Tag: Jew hatred

Jew-Hatred Hits Home

I am mad. I am hopping, spitting, busting-things mad.

Here’s what I’m mad about:

 

Swastika outside HUC-JIR
Vandalized sign in front of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, OH. Photo credit: Gannett Newspapers.

This is the sign outside Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, OH. Someone decided it was a worthwhile way to spend their time to paint a swastika in front of the oldest rabbinical school in the Western Hemisphere.

I headlined this “Jew Hatred Hits Home” because this is my school, one of my Jewish homes. I studied on another campus, but my degree and my ordination are from HUC-JIR. My mentors and teachers studied at this school. The “chain of tradition” first described in the Mishnah runs through this campus to hundreds of rabbis and their students:

משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים, וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה. הֵם אָמְרוּ שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים, הֱווּ מְתוּנִים בַּדִּין, וְהַעֲמִידוּ תַלְמִידִים הַרְבֵּה, וַעֲשׂוּ סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה:

Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua, and Yehoshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples and make a fence for the Torah. – Pirkei Avot, 1.1

I call this “Jew-Hatred” rather than “Anti-Semitism” because I have had it with the faux-intellectual terminology of the Nazis and their ilk. Their predecessors and they may have coined and popularized the word, but I refuse to use it any more. I’ll call it what it is: Jew-hatred.

I could tell you about the background of my school, why it is particularly galling that this sign was marked with a swastika, but my colleague Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin has already written a beautiful article in his Martini Judaism column with Religion News Service. Click the link for more of the story, and to discover another blog I read regularly.

Do not kid yourself that this is “random rednecks” or some such thing. We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in Jew-Hating incidents in 2016, especially since the election. Those and the even more dramatic increase in anti-Muslim incidents worry me very much. The Anti-Defamation League has published a list of the primary manifestations of Jew-hatred in 2016, and it is chilling.

Eight years ago, when I first began teaching basic Judaism classes, I would preface my lecture on Jew-Hatred with a little explanation of why we needed to study it. I remember saying that while it was “hard to believe that there could be a resurgence of it in the United States,” history shows us that it has a way of coming back. Then I’d say, “but let’s hope not in our lifetimes.”

I can’t say that anymore.

Update: This article talks about the response of the Cincinnati citizenry and leadership to the vandalism. I have to say that it reassures me. Also, while I chose to let my emotion show in my post, I think the low-key response of the College-Institute itself makes me proud. I continue to learn from my teachers!

What is the Blood Libel?

An old, terrible lie has resurfaced.

The video above is part of an interview with Osama Hamdan, head of international relations for Hamas. on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV channel on July 28, 2014.  In it he makes the assertion that Jews have a custom of killing non-Jewish children and using their blood to make Passover matzah.

The belief that Jews kill people, usually children, and use their blood in rituals or to make matzah is called the Blood Libel. It is a lie. It is a particularly baffling lie in that Jewish dietary law forbids the eating of any blood: blood is drained from animals before butchering, and meat is salted to remove any stray drops of blood. 

The Blood Libel has been around a long time. Apion, a Greek who hated Jews wrote about it in the first century CE.  It then pops up periodically, but the first major European case was in 1144, in Norwich, England. In the Middle Ages, these accusations followed a pattern: a body was found, or a child disappeared, and the Jews were accused of the crime. Elaborate fantasies about the supposed rituals were imagined and written down by the accusers, which then became fodder for the next case. For more detail about it, there is an excellent but heartbreaking article in the Jewish Virtual Library.

The Blood Libel has continued in the modern era. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an anti-Semitic document that was distributed by the Russian secret police in 1905. It is a catalogue of all the ancient lies about the Jews, repackaged for the 20th century. Henry Ford distributed it in the United States. It included the Blood Libel as well as other medieval stories about Jews poisoning wells, spreading plague, and so on. It was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. And now, in the 21st century, it continues to circulate on the internet, and it has surfaced in Islamist talking points.

The important thing to know about the Blood Libel is that it is a lie without any kernel of truth. Observant Jews do not eat blood of any kind, ever. All Jews categorically reject human sacrifice. And despite what Mr. Hamdan says, the Blood Libel is not in any of our books. It is only in the books fabricated by sick minds to poison the world against Jews.

I really hate this topic. I hate teaching it and writing about it, but tragic experience has taught us that these lies are extremely dangerous. May the day come, and speedily, when all such horrors are finally behind us.

Resource on Anti-Semitism: The ADL Global 100

Graffito in a restroom at the University of Chicago
Graffito in a restroom at the University of Chicago

I’m preparing to teach a class on anti-Semitism. It’s an important class for my Intro students, even if I don’t like talking about it.

