From Never Forget to #NotInMyName
My name: Weiss. It’s from the Hungarian part of my family, who emigrated to New York before the Holocaust. My family’s names on both sides: Steingut. Ross née Roshinksi. Kaufmann. Miller née Malinovski. In the Queens cemetery where my grandfather is buried, he sleeps away eternity a few graves from Harry Houdini, also a Weiss, one who magically escaped from his real name.
We have these names. I have always been secretly afraid of the way my name gives me away. Every time I say my name or hand a card to a just-met stranger, a neurotic neuron twists, reminding me that this person may not like Jews. I learned this when I was tiny, and I will never forget.
Lately on Facebook when I post something against the war in Gaza, there is this strange frisson around my name. Sure, my friends know that I’m Jewish. But comments are seen by many, and you never know who will read and respond. Among my “friends” and my friends – there have been intractable, devastating arguments during the last month. And oy – when you comment on an article outside of Facebook – the battlefield on which words are weapons is merciless.
Yet still, real human beings are dying. The ceasefires wax and wane, and each time, children are left dead, full of shrapnel. Families have no escape. No bomb shelters. There is no electricity, scarce food. For all our righteous anger spilling out in 1’s and 0s, we do not know the real shape of this war unless we are there. If we turn out the lights, get into our beds, and wake up the next morning to coffee and the Times, we simply do not, and cannot know.
My postings about Gaza have been almost exclusively from Jewish and Israeli sources in recent weeks – there is practically a surfeit of anti-war articles from the tribe. Then there is is this, a beautiful movement growing in prayer and solidarity. I am heartened, because I’ve opposed the blockade since 2006, and so relieved to know that the brutality and injustice is finally being acknowledged. But mostly I am heartbroken. Mostly I am sobbing several times a day. Mostly I cannot control what I feel.
I haven’t been to Israel in a long time. The last time was in the mid-nineties, shortly after the famous, uncomfortable handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn. My family is so secular that other Jews would be scandalized by our idea of Passover, but I was so, so invested in this handshake, in this peace. I will never forget sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, weeping and weeping – maybe, finally, the cycle of violence would end now.
About a month after I was in Israel I backpacked through Europe with my college boyfriend. We arrived in Prague and moments after stepping off the train, we were swept up by a sweet-seeming, petite middle-aged woman who said that we would love her pension. She seemed to adore us and was clearly lonely. She was a widow. Her husband, a biochemist, had recently passed. She fed us tea and cookies, and told us stories of life under the Soviets. Then she took out her book with all the signatures from her visitors, pointing out their little quirks. “But this one,” she pointed to a name halfway down the page, “This one was a dirty Jew.”
I had never told her my last name. Blond and blue-eyed, I have always passed as a gentile. I retired to our bedroom, stricken. My Irish Catholic boyfriend didn’t understand why I felt like I couldn’t breathe, why I couldn’t sleep in this woman’s house. It was already dark and we were in the suburbs, far outside of central Prague.
We left at 6 am, while it was still dark, at my insistence. Our note, left next to our money for the night, said simply, “Thank you. We had to go.” I wasn’t brave enough to ask her why she hated me for my name, for my DNA. I wasn’t brave enough to tell her how frightening it was that an educated, articulate woman fluent in English would hold such views. I was taught that only the ignorant were racist – it was true in the US, at least it seemed so.
It was the first time I’d ever experienced anti-Semitism. In the Five Towns, where I was raised – a 97 percent Jewish community – we were simply not exposed to such things, even though we knew they lurked out there, beyond our Golden Ghetto.
When I was six, at the Long Island beach club where we summered, I was digging in the sand a few feet away from an old man lounging in a chair with his wife. I saw the blue tattooed numbers on his upper arm. “What’s that?” I asked, as children are wont to do. He told me that when he was a boy, there was a war. Bad men took his family to a camp, made them work and kept them prisoner. The tattoo was to identify him – instead of his name. This was called the Holocaust, he told me, handing me back my red plastic shovel.
“Why?” I wanted to know. “They did this because I am Jewish, sweetheart.” He said this in a very thick Yiddish accent that I will never forget.
“But I’m Jewish – are those men going to take me?” He promised that those men were gone – they couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. But that wasn’t good enough, so predictably, I asked my mother what the Holocaust was. Ever practical and respectful of my intelligence, even at six – my mother told me the history. She left out the gruesome details, but that did not stop my nightmares.
Of all the outbreaks of violence in the occupied territories in all the years I’ve been tracking them, the most recent war feels the most primordial, the darkest, the most terrifying. And not just because Hamas is “winning the PR war” and lining up “telegenic dead Palestinians.” These words come out of politicians’ mouths on Meet the Press and I literally stamp on the floor and scream, “NO! Stop saying that! You are LYING!” You are lying about me. You are lying about my family. NOT IN MY NAME.
