Well folks, my summer of traveling just ended with a brief visit to my ancestral home of Omaha, Nebraska.  Despite the fact that I was there for ostensibly professional reasons (I was honored to participate in the fantastic annual Omaha Lit Fest, which is turning into quite a major event) the trip was fraught as usual with the ghosts of the past; despite the disconcerting presence of a new American Apparel, it’s still my hometown, and being there, I couldn’t help but reflect on my childhood and adolescence, and for probably the millionth time, what it was like growing up Jewish in a place where being Jewish is still at least semi-weird.

I’ve written extensively about this (it’s so comfortable to revisit postions we’ve already taken, isn’t it?) and I’m not going to go into my personal experience here; if you’re interested, you can read my book.  But being home reminded me of a strange little news item I caught sight of a couple of weeks ago, and have since meant to call to your attention.

Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services is offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, Alabama—a town of 58,000 known as the Peanut Capital of the World (although I think a few towns in Georgia might dare to differ).  It's a kind of yiddische Homestead Act set smack in the cradle of Dixie, and the terms are simple: the families stay at least five years, become active in the local synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, and the money never has to be repaid.  

Jews in the South are nothing new, and historically, were in some ways more visible and prominent than their co-religionists in the North.  The oldest continual Jewish community in the United States is in Charleston, South Carolina, where a group Portuguese Jews first settled 300 years ago.  Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State of the short-lived Confederate States of America was a Jew (a fact conveniently forgotten by so many of today’s good ol’ boys who proudly emblazon the Stars and Bars on the sides of their pick-up trucks and semi-automatic weapons); and during my stopover in the Memphis airport on my way back to New York, I counted as many yarmulkes as one might see in, if not New York, than certainly Chicago. 

Today, more Jews than ever—almost 400,000—are making their homes in the South, but they tend to be Northern transplants clustered in urban areas like Atlanta and Birmingham (rather than in the kinds of towns we Yankees are used to viewing in sepia toned movies, accompanied by haunting shots of live oaks draped in Spanish moss and the sound of somebody throatily humming the word “Jesus” over and over again off screen—a sure sign in the language of film that something bad, sinister, and racially tinged is about to happen.)  As a result, small-town synagogues are closing, and once close-knit communities have dissolved.  In the article I read, a woman named Thelma Nomberg, who grew up in nearby Ozark and was the only Jewish student in the region’s public schools in the 1940’s put it simply: “We are dying.”

This is undoubtedly true and painful to the men and women watching their communities wither and disappear, and the Blumberg organization is to be commended for their attempt to recognize and revitalize the history and heritage of the Jewish South.

That said, I can’t help but feel that the city elders of Dothan, who have expressed enthusiasm about the plan, have slightly different motives here.  

As someone who grew up in a rural state (admittedly not Southern, but a population of 58,000 is practically a megalopolis for some parts of Nebraska), I feel I can safely say that the death of small town America is hardly an exclusively Jewish problem.  Jews may have disappeared from small towns, but so have people.  As big-box retailers curtail and eventually murder local businesses, as factories shut down, as opportunities grow ever scarcer, talented and ambitious young people take flight, seeking their fortunes elsewhere, and never come back. 

They call it the brain drain.  Left behind are the elderly and those with few other options. To survive, such towns (and I’m not speaking of Dothan in particular, but depressed areas in general), require new residents with the skills and energy to attract business rather than drive it away, and in some cases, radically remake the fabric of the community. In the Midwest, a new influx of Latino immigrants has helped to correct some of the imbalance, bringing new vitality to stagnant areas, but in the conservative South where xenophobic fervor tends to run high, this option is perhaps seen as less tenable.  

You need a middle class?  Bring in the Jews.  Any student of Jewish history might feel a faint quiver of recognition.

In the twelfth century, when Jews were massacred and eventually expelled from England and France, the Polish prince Boleslaus III had an idea: why not invite them to Poland?  He was struggling to transform his country into a mercantile culture, Jews were educated and good with money and needed a place to live.  At the time, Lithuania, which comprised much of Poland was still officially a pagan state (it would remain so until 1386, when Poland offered its crown to the Lithuanian Grand Duke, and was the last country in Europe to Christianize); there would be no significant religious obstacle from its people.  Rich in resources and underdeveloped, Poland was ready and waiting for the beleaguered and brainy Hebrews.  

