{"id":86757,"date":"2021-07-08T17:05:49","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T15:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=86757"},"modified":"2021-06-28T07:15:29","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T05:15:29","slug":"18-05-60","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=86757","title":{"rendered":"The Screamers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Screamers<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

KATHRYN WOLF<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

When an ugly hatred arrives in your idyllic backyard, don\u2019t say we didn\u2019t warn you it was coming<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

.
\nDurham City Council meeting, April 16, 2018<\/em><\/span>
\nYOUTUBE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

You think it\u2019s over? It\u2019s not o-ver<\/em>,\u201d my Great-Aunt Lee used to warn me, in a singsong voice, her forced smile wrapped up with some sort of awful knowing. \u201cAntisemitism isn\u2019t over. It\u2019s never o-ver<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My dear Aunt Lee was clearly crazy, I\u2019d think. Superstitiously spitting-after-compliments crazy. What antisemitism?<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the mayor and city council of my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, enacted a resolution in support of what Jewish Voice for Peace dubbed \u201cDeadly Exchange,\u201d a toxic campaign to spook well-intentioned people into blaming Israel for policing issues in the United States. Suddenly, Durham Jews found themselves having to deny that Israeli Jews were instructing local cops on how to torture Black Americans. And deny that hating people of color was a Jewish thing. And deny that we were the most sinister, vile people on the planet. Anyone feel like going to the Hope Valley Diner while wearing a Jewish star necklace tonight?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

We began hearing rumors that similar campaigns were afoot in cities nearby. So I plunked down the $600 AIPAC registration fee and bought a long Tory Burch dress at T.J.Maxx, figuring a serious dress would help me get taken seriously. Surely someone, someone<\/em>, among the twinkling constellation of Jewish muckety-mucks at that conference would listen to my story and then help me fix what left me sitting in numb disbelief on my cold bathroom floor night after night, once the kids were asleep.<\/span><\/p>\n

My husband designed business cards for me. \u201cFight Back Now,\u201d they said, with a Jewish star. We printed an optimistic 200 cards on flimsy stock at FedEx, and then to Washington, D.C., I went. I didn\u2019t care that I\u2019d be spending my birthday alone. It was 2019. The world was on fire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walking through the soaring, glass-paneled lobby of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, I somehow felt things might be looking up. The place was abuzz with some 20,000 AIPAC attendees. A veritable army! In one of the conference rooms, a star of the Jewish establishment was holding forth about he had converted an Israel critic into an Israel supporter by employing a few gentle talking points. The takeaway: Understatement can work for you, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

I raced up to the front of the room the moment he was done. Deadly Exchange is spreading, I told him, breathlessly. How can we respond? What can we do?<\/span><\/p>\n

He seemed flummoxed. A circle of people pressed in around us, anxious to pump his hand. I shifted uncomfortably in my black boots.<\/span><\/p>\n

Surely, he had something for me. Anything, really. Could you give me a few sentences, I asked, that will help me fight back against the logic of Deadly Exchange, which is turning my family and other local Jews in Durham, North Carolina, into pariahs unless we publicly renounce the evils of Zionism? No, he said, he didn\u2019t have those sentences. He turned away. I clamped my hand around the business card I held ready. It suddenly seemed so presumptuous.<\/span><\/p>\n

That scene would become a loop in the three days I attended the conference. I\u2019d sit tensely through the speeches or panels, waiting to make a beeline afterward to the People Who Mattered. Now clutching my Kleenex instead of my cards, I\u2019d tell anyone who would listen that bad things were afoot in Durham. Really bad. We had to reverse the city\u2019s boycott. We needed help. We needed a plan.<\/span><\/p>\n

They sized me up. Shook their heads. Tsk, tsk, what a shame. Some handed me their business cards, thick card stock bearing the names of hefty organizations: Jewish Federations, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Israel Action Network, Jewish Community Relations Council \u2026<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

But somehow, that was it: a business card to cheer you through your troubles. A few times, someone would take me gently by the elbow and lead me to someone else. Maybe so-and-so will have some ideas, they said. So-and-so didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

I plodded on: Anti-Zionist posters have gone up in Durham. Swastikas have come out. You really, really should care. Because, you know, what starts with us, might not end with us \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Someone suggested that I meet with my local officials, behind closed doors. Explain things. Don\u2019t you get it? They laughed us out of municipal meetings<\/em>! After the 20th fruitless exchange, I began to understand. No one was going to fix this. Maybe they didn\u2019t know how. Maybe they couldn\u2019t be bothered. Perhaps it was a combination of both. But one thing was increasingly clear: I\u2019d be going back to Durham empty handed, the same old doomsayer as when I\u2019d left.<\/span><\/p>\n

As my despair grew, I began to take stock of the inverse relationship of my happiness to theirs. The AIPAC crowd was a chipper-looking one in 2019. The men in sharp ties and women in sensible heels all seemed to have somewhere to go, and usually someone to go with. In the evenings, they dashed off to some party or another, ducking into Ubers while taking very important calls<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I\u2019d go back to my room at the Embassy Row Hotel and study a cityscape of bleak roofs outside my window. \u201cI\u2019m such an extraneous presence here,\u201d I wrote in my journal on March 25, 2019. \u201cThere\u2019s no booth set up for people whose towns are crashing and burning. No kiosks in here to connect with other disbelieving, horror-struck Jews who see the schisms coming and need help to stop them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On my third and final day, an old friend from New York led me to a small table and introduced me to a dark-haired woman, the director of outreach at such-and-such organization. My last hope. Exhausted and frazzled, I told her that although we\u2019d lost, I was still making blistering speeches at Durham City Hall, directly calling out the mayor and city council for legislating against the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her exact words: \u201cPlease don\u2019t take your show on the road. We would rather not have a vote than have a win vote.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I found myself saying for maybe the 100th time that the city resolution mattered. That I had neighbors who thought Jews were out to get them. Who were being taught that their solidarity with other groups and their moral standing in their community depended on loudly opposing something called Zionism, which also meant opposing my very existence. That this was a programmatic, effortful campaign, supported by copious organizing energy and ideological manifestos and speakers flown in from out of town, targeting my neighbors, who aren\u2019t Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI would invite them over,\u201d she began, speaking slowly and deliberately, because that is how one speaks to the witless.<\/span><\/p>\n

