Antisemitism

September 2, 2019September 2, 2019

Teaching While Afraid

I have learned to fear my students – their unknown past and what might inhabit their present is worrying me.

My love of teaching is under assault.

A year ago, I taught a lecture course on religion and magic to about 120 first-semester and transfer students at UNC Charlotte. Our lecture hall was dark, without windows. The entrance was at one end of the long room, opposite the stage.

The subject of gun rights came up early in the semester. A student introduced the issue during a lecture on the term “religion.” He wanted to compare the challenges of definition I described to the difficulty he faced defending gun rights.

I tried to return us to our lecture topic. Another student raised his hand and made a second comment about protecting gun rights. Most Americans misunderstand the nature of an assault rifle, he said.

It was a strange, disconcerting moment.

A couple of months later, on October 29, I walked into class both fragile and fearful. It was just two days after eleven people were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter’s social media profiles included an account description that read: “The Jews are the children of Satan” (John: 8:44).

I was to lecture on how magic had become associated with the devil in medieval Christian thought. The lecture would explain how the depiction of Jews as the devil’s offspring had led to labeling Jews as evil magicians and sorcerers.

I mentioned the shooting. Then, I looked across a dark lecture hall filled with people I didn’t know. “I am afraid of you,” I said. “I am afraid to give this lecture.”

Though we spoke about those fears together for a few minutes, I never went into the classroom again without anxiety. My students knew I was Jewish. Some knew I was a rabbi. I’d walk up the stairs to the stage and think wryly what an easy target I could be. I tried to stand behind the podium instead of pacing across the stage, as I usually do.

That fear never went away. Exactly seven months later, on April 29, I went to teach just days after the Poway Synagogue shooting in San Diego. I wondered on the drive to campus: Was I putting my students at risk by teaching a course on the history of European antisemitism? Would a student look up courses on Jewish history and pick up an assault rifle?

Two hours later UNCC was put on lockdown. A shooter killed two of our students and injured four others.

There is no evidence that the shooter harbored any antisemitic views. But he showed how easy it was to bring a gun on campus and to murder people. Simple, really.

This fall, a student in my online course on Hebrew Scriptures (read: Tanakh) wrote me an email suggesting that dropping the course might be necessary. The student wanted to make sure it wasn’t “Jewish-based.”

It was the week Donald Trump called Jews ignorant and disloyal if they voted for Democrats.

Had I been searched online? Had the student discovered I was an ordained rabbi? What kinds of websites did my correspondent like to frequent? Where did the student come from?

I was afraid to provoke by asking what was meant by the comment. I was afraid to do anything more than I did, which was to write explaining that the class material was taught in a secular, academic environment.

For the first time in my life I have gained a semblance of understanding for the kind of courage teaching can require.

I want to thank the teachers of this broken world. I am certain that most of us only want to bring good things into this world.

Dear students: Here, with us, you can learn that the world is beautiful, complex, extraordinary and precious. Here, with us, you can find that humanity can create literature that lasts millenia, art that transcends its time, music that can move each and every soul. Your classrooms are playgrounds for your minds, for your hearts, for your future.

You can learn to love your world and find humanity in our classrooms. If you do, there will be no reason for fear.

February 15, 2019February 15, 2019

I Promise: An Ethical Will for My Students

Two times a week, I meet with a class of exactly ten students in a small conference room at UNC Charlotte. Those ten students are dealing with the most difficult history I teach – the history of European antisemitism.

It is challenging work because the readings assigned are among the most sophisticated I teach. It is challenging work because my students are almost always unfamiliar with this history, and it is a painful one.

It is likely that my students will be Christian. Some will be devout. These are students who usually came into my world via courses I teach on Hebrew Bible. We forge, in such courses, deep connections around biblical literature. Our learning may include rabbinic midrash as well as academic commentaries. The exposure to ways Jews have read biblical texts sometimes leads them to question what they might have believed about the Jewish relationship with bible. That can lead them to this course.

I am – and this is hardly unusual – the only Jew in the room. I know, from long experience, how much courage my students are bringing to our course of study. After we covered the way John’s Jesus vilifies Jews as children of the father of lies, as offspring of Satan (John 8:44), a student said: “I’ve read this before. Somehow, I passed over the text. It was just a story. I can’t believe I did that, now.”

