Ana’s Story, Part III: Reframing Anti-Semitism

I belonged to a community garden in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. Anyone familiar with race relations history within the last 15 years knows that Bed-Stuy has been a hotbed of racial and ethnic tension for that time, if not longer. Bed-Stuy is a poor neighborhood. Right now it’s being gentrified, but private developers haven’t yet bought the projects and turned them into condos the way it’s happened elsewhere in New York City. They haven’t yet buried the layers of history underneath cheap concrete and pressboard. Right now, gentrification’s face is that of young, white hipsters – transplants from San Francisco and other points west of the Mississippi. The block where my community garden is, is only a beginning indicator. There are three gardens on the same block. Only one of them is a fully integrated garden. The one I joined.

I first went to join the garden on the western corner of the street, but was immediately turned off by the white woman whose first words to me were: “We’re going to put you to work.” - at which point another white woman joked about her being a slave-driver. I walked out of that garden and happened to stumble into the one in the middle of the block. I was immediately greeted and welcomed by S.D., an African-American woman whose work is to be a vice-principle in the NYC school system. And her welcome convinced me this was where I wanted to be. Not only because of her welcome, but because when she saw my face, she knew what had just transpired.

This garden is not just a black and white garden. The members are of all ethnic, racial, religious and economic backgrounds, and includes children and elders. It’s an amazing orb of community, where each member holds the others in respect, and is accountable to the others as a whole. It’s been an incredible space in the middle of Bed-Stuy, where tensions still run high. It is still a product of its environment.

Six months into my membership, on a beautiful summer afternoon, I was standing in my bed of vegetables when I straightened up and looked out onto the street. I saw a row of cars, and a group of Hasidic men standing in a circle. I looked out and watched as they wandered into the building next to the garden. It was not half an hour before I began to smell toxic fumes. I sat down and swallowed my nausea, and in that moment, one of the other members of the garden, a Black-Native American woman, walked in with a younger African-American girl by her side. They came and sat down next to me. I asked her.

"What are those fumes from?"
" "The auto-body shop."

Pause.

"Auto-body shop?"
"Yeah, they run an auto-body shop. We’ve been trying to get them to stop, but you know."

At which point my eyebrow went up. I felt the skin on my arms bristle. I felt something coming, something that was about to be real wrong.

"What? Why won’t they stop?”

And there it was.

"You know them Jews and how they operate in this city.”

I had known it was coming, and yet I found myself struggling for words, for a response, for some way to address this assault. Did she not know I was Jewish? Even if I wasn’t, what had led her to believe she could say something like that to me? I turned to her and took a deep breath, ready for her distrust to land at my feet.
“I don’t think that in NYC it has anything to do with being Jewish. Corrupt officials are corrupt officials. It’s on them.”
"True,true. But, still…”
"But still nothing. There are like three auto-body shops in this area. I know this ain’t the only one greasing palms."
"Yeah, I still don’t like that they’re trying to take over the neighborhood."
"Haven’t they been here as long as you have?"
"Yeah, but they’re building a settlement house and trying to fill it with their people."
"You mean, you’re upset because another project is going up?"
"No, it’s messed up cause they won’t let black people into the project."
"B. – it’s a project. Everybody’s in the same broke-ass situation."

She looked away from me, and I saw in her eyes that I was incredibly close to being pushed into the “wanna be white” category of assumptions – that I was about to be disowned as a person of color. So I shut up and tried to think about how to break it to B. that “they” includes me, and how to confront what she was doing. The fumes were still going when the younger woman, C., began to talk about the subways and she blurted out:

"Whenever I see one of them, I get off the train. I’m scared of them."

I had lost the thread of the conversation, but I tried to focus. I had to know who she was talking about.

"Who?”
"You know – those turbans."
"Are you talking about the Sikh?"
"Whatever. The ones who look like bin Laden."

I felt sickness rising in my throat. And I had to say something. This was too much.

"This is some ignorance. How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"You’re sixteen and you’re talking like you’re eight and have never seen someone different from you, ever. What do you think other people see when they see black people?"

She fell silent.

“I don’t think it’s the colored people you need to be fearing, y’all. What do you say to the fact that I am Jewish? Trust – the issue is not about poor people, colored people, Jewish people. Those are not the people with power in this country.”

I stood up and walked to the front of the garden. I felt them staring at me, but knew this would blow over. That we might not trust each other the same way again, but that at least, a new truth was out there. As I stood in the flower bed by the front of the garden, one of the Hasid men looked over to where I was standing. I tried a smile. I tried to establish our connection. He looked right through me, twirled his side curls with his fingers and turned away.

