assad answer for crimes worthy of the worst butchers in human history? Would it help if an iron dome missile fell in Syrian territory? Would it help if some AIPAC money went to resettle some Syrians in Israel? Because in the case of Syrian Druze I guarantee it has.

For years I've argued tooth and nail with other Jews that we have to give greater respect to Palestinians, to Baltimoreans, to Arabs and Muslims, to the African-American community, and the whole time, their argument back is that they'd spit our respect back into our faces. It's a very Christian notion that you should love people who hate you back, and Jewish history seems to demonstrate that Christian love is an impractical concept....

But now I'll tell you what terrifies me and keeps me up past five in the morning. What scares me most of all, by far, is the fact that the future is coming very clearly into focus for most American Jews, and the future of the Jewish people as a community who survives whatever comes next can only be with the Republican party, and if Jews like me stay with Democrats, we do so knowing that there is no way the Democratic party can ever again properly support us without alienating its new base.

The number of Jews who vote Republican increases in every decade. The Jewish future is so clearly its past. If the future of America is perpetual rule by the Republican party, then we will become, yet again, the model minority, the cudgel by which an authoritarian Republican party beats up every other American minority for not achieving on our level. We will never be the bosses, but certain fortunate among us will be their moneymen, middlemen, managers, the face of the establishment whom every member of the underclass deals with.

And as always, when rebellion comes and the authoritarian establishment gets thrown off, the establishment will be fine, but as always before, the populist mob will come for us instead, and if there is no Israel, there will yet again be no place to go but into the sea.