Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew

by Emmanuel Acho

As in, people have been sounding the alarm about the danger of anti-Jewish oppression and racism for about two thousand years.

The year 2021 saw the biggest spike in anti-Jewish rhetoric, violence, and vandalism in the United States since World War II.

Jews are just over 2 percent of the US population, but they are the target of 63 percent of religion-based attacks.

being Jewish is not a one-size-fits-all experience.

In fact, Jews have been debating (one of our favorite pastimes) over the issue of what it means to be a Jew for thousands of years.

Judaism is a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity; it’s a belief system, a tradition, and a bloodline.

One is equally Jewish whether they are a devout practitioner of the faith or if they’re a part-timer for the High Holidays.

“They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”

Whether we recognize it or not, Judaism has seeped into almost every nook and cranny of our lives because of these traits, values, and behaviors. We have this lovely universal shared identity because we’re Jewish—and that’s not something to take for granted if we want Judaism to have a future.

A more appropriate and nuanced concept for understanding how all Jews are related is that of an ethno-religion, which is a vast group of people who do happen to share a distinctive culture, ancestry, belief system, and/or language.

Jews have been told for decades by outside groups who they should be in order to fit in, and then are either shunned for not being enough of that thing

Jews are both not white enough and also way too white. We are seen as an “other” by some and as abetting an oppressive system by others. It’s a “both/and” situation.

Many Jews are both white-passing and our experience can only fully be understood through the prism of ongoing persecution, expulsion, and execution; plus, the collective trauma of what’s been done—plus, the never-disappearing anxiety of what could come next.

Being a white-passing Jew in America is not a ticket out of the cycle of danger. As I said earlier, a majority of religiously targeted hate-crime offenses are committed against Jews, which has been the case every year since the FBI started reporting hate-crime statistics in 1995. After the Hamas attack of Israelis on October 7th, 2023, antisemitic events increased by 388 percent. In October 2023, FBI director Christopher Wray testified to a Senate panel that antisemitism terror threats were reaching “historic levels.”

When you assume that all Jews are white and/or privileged, you erase an entire people’s history. It also makes it a lot easier to assume the worst about Jews.

In fact, the main reason why I wanted to go deeper into Jewish myths and stereotypes is because of how historically damaging they’ve been and continue to be—even when they seem “positive.”

It’s a lot easier to dehumanize and marginalize a group of people when they’re seen as monstrous, ugly, and revolting. In fact, if you reinforce this thinking enough, it seems not only acceptable to persecute or completely wipe out those individuals but potentially even necessary to protect yourself from their negative influence.

What it created was the idea that one only had to look for the nose to “spot the Jew,” and, like the horns, it created an unflattering visual that made all Jews seem evil, calculating, and untrustworthy.

It is still reached for today, usually by referring to Jews as innocent-sounding “globalists.” To use this term when referring to a Jewish person also suggests that Jews hold a higher allegiance to a global conspiracy than to their country of origin.

Antisemitism is both looking down at a Jew as inferior (Hi, Nazis!) but also kinda looking up at them, mostly with fear or resentment, and attributing to them a larger-than-life power and control (Heya, Marjorie Taylor Greene and your Jewish cabal space lasers!).

That can’t-quite-place-it feeling you get about antisemitism is because it is, in essence, a shape-shifting conspiracy theory.

I like to cite author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, who says that Jews are always used to describe whatever it is that is the worst, most loathsome in society at any given moment.

And then there’s the wilderness of social media: 84 percent of Jewish hate–related messaging is not taken down from Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where it spreads like wildfire.

Educators from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum put it in a chillingly eloquent way: “The Holocaust happened because of millions of individual choices.”

The burden of proof has always been on the Jews when it comes to their tragedies. When Hamas released GoPro footage of the rapes and murders its members committed on October 7th, the world still needed more evidence.

So, you see, when we hear the stories from eighty years ago, they are not theoretical to us because we are those stories. We are the descendants of the Jews hiding in closets and under dead bodies in Jerusalem, Cordoba, Fez, Baghdad, Warsaw, and Berlin. This is still very, very real to us.

You see, we are not asking people to hide us in their attics; we are not those people anymore. We’re asking them to come out of hiding for us.