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Our souls have filled with so much darkness that there is no more space: the true face of this – the fascist face – is baring its teeth. It’s not even concealed anymore. It’s brandished like an Uzi. It is loud bombs from the sky that break your eardrums, announcing themselves without regret. “We must protect ourselves. We will do whatever it takes.”
“Never forget.” It is tattooed on our collective psyche, us Jews. It is tattooed on the psyches of those of us who have never, ever been in danger in our lifetimes. It is tattooed on us – those who have had every privilege – of whiteness, of education, of being able to call ourselves liberal. Being able to feel proud of our participation in the Civil Rights movement. Of our accomplishments: Nobel Prizes. Oscars. Seats in Congress. Much more. We live in the world; we are no longer refugees.
Yet the archetypes of the Hanukah story dominate our consciousness – our core idea of who we are. We are miracles. We made the desert bloom. All our holidays, the joke goes, can be summed up by: “They tried to kill us, we survived, so let’s eat.”
I am not denying the rabidity of hatred toward Jews in certain quarters. I am not defending the Hamas charter, whatever the reality of its current incarnation. Just for this moment, I am talking about US. Not them. Us.
I am not ignoring the recent virulent outbreak of anti-Semitism in Europe. It is real. It will not go away. There will always be these shadowy forces that come out whenever they can; especially during wars. Despite the scary things that our friends —our self-selected tribe — share on Facebook, don’t we know by now that leaders will stand up for us? That it can never happen again? We have created a bulwark. Laws, international and otherwise. An army in Israel that can, and has, defeated all its neighboring armies. Yet we are still afraid, and our fear is our armor.
Here we are, most of us Jews, in the world, safe and sound. I think about people of color who have to live everyday with the fear of violent assault by police officers, or being stopped and frisked because of the serious offense of merely walking while black. LGBT people live with the same kind of fear — leaving the house and risking assault, just because of who they are.
But these other marginalized groups – those that find it much more difficult to pass – they are not waging a violent war on all perceived enemies. They are not preemptively dominating so they will not be dominated. They are simply seeking to take up space in the world and not be shamed for their existence.
It’s a long time since any of us saw a sign that said, “No dogs or Jews allowed.” Yes, that happened. Yes, it is a brutal, ugly part of our history. What if we could refuse to forget this without living in the constant sadomasochism of our remembering?
It begins with us letting our bellies go soft for just one moment. It begins with us trusting that the entire world is not our enemy. In those nightmares I had, some set in Europe, some in my family’s suburban home, I would hide in closets, in crawl spaces, in the shower crouching and shaking on the bathtub floor. I would hear the Nazi footsteps coming up the stairs. I would often know they’d taken my family – I was the last one left. Sometimes they would stomp with their black boots and in the last frame of the dream, they would find me.
I had these dreams for many years. They flooded back with vicious intensity while I was traveling in Europe. Riding the rails through Germany, the conductor knocked on our cabin while I was sleeping. Still encased in the soft vessel of my dream, I thought maybe he was coming to take me away.
But no one is coming to take me away. I am awake and I am safe. The people in Tel Aviv, even in the South of Israel, are protected by the Iron Dome. Jews all over the world have built a psychic Iron Dome around ourselves, one that feels as if no reality can penetrate. This iron is so thick, so massive, so impenetrable that it prevents some of us from seeing babies in Gaza as human beings. It makes some of us say repugnant things like, “The Arabs don’t love their children like we love ours.”
People of the book, we’re supposed to be. Our selective memory favors only the images that distort and twist us into a decades-long, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder that we’ve grown comfortable with, like an old shoe that never fit properly, that mangles out toes, but it’s all we know so we keep wearing it.
I am writing this because I want my sisters and brothers, the Jewish ones and the Arab ones, to know that this overreaction, this inability to see the world for what it is – it comes from a place. Not just from knowing that less than a century ago a party rose to power in Europe and attempted to exterminate all the Jews on the planet. Not just that they succeeded in murdering 6 million of us and 6 million others. Not just that before that came centuries of pogroms, the Inquisition, the diaspora because we didn’t fit anywhere. Not just. All of it and more.
We have this all in our veins. Our DNA is ridden with existential fear of annihilation. This is why, G-d forgive us, so many forget that our law says we are not to mistreat strangers, for we were once strangers in a strange land.
But if it is annihilation we fear most, it is not the ruthlessness loosed into the world in recent weeks which will save us. It is facing the darkest pit of our fears – facing that Nazi that lives within. It is only by merging with that shadow that we can ever release the shame we carry.
Not every stranger will welcome us. But we must make remembering our security a practice, like a meditation, every day. What happened to us was real – it was not just a bad dream. But we are awake. And we are safe.