Sometimes, as we gather, we trade small news. Recently, I told my students about my new glass whiteboard. It’s huge – it takes up a good part of the wall next to my desk at home. There are columns for each realm I work in – one for the course I am currently teaching for ALEPH Ordination Programs, another to cover administrative work in that realm, another for my work as the director of graduate studies for UNCC’s department of Religious Studies, one for the courses I teach for the department, another for the work I do as a spiritual leader of a small havurah, another for the little Etsy business I have making kippot and tallitot. There is a little corner for “personal.”

My students laughed and asked what was put in that corner.

“The first thing on it,” I said, “is ‘ethical will for Serafina.’”

My students know the name of my son and my daughter-in-law. So they knew who I was talking about – but not what I was talking about.

“Ethical will,” one asked. “What is that?”

I explained. “You know how you have a will for your assets, and what you want done with them after you die? An ethical will is a Jewish tradition. It’s a document that might include pragmatic information, like how you want your funeral to go and that sort of thing. But the main thing is writing down what you want to leave your children in the way of wisdom or learning. It’s a way of summing up what you hope your children will take from you that is truly important or good.”

I had long since written such a text for my son, Erik, and I explained that I periodically updated it for him. But it was now over two years since he had married Serafina, and I felt it was time for me to write her one, too.

For Sera has brought a perfect completion to our little family. I can no longer imagine us without her. She and I had become friends, and as much as I was learning from her, I hoped that there would be some learning I could give back to her. When I died, I would want her to have that from me.

“Well,” one of the students said, “we would miss you, too. What about an ethical will for us?”

The other students agreed, though one was afraid that given everything else on the board, adding something might not be the best thing for me.

“I think it’s a good idea,” I said. “I like it.”

I have been teaching for almost four decades. My students have given me life and hope. They sustain me and they teach me. I rely on their generosity, their kindness, the wisdom they bring into every classroom. I do not overstate: My students also complete my life and make it perfect.

I went home late that day and after I took off my coat and put my backpack in the corner of my office, I picked up a marker and drew a line from “Ethical will for Sera” to the word “students.”

And I will write both.

This post is dedicated both to Serafina, on her birthday. If I hadn’t thought about what I want to write to her I wouldn’t have ever been asked whether I would write to my students….

October 30, 2018

Must I Ask? In Response to the Pittsburgh Shootings

October 27, 2018

Dear friends,

Please consider speaking to your congregants about the murder of 11 Jews today while worshiping on the Sabbath.

Please consider pointing out that in 2017 antisemitic incidents have increased 57% — the largest increase in any given year, and please note that the increase in antisemitism we have been seeing is, in considerable part, related to the 2015 presidential campaigns and the hateful antisemitic rhetoric that year which was then and continues to be made permissible in this country by dog whistles, by acquiescence, and by deployment of false equivalencies (“good people on both sides…”).

In grief,

Barbara

Many of my Christian colleagues wrote back last Saturday night, with great kindness and compassion. Some, I know, did speak from their pulpits to the horror of the Sabbath Jews had endured. Some added wisdom that could deal with the murder of two black people in Louisville by a man who then announced that “white people don’t kill white people.”

The next day, I posted on Facebook.

Last night I wrote to my every Christian colleague to ask them to please speak to the horror of antisemitism from their pulpits this morning. I appreciated every loving response. But as a teacher of the history of antisemitism, I know: We are still asking. We will still be asking. I do not think we will know what it is to live in a world in which this request is no longer necessary.

I spent the day grieving. I have gone from one church to another, given one presentation after the other, led adult study and bible study, spoken with, prayed with, tried – again and again – to embody the deep ecumenism that Reb Zalman espoused.

I am asked to speak about Torah – and that’s often just exactly what I do. I am asked to share Jewish ritual and tradition and prayer practice, and I do. I have learned with Christians, prayed with Christians, shared my heart with Christians of all kinds.

But in all these years, no congregation has initiated a conversation about antisemitism, though most church communities I visit know that I teach that subject.

I have often asked myself: When will white people examine their history, collusion and complicity in enslaving, controlling, subjugating, imprisoning and even murdering black people? This past week I asked myself a like question: When will my most compassionate and dear Christian friends understand that loving statements about the evil of antisemitism will not suffice – not when the overwhelming majority of Christians neither know nor understand how their traditions and texts contributed to its creation?

If I am honest, I must admit this: even if those many church communities were to ask me to teach their congregants about the history of antisemitism some part of me would ask: “Why not do this yourselves? Must a Jew explain Jewish pain – yet again?” It’s not as if there are not texts to study (David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism, for example). I’ll share the curricula I’ve used.

