Back in 2002, I wrote “Jew You.” It appears in my book When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and though it is not my favorite of the poems I wrote that spring, it does have one line that I continue to like:
Dear Jews: We liked you better as victims.
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I thought of it today when reading Jason Zinoman’s article “Is It Funny for the Jews?” in the New York Times (Feb. 17, 2022), in which, considering such phenomena as the tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jews in TV shows, he raises the possiiblity that what we are witnessing in the resurgence of anti-Semitism today is a reversion to the mean. And by “resurgence of anti-Semitism,” I do not mean casting decisions but the appearance of swastikas on synagogue walls, murderous attacks in Jewish houses of worship, and hostility to Jews on campus, particularly those suspected of siding with Israel. (Click here for the Ha’Aaretz article about the “fuck Jews” graffiti on the outside of Miriam, a resturant on 74th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in NYC.) Here are a couple of thought-provoking paragraphs from Zinoman’s piece:
. . .one reason some Jews don’t make a bigger fuss about discrimination, one reason they feel comfortable laughing at it, is that they — we — feel safe. It’s easier to laugh at antisemitism when it happens in an unthreatening place. The feeling is: There are worse problems in the world.
In her acclaimed book “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn takes fierce aim at this blasé attitude, at the downplaying and rationalizations that Jewish Americans make, whether it’s the strained lengths intellectuals go to to argue that Shakespeare transcended bigotry in his portrayal of Shylock or to take comfort in the story of Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of people (before bad people killed her).
Horn’s bracing argument is that there is a cost to denial, that the rise of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes against Jews — including the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — is directly tied to the fading of the stigma of bigotry against Jews. Hatred of Jews is not unusual, she argues; it’s the years after the Holocaust when that was socially unacceptable that were the anomaly. “Historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal,” writes Horn. Now, she writes, normal is back.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/television/comedy-jewish-identity.html
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Author: The Best American Poetry
