Over and over again, I am consistently stunned by the political blindness of hate. It’s incomprehensible to me. How can people loathe all Catholics because they still worship the papal Christianity or all arabs because of 9/11 and ISIS? Or how pro-Palestinian convictions automatically translate into hostile animosity towards all Jews dispersed throughout the globe – many of whom are not religious whatsoever, have never been and don’t plan to go to Israel, and some (especially here, in the States) don’t even understand what the conflict over there is all about? Aren’t the haters at all concerned that their blanket enmity completely obscures the essential meaning of their political standpoints? Shouldn’t they be more focused and direct their efforts against the forces behind the territorial and largely economic conflicts? What can possibly be achieved by inciting violence against the students and the teaching staff of an educational institution 5700 miles away from the epicenter of the military actions? It’s truly bizarre!
On the other hand, I’m quite accustomed to the pervasive, persistent, and profuse plain-ass antisemitism no matter how many political, nationalistic, self-righteous, and morally confused shrouds anyone throws over it. Look, I was born in the most antisemitic country in the world – Soviet Russia, with its pre- and post-revolutionary history of oppressing my relatives and ancestors going back centuries. Thus, as the Soviet Jew I was raised to believe that antisemitism is simply written into the genetic code (my mother was among the first generation of Soviet physiology students to be taught genetics at universities in the 50s) of every non-Jew and there is nothing we can do about it: Whether openly or secretly, and with some even subconsciously, goyim will despise you. Live with that. Period.
And when I escaped Russia, the Soviet Union, though on its last legs, was still live and kicking, the communists were still in power (many of them still are – lightly disguised), and anti-Jewish state policies were still as prominent as the nationalistic hatred of the Russian populace. But, of course, decades of the subsequent NYC living… It lulls you with its ethnic diversity, and religious freedoms, and Jewish mayors, and Philip Roth, and Woody Allen, and Kubrick, and the overwhelming popularity of Seinfeld and Friends, and everybody eating lox on their bagels… And you (I mean me), a cultural non-observant Jew, start feeling… Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say “free of the ethnic bias”, but you definitely push to the back of your Jewish kop the teachings of your grandparents – that if you ever forget that you are a Jew, there will be an antisemite nearby to remind you.
Of course, Ivy League schools, even those – like Columbia University – located in Manhattan, are nothing like NYC. Their student bodies, professorial staff, and administrations consist mostly of transient people from all over the world. Not just all fifty states of our own nation – most of them not nearly as diverse as our city, but from the foreign countries with their own socio-economic backgrounds as well. These people are here not because they belong, but because it’s good for their resumes – if I had to generalize. So, it shouldn’t be surprising at all that these educational institutions are prone to become fertile grounds for antisemitic protests.
And apparently the ones at Columbia earlier this week got so threatening, Jewish religious leaders urged students to STAY HOME (!!!) Here, IN NEW YORK CITY! And the university’s administration (as well as the law enforcement – let’s be honest) are so powerless in the face of these protests, the solution they offered is online classes! This is Columbia we’re talking about!
I don’t even know, though, why I’m so shocked. I mean, I’ve already got exposed in the fairly recent past to similar displays of open antisemitism and the passivity by “the powers that be”. Because, guess what? The New York State prison system is even further removed from NYC than the hodgepodge of Columbia campus. It’s staffed entirely with ethnically and culturally isolated upstate prison guards; and among the inmate population, there are plenty of multigenerational neo-Nazis – proud to display their various tattooed insignia and the compatible attitudes – as well as intellectually confused people.
From I Built This Prison, Part III – Impressions of Imprisonment, •The Jewish Thing•:
“…In Albion… I’ve got exposed to antisemitism of all stripes and colors – the white-bred upstate xenophobia, the ignorant multi-racial criminal-element loathing, the semi-religious misconfusion, and the pure Aryan “pride”.