Casimir the Great: good for the jewsAs they say in Fiddler on the Roof, it was a perfect match.  Over the next two hundred years, Jews flooded into Poland, almost exclusively forming the middle class—a liaison between the agrarian peasants and the cultured aristocracy.  The odd flare-up of anti-Semitic violence certainly occurred, but compared to the horrors Jews had endured in Crusades-mad Western Europe, these hardly seemed reason for pause.  In 1264, Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz, which officially granted all Jews the freedom of worship, travel, and most importantly, trade.  Poland became the center of Jewish life in Europe, culminating under the beloved proto-liberal Casimir the Great (1303-1370) who expanded Jewish rights and protection to such an extent that he was known as “Casimir, King of the Serfs and Jews.”  

Unfortunately, if you’ll remember, it went downhill, or we’d all be speaking Polish right now.  

Thus far, Dothan has not proved nearly as attractive to urban Jews as medieval Poland, and unless the approximately seventeen gentiles in Great Neck lose their minds and start a riot against the Silvermans next door, this seems unlikely.  But the Jews who have settled in Dothan seem to find an extremely hospitable place.  As Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El points out: “The Northeast has a very warped perception of what the South is all about….the South is a wonderful place to be.  The people are warm and friendly.  There’s very little traffic, and best of all, there’s no snow.”

Let’s just hope she’s singing the same tune 500 years from now.

Hello, and welcome to “Anti-Semites We Love!”

It’s a new semi-regular feature here in the Protocols, when every few weeks I’ll take some time out from furiously cataloguing the various ways in which Jews hate themselves and give some attention to the people who keep making sure that we do.  Namely, those writers, musicians, and artists that we have admired and even loved over the years, found in them a kindred spirit, and then come across a passage in one of their works, or a troublesome quote, (my mother had a day planner given out free by the ADL, I believe, that was full of such chestnuts—a Jew-hating maxim for every day of the week.  I wish I was joking, but I’m seriously not), or the telltale section in their Wikipedia entry entitled something like “5. Controversies; 5.1: Anti-Semitism” and realized that not only were we not kindred spirits, but said idol would detest us for no reason other than an accident of birth. 

An idol such as this might be perfectly polite to our face as we proclaim our admiration and excitement at meeting them, all the while silently, relentlessly scrutinizing our behavior, pens poised, ready at some later date to hold up our too-loud laughter, the too small (cheap) or too big (showy) tip we left for the bartender, or our unfortunate propensity to spray them with crumbs as we speak as evidence of the inherent inferiority of our religion and race.  Later, over a glass of port with similarly inclined friends, they will mock our names, our noses, our manners, our almost touching—that is, if it wasn’t so ludicrously reprehensible—delusion that we could ever belong. 

You may surmise, reading this above paragraph, for this purpose my typical anti-Semite is rather a genteel one, the kind that stand around in country clubs in pressed white linen and tennis clothes, drinking cocktails and flashing their pearly teeth like some kind of advertisement for Presbyterian toothpaste.  This is not accidental.  Like many of my co-religionists (Ralph Lauren, Aaron Spelling, Joseph Lieberman), I harbor a furious and obsessive love for congenially hostile WASPs and their culture that borders on the self-destructive—the way an adolescent girl, feverishly inscribing the name of her crush on the cover of her notebook in ever deepening gouges of ballpoint, suddenly wonders what it would feel like to do the same thing with a razor blade, on the inside of her arm.  

Thank You, Henry Ford: we tip our yarmulkes to youBut here the plan is to stay away from the professionally bigoted—those whose antipathy toward my race is a raison d’etre—your David Irvings, your Hassan Nasrallahs, your Adolf Hitlers.  We don’t love them.  Nor will I be reaching too far back into the sands of time—I’m not interested in waxing nostalgic on the virtues of Pharaoh, for example, or Haman or Antiochus; I filled in enough coloring pages of these villains in elementary school to last a lifetime.  