Three years ago, during the 2015 campaign, when right wing extremism and members of the current administration stepped out in public to begin their close, intimate dance, I told my husband and son: Jews will die in America.

It has been three years of dread, living an awful expectation. And now, just as black leaders did after Dylann Roof murdered nine black congregants of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in the summer of 2015, so am I doing. Just as they explained and explained to white folk – yes, racism is still alive — so I find myself saying, “see? Yes, antisemitism is still alive.”

We will not rid this world of either one until the worlds which spawned them take up the work of eradicating them.

May we live to see such a time.

February 28, 2015February 28, 2015

Jews: Surround a Mosque…

One life rescued saves the world. One life taken destroys it.

Just one week ago, after Shabbat came to an end, more than 1,000 Norwegians of all faiths came to Bergstien Street to surround a synagogue in Oslo. The organizers were Muslims. Pictures showed a chain of human beings, arms outstretched and holding hands. Thomas Holgersen Daher Naustdal, an event organizer, insisted that the human ring of peace was intended to demonstrate “that if you want to commit violence in the name of Islam you will have to go through us Muslims first.”

There were, naturally, grateful reactions from Jews and Jewish communities. And then, there were (inevitable?) reports that the entire event was staged, created by a media capable of ruthlessly playing on people’s fears and exploiting their hopes.

Were there actually more than twenty Muslims present, some asked? Were some inside the gates and some outside? Were some difficult to identify because they were not wearing clothing that would clearly identify them as Muslim? Come to that, clothing doesn’t necessarily prove a thing, so… were any Muslims around at all?

How were we to assess the fact that protesters spoke not only about the dangers of antisemitism but about those of Islamophobia? Reportedly, demonstrators chanted, “no to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia.” What were Jews to conclude? Were those demonstrators willy-nilly equating a merciless cultural pathology that had cost the lives of millions of Jews with something that could not begin to compare?

To save one life, Talmud tells us, is to save the world. If we believe that, then a single Muslim showing up at any synagogue with holy intentions may well be, in our book, doing her best to save a life. If the only non-Jew present in Oslo had been Naustdal, coming to stand, as he said, “against all types of hatred, violence and particularly in this case anti-Semitism, both within our own ranks and from society as a whole,” that’s a life-saving intention.

Just a short while ago, Jews could have shown up to support the single time allowed Muslim students for the recitation of the call to prayer from the Duke Chapel belfry. Right now, tomorrow, or next weekend, Jews could create their own ring of peace around a mosque in this country – maybe in Chapel Hill, where the community is mourning the brutal murder of three Muslim students.

I could imagine Jews stating, proudly, that they are present to fight all forms of hatred, from antisemitism to Islamophobia because the latter also kills.

If such Jews said: “we get your grief and we get your pain and we understand why you are afraid,” I would hope that we would not be accused of minimizing the pain we are witnessing by honoring and remembering the pain we have ourselves known.

We should be inspired by the Muslims who showed up in Oslo, regardless of number.

Imagine a world in which, every week, we showed up to protect one another. Imagine if we announced, day after day, that we must stand for peace and for life: Together. Imagine if we did not concern ourselves with “how many” but rather with hearts, with meaning and with intentions.

We might save a life. We might save the world.

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015

Written for Sarah (with her permission)

She graduated UNC Charlotte in 2012. She was an irrepressible student. Precocious, and very funny. She described herself as a little wacky.

She had a droll way of speaking about herself; One day, she came to me with notes on a major project she had started for another class. She made wry comments about feeling overwhelmed.

I asked her to explain the project. I looked at her notes.

“Sarah,” I told her with mock sternness, “this is completely out of control.”

She sighed. “I knew you would say that, Dr. Thiede,” she said. “I just knew it.”

“Let’s get to work,” I said, and we did. We spent about an hour tightening up the project’s parameters, finding out what she really wanted to say, and making sure she could demonstrate that she knew a thing or two.

Sarah majored in German and International Studies and she minored in Judaic Studies. She took courses in Judaism and in antisemitism with me; she researched the Holocaust. She decided to study abroad in Germany. Before she left, I asked her to keep in touch.