Funny, how some naïve individuals sometimes ask how Russians always knew that I was a Jew without even checking my official documents. Well, my Albion experience has proved all over again that Russian, German, American, or of any other origin – an anti-Semite always knows. By simply looking at you. Even though you are secular and wear no other ethnic attributes than your own face.
***
I just couldn’t get used to this shit all over again. Even two years in, it was still hurting.
On the way from OMH meds, Sherri Ellis called me “old stinking Jew”, because she thought I looked at her funny. On previous occasions she called me a “nasty Jew” – she was definitely escalating. Oh, she kept her antisemitism in check when she asked for my help with her ASAT reinstatement after being kicked out for dirty urine. Now, this. Nobody had used that specific slur on me since the Soviet Union. And there was nothing I could do about it – not even talk back to her violent mug: if she lunged at me, both of us would’ve been sent to SHU.
Heather Mims was walking next to me. She was shocked: “What are you doing being Jewish?” was her question. That was easy to brush off, actually. She knew me for two years and didn’t realize I was Jewish. Hers was the antisemitism of geographical isolation not of consciousness. She was from a tiny village on the Canadian border.
I was more offended by Trish D: “I despise you because you are a Jew,” out of nowhere she spewed at me from across the messhall table. I was lost for words and I couldn’t just leave before a CO’s release… But several women at that table instantaneously joined forces in berating Trish for her unacceptable racism and un-Christian hatred. I felt as if a row of warriors was shielding me from the enemy.
***
Yet, most of the time you are unprotected, alone…
Did you know that not all Nazis that fled Germany at the end of WWII and escaped the justice, ended up in Latin America? Thousands of them were accepted in the United States and many ended up in upstate New York.
In prison, I’ve discovered that a chunk of their offspring constitutes a sizable part of our state’s neo-Nazism movement: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Quite a few of them wore the guards’ uniforms, far more – the state’s greens. Some with no other signs of the fascist distinction but their openly hateful attitude. Others – walking around with the swastikas, SS bolts, 88 (numerical code for HH – heil Hitler), 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday), etc. tattooed on their necks, chests, and arms…
But twenty-something Amanda in the fourth of my Albion’s residences had a huge flower arrangement on the back of her neck. She was tiny, very blond, cutely pixyish, terribly flirty – especially with young white officers. A very sociable kid, friendly with everyone. A cleanliness freak and a cleaning ace. She bore a tongue-breaking last name that started with W, which, together with her partiality towards German rock bands, left no doubt of her descent. She chirped at me and offered to do my chores for cigarettes. She lived in a row of cubicles that shared back walls with my row, two cubicles down.
You were not really allowed to wonder around the dorm and cube-visiting was strictly prohibited. But if you needed to get something from somebody and you asked for permission to do so, depending on the CO, you might’ve been granted a 2-3 minutes trip to someone else’s cubicle. My cooking time-slot was coming up and I needed to retrieve my Mrs. Dash from somebody who lived next to little Amanda.
As I was passing her entryway, my sideview caught something on her board that froze me on the spot. The picture was affixed right in the center – a cutout from some cheap-paper publication, an old black-and-white photographic portrait of SS Oberstumbannführer Adolf Eichmann – the architect of the Holocaust. The man who proposed that exterminating every Jewish child and adult would solve all German problems and then proceeded to manage the logistics of the mass slaughter.
She was in her cube, cleaning. I stepped in, “Why do you have this photo?”
“Do you know who he is?!” she exclaimed. Not in the way that she couldn’t believe that I recognized him, but in excited, starry-eyed, groupie way. “I’m obsessed with him… Do you want to see my books?” She started pulling hardcovers from her locker and shoving them at me one after another. Half of them were in German. I saw ‘Mein Kampf’ and something with the word “Aryan” on the cover… and then I stopped looking… She was chattering something about her dear great-grandfather, but I stopped listening… I walked out. I was nauseous…”
To continue: p. 428
The featured image:
© Marina Zosya, My Personal Nazi Brigade – Self-portrait in Mise-en-scene, ACF, 2019
The Frustrated CFO 