I burst into tears. At the sight of a grown woman, publicly reduced to a weepy lump in a serious and very long dress, my friend was speechless. He finally said, \u201cI guess we forget, living on the Upper West Side, what it\u2019s like in regular America.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed. You there, the lucky ones, standing by the spotless windows of your multistory co-ops, peering down occasionally at us if you remember we\u2019re there. From our perspective, you appear something akin to the \u201cprivileged Viennese bourgeois\u201d of whom Herzl despaired.<\/span><\/p>\n

And us?<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps we are the wretched Eastern Europeans in the evolving story of America. We are the not-lucky people like Mel Waldorf, railing alone against the Alameda County school board; or John Kovac, battling the public library in Highland Park; or Andrew Pessin, thanklessly exposing BDS\u2019 latest maneuvers; or Victor Muslin, chronicling which Columbia University professors whom students would do well to avoid; or Naomi Reinharz, penning a solitary howl against Israeli divestment at Brown University; or Deborah Friedman, Amy Rosenthal, and Josh Ravitch, persisting in the Sisyphean labor of holding accountable Durham\u2019s most powerful civic leaders and the (usually sanguine and occasionally colluding) Jewish establishment here.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of us have been screaming for several years now about the urgency of awakening a slumbering Jewish world as to the dangers of dismissing, excusing, and normalizing anti-Zionism.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are the ragged ranks of isolated objectors doing the dirty work of calling out anti-Zionism in America\u2019s powerhouses and hinterlands. Because that\u2019s the stuff that rots the floor joists, leading to the moral collapse of otherwise good Americans who will grow to favor Deadly Exchange, and reject things like funding the Iron Dome that protects innocent Israeli children from rocket fire. And once <\/span>that<\/em> happens, they\u2019re just a breath away from justifying why someone might want to smash the face of, say, one Joseph Borgen, a red-headed accountant who had the misfortune recently to walk through Midtown while Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Do we lone protesters move the needle? Not by much. Believe it or not, Jews are not all-powerful. The Jewish people are a small minority group\u2014and an increasingly unpopular one in the precincts of fashionable or even semifashionable opinion. We are thoroughly outmanned and outgunned. We break ranks and seek shelter where we can. Some make a misplaced calculation\u2014maybe if I separate myself from the ranters and ravers, the brazen Zionists, the mob will come for them, and not for me.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

After the Durham resolution, I watched in nauseating astonishment as my local Jewish community center platformed the very mayor who had spearheaded Durham city\u2019s boycott. I noted, to my horror, how my Reform synagogue, under its \u201cbig tent\u201d policy, regularly amplified anti-Zionists through study sessions, committee appointments, and even board election slates\u2014while simultaneously shutting down strong Zionist voices as \u201cdivisive.\u201d I wrote regular letters, pointed but polite, about the damage they were causing to our community, our people, and our country. My letters were ignored. My application to sit on the shul\u2019s Israel discourse committee was denied. My request to establish a committee on the scourge of anti-Zionism went unanswered. Last week, my synagogue named our Durham mayor one of its volunteers of the year. I am composing another letter: Dear Temple Executives and Leaders \u2026<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In our own way, my peers in this movement are the new screamers in Arthur Koestler\u2019s stunning essay, in 1944, The Nightmare That Is a Reality<\/em>, which Eric Weinstein read last summer in his podcast \u201cThe Portal,\u201d and which resonated so deeply that we can\u2019t stop talking about it. Koestler\u2019s screamers tried in vain to awaken a slumbering world as to the urgency of saving European Jewry from the ditches and the ovens. Some of us have been screaming for several years now about the urgency of awakening a slumbering Jewish world as to the dangers of dismissing, excusing, and normalizing anti-Zionism.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the longest time, our screams seemed to fall on deaf ears. On the occasions when we were loud enough to cause people to put down their lattes for a moment, they largely dismissed us as hysterics, or \u201cright wing,\u201d or simply too Jew-y for genteel American Jewry.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so it is with equal parts dismay and empathy that I watch as a familiar hatred appears in the sacred double-digit streets of Manhattan, far from \u201cregular America\u201d! Will the people with their hands on the levers at our shuls, our Jewish studies departments, our federations, associations, and committees take our warnings seriously? Maybe. Or maybe not.<\/span><\/p>\n

A virus is a strange equalizer. It turns out that the disease we feel so keenly out here in the shtetl-burbs doesn\u2019t stop at the county line. It now lies in wait on every city street of our tinsel new Jerusalem. It is knocking on all our doors. And if I have learned anything, it is this: The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Durham, we are here for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Kathryn Wolf<\/strong> is a writer and former reporter, living in Durham, North Carolina. Reach her at ThisIsZionism.org.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Screamers KATHRYN WOLF When an ugly hatred arrives in your idyllic backyard, don\u2019t say we didn\u2019t warn you it was coming . Durham City Council meeting, April 16, 2018 YOUTUBE You think it\u2019s over? It\u2019s not o-ver,\u201d my Great-Aunt Lee used to warn me, in a singsong voice, her forced smile wrapped up with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86757"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87301,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86757\/revisions\/87301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}