One day, she wrote me this:

Germany is amazing and awesome.I never want to leave, but the reason I’m emailing you is because of an incident that has left me shaken. I don’t know how to react or why I’m so unprepared. This past weekend, two of my friends and I rode the S-Bahn into Stuttgart, and as we were nearing the Hauptbahnhof, all of a sudden this guy stands up and begins yelling (swearing) at this woman, and begins to push her and he punches her twice, saying she can go to hell with the Jews, and he ranted fuck Jews, etc.. The woman was scared and kept saying to him it’s no reason to get upset… There were about eight other grown German men… not one of them batted an eyelash, just ignored it as if it wasn’t happening. I wanted to do something, I was tiny compared to this guy and I was paralyzed with fear and rage and turned to my guy friend and told him to do something. He got up and walked back there, guided the lady to sit with us… I know we’ve studied this, and I know hatred of Jews still exists, but it left me unprepared for that, and I’m unsettled and somewhat ashamed that I sat there.… nobody did anything or said anything. I’m stunned that this could be tolerated in Germany of all places.

I don’t know what to say or why emailing you, I guess just to vent. I’m so stunned and shocked, I can’t just ignore stuff like this, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to react either. I don’t want to be personal or rude, but have you ever experienced this, if so, how do you respond?

Sarah is not Jewish. But she had learned about human horrors. She cared – deeply – about the world.

I don’t have my reply to Sarah, though my computer tells me I wrote one. But now, I know, I will keep every reply I write.

Last week, Sarah called me from Houston. She told me she had been diagnosed with fourth-stage colon cancer. Sarah is 23.

She was worried about her family and her boyfriend, she said. She had lost an aunt to colon cancer two years ago; a grandparent died of the same disease. She had flown to Houston to see a particular surgeon, a specialist of some sort. He wouldn’t operate, she told me. His advice: Try chemo and come back to see him in six months if she was still alive.

She said: “I am frightened. I don’t want to die.” She said: “I’m sorry to ruin your day like this.”

No, no, I wanted to say. You called; I answered. Two human beings, connected by the simplest of facts. Two human beings, connected.

I am not going to pretend otherwise to anyone – even to Sarah. I am scared. I am scared I won’t say or do the things that would be perfect and right. I am scared because her youth hits home: Sarah was born when I was five months pregnant with my son, Erik.

Sarah’s boyfriend’s name is Eric.

We spoke, she cried. She stopped herself crying, cried again.

That night I found an internet site on gofundme (http://www.gofundme.com/duckcoloncancer). Sarah had put the site up when the first diagnosis had been made, just a few weeks before she called me. At that point, her cancer was third-stage. Sarah needed money to see more specialists.

I wrote to faculty members and asked them to spread the news. I am writing this for the same reason.

Here is what Sarah needs now: To try everything she can. This is her right. I will help with that.

To readers, then, if you can and feel so moved: Please visit that site and make a donation.

To Sarah: I will walk with you however you decide you need my presence. That’s a vow.

To the Ruach Ha’olam: Help me walk.

February 19, 2015February 19, 2015

The Procrustean Choice: Living with Antisemitism or Living with Racism

Benjamin Netanyahu flies to Europe not to grieve, but to calculate. As families are mourning their loved ones, he chooses to agitate for his political agenda. Instead of compassion, he offers European Jews a lesson. Theirs is misplaced allegiance. Israel, so Netanyahu, is the only place they can truly call home.

I’ve taught the Holocaust for almost three decades. Antisemitism has never left Europe. I don’t believe it will. Even the murder of a million Jewish children and five million Jewish adults could not do away with it. What could?

Europe was long ago infected with a cultural pathology, a virus that appears to go into remission only to return – still virulent, still horrifying, still murderous.

White Europeans may not, however, point fingers at non-white Europeans and claim antisemitism is no longer “their” issue. This is not the problem of some Muslim “other.” This disease was born in Europe. Variations on neo-Nazism are everywhere, and they find a home in a number of varied populations across the continent.

It is true: No one can guarantee the safety of Europe’s Jews. But is Israel their home? Is it mine? What will Israel offer, should we make aliyah?

A lot better, of course, than it offers other refugees seeking asylum. Do you happen to be a black and African soul fleeing violence instead of a white, European, and Jewish one? So far, the Israeli government has managed to respond to less than 1½ percent of asylum requests from Sudanese nationals. Not a single Sudanese has been granted refugee status.

Eritrean asylum seekers face similarly awful conditions. Just four of almost 2,500 Eritreans in Israel have acquired refugee status. Some of the detainees in the Holot detention facility, where such refugees face (and freeze) in despicable conditions, have been there for six years. Israel is hardly a safe haven for them.

Nor is Israeli society free from its own forms of virulent racism. Lehava (Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land) is just one of many virulently racist groups whose supporters can be heard screaming “death to Arabs” in the streets of Jerusalem. Three Lehava supporters have been indicted in the arson attack against a Hebrew-Arabic bilingual school in the city.