Instead, I shall focus on those that have had a lasting, positive effect on humanity.  Those that have left behind ideas and works or transcendant beauty (or at least impressive cleverness) and are exceptional (or at least amusing) in every way, yet happen to be tarred forever with the brush of disdain for the Chosen People.  The evidence may be no more than an incriminating joke or the recollection of a colleague; or it may be something more insidious, and some of these may have even contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to something that may have helped the objects of their derision. Henry Ford gave us the Dearborn Independent, but he also gave us the car. You get the idea.  For every cloud there is silver lining—for every anti-Semite there is something, somewhere that is good for the Jews.  

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Hello Semites and anti-Semites! (Is that like matter and antimatter? Kind of, except instead of totally and mutually annihilating each other they seem to have maintained an antagonistic, yet symbiotic relationship for centuries, deathless and regenerating, occupying the others mind and heart, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. I talk about Harry Potter a lot, don’t I? I think it’s because it makes me sound younger.)

Sorry! Wandered off there for a second. You see, I’m in Amsterdam.

Yes, that Amsterdam, where last weekend I had the singular experience of watching You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch people—Dutch, except for the dozen or so Germans parked behind us, loudly expressing their befuddlement at every cry of “Disco Disco,” and at Lainie Kazan, naked and resplendent, throwing her arms around Adam Sandler and cooing, “Oh honey! You are good at everything that you do,” before she dunks her hunk of pound cake in his coffee and shoves it in her mouth. Were they really allowed to laugh at this?

The New Jew Revolution--this reflexive self-mockery, the transformation of our own stereotypes and internalized self-loathing into something like pride--hasn’t quite gotten here yet. This can make for some intriguing exchanges. When one Dutch woman, somewhat haughtily, asked me why I hadn’t changed my last name upon marriage to Mr. Abramowitz, “subsuming my identity like most American women,” I replied:

“Well, I guess I could feed you a bunch of lines about having already established my professional identity and not wanting to go through all the paperwork, but honestly? I just wasn’t prepared for my name to sound that Jewish.”

She looked at me with undisguised shock. I know it’s difficult to detect irony when you’re not speaking in your first language, and standing just blocks away from the train station that processed the transports to Westerbork, I really should have known better. But before I could tell her I was kidding, she jumped in.

“But your last name is Shukert. That is a already a Jewish name.”

“Kind of,” I said. “In America it’s sort of neutral. In Nebraska, where I grew up, it’s just kind of German.”

“Well,” she said. “In Holland, it’s very, very Jewish.”

Ah! The ghosts of the past!

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I’m sorry. I really am. I had an entirely different column outlined for this week, all about interpreting the book and recent film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited through the lens of the twentieth century American Jewish experience (the striving, the trying to fit in with people who don’t really see you as an equal, the getting by on sheer talent, the masochistic self-loathing); a piece of literary criticism that would have surely made the genteelly anti-Semitic Evelyn Waugh (who for years was desperately, unrequitedly in love with the notorious Diana Mitford Mosley, Britain’s most glamorous Nazi) turn in his grave. It was going to have a beginning, middle and end; it would have had a coherent thesis and concluding statement.

But that was before the Olympics melted my analytic mind, turning it into a messy, manic carnival of nationalistic synapses. And now, I’m too excited to write (or even think) about anything else.

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“Guess what?” My mother sounded positively bubbly--I hadn’t heard her this excited since her latest colonoscopy came back clean. “Harry Potter is Jewish!”

“Harry Potter is a fictional character,” I explained patiently. “But if Harry Potter had a religion, I’m pretty sure it would be some kind of magical Druidic paganism or something. Isn’t that what the Fundies were all up in arms about?”

“Well, not the real-life Harry Potter,” my mother replied, imbuing this paradoxical statement with all the disdainful petulance of a thwarted middle-schooler. “The actor. I just read an interview with his Bubbe in the Jewish Press. What’s his name?”

“Daniel Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe, huh? I wonder what it used to be.”

“It’s his mother that’s Jewish,” I said automatically. “His father isn’t.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. But she soon brightened again. “But if his mother is Jewish, then he’s Jewish! And you already knew!”