If you want the short version of what I teach in class, you can read it in another blog post. But today, as I was preparing, I discovered a great new resource online, the ADL Global 100. For the first time, the Anti-Defamation League commissioned an independent research firm to survey adults in over 100 countries. (Previously, their survey covered only the U.S.)

The survey itself was interesting. People were read 11 statements, to which they responded “true” or “false.” If they answered “true” to six or more of the statements, they were counted as having anti-Semitic attitudes. The complete list along with the methodology is on the website, but to give you a feel for it, here are six of the statements:

  • Jews only care about their own kind.
  • People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
  • Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.
  • Jews have too much power in the business world.
  • Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to the country they live in.
  • Jews have too much control of the U.S. government.

To count as having anti-Semitic beliefs, they have to answer “true” to six of eleven statements similar to those. Again, the complete list of survey statements is on the ADL Global100 website.

So what were the results? 26% of adults world-wide have anti-Semitic beliefs, as measured by the survey. Nine percent of adults in the United States hold such beliefs. Before Americans congratulate themselves, remember, that translates to 21,000,000 people.

You can click around on the survey and find out the percentage for each continent and for each country. It’s fascinating reading. For instance, why is it that in the U.S., men and women have anti-Semitic beliefs at the same rate, but in Australia and New Zealand, men have those beliefs at a higher rate than women? Why does Panama far outstrip all other countries in the Americas, with a rate of 52%? What would account for the low rate in the Philippines, only 3%?

Perhaps if we could answer those questions, we might be on the way to ending it.

Image by Quinn Dombrowski, some rights reserved.

The Class I Hate to Teach

English: Antisemitic graffiti in Venezuela
English: Antisemitic graffiti in Venezuela (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I enjoy teaching basic Judaism: it’s my true love, my mission, my passion. “Intro,” done well, can make it much easier for outsiders to become fellow travelers in Jewish community, whether they are Gentile relatives of a Jew, or Jews who got no Jewish education, or someone looking to become a Jew.  It has to be more than facts and how-to’s, because Judaism isn’t just a religion, it’s a vast array of ethnicities, customs, history, and culture – as Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan famously titled his book, Judaism is a civilization. As an “Intro” teacher, I’m a tour guide, den mother, demystifier, and spiritual director.

But there’s one class in every series that I hate to teach. Not coincidentally, it is the only class specified by the tradition as a requirement. Rabbinic tradition is rather vague about what converts to Judaism must be taught before they go to the mikveh, but it is adamant that they understand that Jews have been a despised and persecuted people. In other words, they need to be acquainted with anti-Semitism.

It’s the one class to which I bring a printed-out lesson plan, because I know I will go off-topic like a giddy puppy at the first opportunity. I march through the list: the misgivings about Jews in classical civilization, Christian attitudes about Jews that took shape in both church doctrine and in civil law, and the obsession with Jewish ancestry that surfaced in Spain in the 16th century that presaged full-blown ethnic hatred of Jews in the Western world.  I talk about Herzl’s realization, as he covered the Dreyfus affair, that the Jews of Europe faced something terrible. I talk about all of that as a prelude to the Shoah. And then we talk about the “New” anti-Semitism.

We talk about the memes that have dogged Jews through history: blood libel, moneylending, court Jews, conspiracy, communism, socialism, anarchism, pinko-Commie-whatever-ism. I tell them about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  I tell them about the origins of the term “Anti-Semitism,” that it was invented by a German journalist as a sophisticated-sounding substitute for Judenhass, Jew-hatred.

Some students who have been engaged Christians at some point in their lives practically writhe with discomfort. I name those feelings, and acknowledge that when you’ve got one foot in each community, this can be very hard listening. I share the fact that it was hard for me, when I took the class long ago. Some Jewish students look distant, and I suspect they are running through unpleasant memories and feelings. Maybe, like me, they just hate the topic.

My impulse is to comfort. I bring cookies. I reassure. But I march relentlessly through that lesson plan, because it is important that they know this stuff. I have a duty to see to it that they understand that when you sign up to be a Jew, you sign up for this, too. For Gentiles in the class, it is important to know why Jews seem “sensitive” about some things, why some topics are funny only if you are a genius like Mel Brooks and can take them all the way off the deep end.

Usually the evening ends off topic: I get to the end of the list, and we trail off from “Jews run the media” into jokes and trivia about Hollywood and Jews. If I’m artful, we’ll leave on an upbeat note.  But I’m always relieved when the evening is over, because I hate this topic.  I hate, hate, hate it.