Last January, a Druze man who had recently completed his service with the IDF reported that ten religious Jewish men had assaulted him after hearing him speaking in Arabic. He had to pay for his own ambulance to get to a hospital.

Before we consign Israeli racism to extremist right-wing groups, we might want to consider the kinds of things coming out of the mouths of some Israel’s leaders – and as a matter of course, these days. Just this month, Naftali Bennett, Minister of the Economy, spoke about internal security concerns in the country, referring to areas with high Arab populations. “Anyone who’s gone traveling in the Negev in recent years knows,” he asserted, “that they can’t leave their car … because it will be broken into and stolen.”

Arabs, who make up a fifth of Israel’s population, are car thieves.

European Jews fleeing antisemitism will, if they make aliyah, live in a country that is home to hate speech and hate crime. They will be fleeing to a country that has been – for five decades – exercising colonialist methods to subdue and control millions of Palestinians.

Netanyahu claims to belong to a western culture that is “based on freedom and a culture of choice.” For whom, exactly?

The extent to which any western culture has achieved such an ideal is worth questioning. The extent to which Israel presents humanity with anything close to such a thing is debatable.

I want Israel to exist. Most Jews in the world want Israel to exist. But the Jews of the Diaspora do not live in order to support Israel on any and all terms presented by Netanyahu and his supporters. The dangers faced by Jews in a Europe that is still home to antisemitism should not blind anyone to the dangers of living in an Israel that has been made a comfortable home for rampant racism.

No home we have had has ever been a safe one. That fact should not keep us from trying to create one.

April 20, 2014

Killings in Kansas – One More Question at the Seder Table

He’s one of our’n. And while he lived in North Carolina, he was one of the most prolific producers of racial hatred and antisemitism in the U.S. of A.

Frazier Glenn Cross (known mostly as F. Glenn Miller Jr.) has a point scale for murder. One point for killing an African American. Twenty for a Jew.

I don’t think he had planned on awarding points for random Christians, though he is suspected of having killed three last Sunday.

It’s better than likely that he was after Jews. For one thing, he advocated killing them. For another, he is reported to have shown up at two Jewish institutions outside of Kansas City for a hunting trip.

Jews have been targeted so often and for so long that the hunt itself has become a national pastime (and not just in Germany under Adolf Hitler, either). When I teach courses on the history of European anti-Semitism, my students usually have some idea about the big-name persecutions (the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust). During the semester they become witnesses to the forgettable smaller stuff – expulsions from this or that European town, a local slaughter of all the Jews. They look through timelines listing the incidents of forced conversions or pogroms, about laws sanctioning the enslavement of a local Jewish population or their enslavement, about their ghettoization. It’s pretty regular stuff. Every few years, somewhere in Europe, some Jews are being hunted.

Again.

So it is probably no wonder that I mentioned the KC killings at my first night seder.
But maybe it was a wonder: After all, six of the ten people at our seder were devout Christians (one an ordained Protestant minister). I also invited two agnostics to the meal. But Jews and non-believers were outnumbered that night, and for a reason.

I wanted to prove to myself (and to the others at my table) that there are universal messages in the Passover seder — messages about human cruelty and oppression, about the evils that emerge when we control and abuse others. I wanted us to sit around my round table without leaders or followers. I wanted everyone to see the face of every other. I wanted to remind myself that there is reason to believe in humanity.

I wanted to ask: Who is humanity, exactly?

In The Train of Life, a film about a small shtetl in France that attempts to deport itself in order to escape the Nazi wholesale destruction of European Jews, the town fool, Shlomo, offers wisdom a rabbi must pay heed to.

Shlomo: God created men in his image. Sounds nice. Shlomo is the image of God. But who wrote that sentence in the Torah? Man, not God. Man. With no modesty whatsoever he compared himself to God. God may have created man but man, son of God, created God in order to invent himself.
Rabbi’s wife: Can you repeat that?
Shlomo: Man wrote the Bible so he wouldn’t be forgotten. He didn’t care about God.
Rabbi: We have enough problems.
Shlomo: Rabbi, we neither love God nor pray to him. We beg him to help us get by down here. But we don’t care about him. We care only about ourselves. The real question is not whether God exists but whether we do.

To exist, what must we humanity become? Are we, on some level, yet to exist at all?
To control, to abuse – to murder and destroy – if we class these things as inhuman, then Shlomo is correct: The question is whether we exist, not whether God does.

I gathered eight loving people around my seder table.

To prove that we do.