They Hate Us. Get Used To It.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a favorite of mine. That became even truer after reading her book review of the novel, "The Netenyahus." 

Yes, the book is a novel of Bibi's father, Bentzion, during his time as a professor in the US. The review begins in a typical fashion, about the actual book, and then Brodesser-Akner goes on a different track. It goes on a bit, but it is very, very worth it: 

. . . this was a great book for me to read during the weeks after it was assigned to me, as tensions between Israel and Gaza raged and there was nothing to say about the matter but to text a few people I’m in touch with when these things go on and share my distress and also my inability to share that distress wider. This was a good book to read while tensions escalated further, and friends reached out to me who were just “wondering” what my point of view was on it, in argument stance, and people I didn’t know tweeted at me to see where my support for an oppressed people was, and my peers — who know full well the constraints of my job’s policy on tweeting about politics — liked those tweets, as though being Jewish meant I had to answer for Israel or its government, which I did not elect.

This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews. This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the “questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.

Yes, this book was a good place to turn to swallow my opinions, which are fungible and not really worth knowing, while smart people I know shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the founding of Israel, and learn about the infighting of it even more intimately from this book, as the noise around me got louder and I began to sympathize with Benzion’s point of view not of everything, but of the fact that it must be that Jews were doomed to this particular torture: to remain polite and quiet as this goes on. I began to have Benzion Netanyahu’s old dogmatic thought that this kind of hatred had to be preordained by someone. A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn’t even exist. . . 

I finished writing this as the rhetoric against Israel that had parlayed itself into violent attacks on Jews in the streets of America quieted down, and the online conversation on anti-Semitism chastened itself and receded into its safest places, a place we all agree upon, where a gentile author was bullied into removing an innocuous Anne Frank reference and we Jews all broke our necks nodding in defense of an author being able to make an innocuous Anne Frank reference — and there we American Jews were again, going out of our way to promise we won’t be any trouble if you just leave us alone. Yes, make jokes about that poor dead girl, just please don’t kill us!

In the house I grew up in, a family descended from survivors, we have a pragmatic approach to anti-semitism: It exists, and there is nothing we can do about it. My brothers had always been told, if out for the day in Manhattan, to wear a baseball cap and tuck their tzitzis into their pocket. Nothing new there.

Han, who is from a similar home, becomes upset when he reads obviously slanted news in favor of the oppressor, but I shrug. The world hates us, this I know, no matter how they try to couch that dislike into rejection on moral or warranted grounds.