I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt my vision of the multi-ethnic utopia that I had so ephemerally experienced shatter. I had found the breaking point – the point where no matter how many different types of people were put together – there lay an unspoken fear that somehow – we would take away from each other. That we would lessen each others’ worth, existence, legitimacy, life…simply by existing. This was the Bed-Stuy, uncovered, and I was there, raw and in the flesh.

**

My experience of anti-Semitism goes beyond my Jewish identity.

I converted to Judaism in what was a very long process, over a series of years that began with my acculturation into Jewish religious and social practice. It began with the people I called my close community that included overnights with the YM-WHA youth group, going to all of my friends’ bat and bar mitzvahs, going to synagogue on high holy days with my best friend’s (Sephardit) family, living in Israel as an adolescent. My conversion was more formalized when I began college and decided to study with Rabbi Sally Finestone – one of the first female rabbis in the United States and a compassionate, dedicated teacher who was passionate about the Hillel’s mission. However, I am a bad Jew. I never had my official mikvah and some would say that my conversion into Reform Judaism doesn’t count anyway. But for me, Judaism is intricately tied into my understanding of community, spiritual practice and tikkun olam – social justice.

Being a woman of color, an Afro-Latina, mixed with a white anglo-saxon U.S. American history, and being a Jew has its complexities. The ones that are most palpable for me are the ones played out on my body within a larger white, Christian society, and within the smaller circles of Ashkenazi European “white passing” Jews and communities of non-Jewish People of Color.

White society in general responds to my declaration of Jewishness with the statement that I am trying to be “white”, or with references to Sammy Davis Jr. And my experience of anti-Semitism in the larger Christian fundamentalist world that is currently the United States is incredibly frightening – for the anti-Semitism underlying actions against Arabs, people perceived as Arabs and against Jews is compounded by racism against Black people and Latinos – all on/against/towards my body. And specific forms of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism are played out around me all the time, by all kinds of folks, who assume that because of my perceived race – somehow, I am supposed to be okay with it. Even if I wasn’t a Jew, I still wouldn’t be okay with it.

Many white-passing Jews usually meet my declaration of Jewishness with the question of how it is I came to be a Jew. My answer has become more graceful over the years, but it is a fundamentally offensive question because it seems that I am asked not out of genuine interest, but because the questioner is trying to make sense of my skin color and Jewish identity (this is also my partner’s experience – she is also a Jew of color, and specifically of African descent). To me, this question is also fundamentally anti-Semitic because it denies the Semitic and multi-ethnic roots of many Jews who are not specifically white-passing or of European ancestry. This includes Arab, Latino, African and Chinese and Indian Jews. It includes me.

Then there is the question of Zionism. As a radical Jewish Lesbian of Color, I am fundamentally, intrinsically, deeply committed to the creation and manifestation of a world free of oppression and violence in all of its forms. That Europe has pushed Jews out of its nations/states and kingdoms throughout history and onto colonial projects is a very jarring and saddening reality.

Many Jews who were forced out of Europe were sent to the colonies to serve as indentured servants or as participants in the colonial enterprises of the Spanish empire. Many of us were forced to become conversos and hide our Jewish identities in order to survive. Many Jews during this time actively participated in the colonial project and the slave trade as owners of African and Native American slaves throughout the Americas. The Spanish inquisitorial court not only had its seat in Spain, but in the Spanish colonies. And this court tried Jews, Moors, witches and heretics alike. Yet, this did not stop our own participation in one of the cruelest systems of genocide in world history. My father’s black/miscegenated family is descended from Jewish slave owners. My own living history is a questioning of this past.

I believe that history repeated itself in a new, uglier form with the formation of the state of Israel following the Holocaust. Because of the way Israel was formed – through forceful action rather than through deliberative, collaborative and democratic participation, we have been struggling with the sum result of our actions ever since. And, it makes me angry that Europe failed to continue its accountability towards Jews and instead “encouraged” a return to the homeland…a political project that was essentially created to establish European and American political strongholds in Southwest Asia with no regards to the actual human tolls.

And because I am a radical Jewish Lesbian of Color, I am fundamentally, intrinsically, deeply committed to the creation and manifestation of a world free of oppression and violence in all of its forms – and though I believe in the Jewish homeland, I also believe in citizenship and in the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. I believe as Jews we have a right to live freely anywhere on this earth – free of persecution, violence and oppression. I also believe that as Semites, we must be accountable to our cousins, our brothers and sisters of the Southwest Asian peninsula, Jewish, Muslim and Christian and hold a united front against our own eradication.

Therefore, anti-Semitism, and my own story of anti-Semitism cannot be divorced from my perception of history, from my understanding of my national, racial and ethnic identities. From my lived experience in a world where Arabs and Jews become targets whenever a colonial project is underway, and one in which Jewishness is narrowly defined as Europeanness.

And this, we should never forget.