When Everything is Upside Down
"Anti-Semitism is everywhere – yet I can’t stop holding onto thoughts of a better future."
By Abigail Pickus
There I was, hugely pregnant, waddling through a parking lot somewhere in Jerusalem. Just a few paces ahead, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, stood my destination: the office of an acupuncturist who would hopefully coax this stubborn baby out of my womb where he had overstayed his welcome.
So it didn’t help matters when an Israeli man on a motorcycle, a vision of leather, gold and flashing sunglasses, headed straight towards me, coming to an abrupt halt just inches from my protruding belly.
“Nu?” he said, a sly grin spreading across his face. “That baby is going to come out any minute now!”
“Like I don’t know that!” I spat back, having by that point adopted many of the strange and marvelous ways of the citizens of Israel, including being no one’s fool.
“B’emet,” he said again for emphasis. Really. “You’re about to pop! Get on my bike! I’ll run you over to Hadassah.”
I recall this snippet from that sunny fall day back in 2012 from what now seems like an entirely different planet.
And here we are. In this moment of horror and despair, our brave and strong Jewish State has been peeled bare, our fragile, vulnerable underbelly exposed.
As Israel continues to fight for its existence against a terrorist group committed to the destruction of all of Israel “from the river to the sea,” and to purging the world of “Jews and Christian traitors,” here in the diaspora we’re fighting another war.
“Hitler should have finished the job,” yelled a woman pushing a baby stroller.
“I suddenly have the urge to take on paragliding,” posted a famous person on social media.
“Stop occupying Palestine...The State of Israel must go now,” and “Zionism = Nazism” are the constant refrains.
On college campuses, outside opera houses, on street corners, people are spewing the most vile and hateful invectives against…the Jews. They’re tearing down posters of Israeli civilians kidnapped and held captive by murderous terrorists. They’re refusing to drive buses taking American Jews to the Capital to participate in the March for Israel.
And it’s all in the name of humanity.
I understand being pro-Palestinian. I’m also pro-Palestinian. But why must being for one people mean being against another? Why is it socially acceptable to say the most vile and hateful things against Jews – but if you substituted out the word “Jew” or “Israel” with any other minority – it would be considered hate speech
And why, after so many decades of being at the forefront of civil rights and interfaith dialogue, does it appear that it’s these same minorities we have marched shoulder to shoulder with who hate us the most? Because in instance after instance of people tearing down signs demanding the release of babies being held hostage or of college students holding up signs that say, “Keep our world clean again” with an image of the Israeli flag in the garbage – the faces that are spewing hate against Jews are very often Black and Brown. Notably, these folks are not always from Arab heritage. And they clearly feel that Jews are the privileged class.
What’s funny about that is we American Jews, no matter how much we’ve made it, never feel we’re on top. And it’s most likely because of our inherited trauma.
Coming of age in the 1980s, not that long after WWII, I was raised on the mantra: “Never again.” I was taught that our people were enslaved, persecuted, treated as second class citizens. No one wanted us. Indeed, precisely after everyone tried to kill us or drive us away, our two-thousand-year-old dream finally came true: We were granted our own country. We were, at long last, a free people in our own land.
But even having a Jewish State didn’t mean we were totally free. Neither did living in America.
Even well into the 20th century, Jews faced all kinds of discrimination, from quotas to housing covenants to antisemitic social norms.
But that was then. How naive I was to think that my son was growing up in a more enlightened world.
And yet, even during these extremely polarized times, I try to remind myself that the “us versus them” mentality will not serve us. For wasn’t it that mindset that got us here in the first place? Isn’t teaching hate from a young age what leads to this kind of dehumanization of the other?
I need to hold onto that, and to snippets of good, like how an Arab psychologist at a Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem told my Israeli Jewish friend, “My heart is with you.”
Because at the end of the day, no matter whose “side” you’re on, Jews and Palestinians both have historical claims to the land. And any true, viable, and sustainable solution must consider the dignity and right to actualization of both peoples. How that will manifest, I don’t know. But I do believe that the only way forward is through the lens of a shared future.
Maybe it’s too soon to say this. The trauma is still fresh; the trauma is happening – right now. Still, at some point, everyone must consider what’s next.
In the meantime, I wonder where the Israeli motorcycle man is today. Is he drinking a cafe botz and taking a few drags of his cigarette while chatting away on his cell phone? Is he up all night worried about a loved one called up to serve or a loved one being held hostage in Gaza? Or both?
I’d like him to see my boy now, tall and slender, with dark hair and blue eyes and feet that seem to grow a full size every few weeks. There he is, dressed in his blue and white soccer t-shirt with ‘Israel’ displayed proudly on the back. Watch as he joins me on the couch and together we sing along with David Broza on YouTube. The song is called יהיה טוב, (yehiyeh tov) which means, it will be good.
It has to be good. Indeed, we are all counting on it to be good.
Abigail Pickus has written for JUF News Chicago, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and The Jewish Week. She ran the Nextbook literary series at the Chicago Public Library.
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