Yes. I had known the truth about young Mr. Radcliffe for some time, since my usual procrastination technique of looking up random bits of useless knowledge on the internet had seized me with a burning need to know whether it was Alicia Spinnet or Katie Bell who played Chaser for the Gryffindor Quidditch Team (answer: both did!) which led me to the Harry Potter Lexicon, which led me to Daniel Radcliffe’s Wikipedia page, which led me to the “List of English Jews” where I spent a full two hours glorying in the achievements of Matt Lucas, Nigella Lawson and Vanessa Feltz until I pulled myself together enough to go to the bodega for my seventeenth diet Coke of the day.

This kind of behavior is hardly atypical. Before my grandmother passed to that giant entertainment center in the sky, she used to adore cataloguing the co-religionists on her favorite television programs, pointing a knobby finger at the screen as the stale rugelach crumbs spilled down her housedress. “That Paul Reiser is just adorable! And he’s a Jew!” (Really? Paul Reiser? You don’t say.) As a child, I often shut myself in my bedroom, poring over the copy of Great Jews of the Stage and Screen, the soothing presence in those pages of Debra Winger and Jill St. John assured me that I could still be rich and famous, without having blond hair or being able to do a complete split. Despite the fact that my sister possessed a fine head of pale, buttery ringlets, and nearly every girl in my ballet class at the JCC was suppler than me, at the time I associated my failings in this area, like everything else I disliked about myself, with my Jewishness. Lauren Bacall gave me hope.

We lived in Nebraska, where Jews were thin on the ground, but had we dwelt in Great Neck or Tel Aviv I hardly think my mother’s delight that a Jewish boy had been chosen to portray the world’s most beloved teenage wizard would have been more acute.

There is only one other group of people that monitors the identities of prominent Jews as assiduously as the Jews themselves; who can, off the top of their heads, rattle off the names of each Jewish member of the United States Senate (thirteen, if you count Joe Lieberman) and Nobel Prize winner.

These people are white supremacists.

Thanks to the Internet, climbing into the mind of your friendly neighborhood neo-Nazi is easier than ever. Simply type in the name of any celebrity or public figure you believe or suspect to be a landsman into a search engine, along with the word Jewish. You’ll find glowing-with-naches profiles a la Harry Potter’s proud grandma, but you’ll also immediately be directed to David Duke’s website or the aptly named Jew Watch, which will assure you (accompanied by detailed genealogical charts) of the problematic ancestry of dangerous and powerful Semites like Estelle Getty, Scarlett Johanssen, and Kyle Broflovski. The attention to detail is so astounding—Robin Williams appears on the list, with the caveat that he once mentioned that he was Jewish on Oprah, but was “most likely joking and is of probable Christian ancestry” which is a relief, since the organizers of the next Aryan Brotherhood Autumn Retreat had already a Bicentennial Man/The World According to Garp double feature for Movie Night. Other heroes of American comedy don’t get off so easy; although the author acknowledges that “he is a funny motherfucker” and that he has “laughed his fucking ass off as some of his shit before”, Larry David is most certainly a Jew and none of us should forget get it.

Don’t worry, dude. We won’t.

Lists of names feature prominently in Jewish culture. The Book of Genesis teems endlessly with long recitatives of who begat who. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we pray with our eyes trained on the Book of Life, a kind of gargantuan cosmic database cataloguing all our virtues and trespasses that judges us accordingly (growing up, I always explained it to my Gentile friends as something like Santa’s naughty-and-nice list, except that the punishment for naughtiness was not fewer toys, but death. Is it any wonder we don’t attract more converts?) The names of the deceased are printed in pamphlets and solemnly read aloud on the anniversaries of their passes, and the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem has taken on almost talismanic properties—at once a memorial and an affirmation of existence. After all, the Nazis had their lists too. And apparently, they still do.

Perhaps what is most interesting (and eerie) is that whether these lists of famous Jews are available in glossy coffee table books and sold at the gift shop of the Jewish Museum on 5th Avenue, or posted in inept HTML on a website festooned with German Eagles and misspelled quotes from David Irving, they serve a roughly analogous purpose: to document the influence and reach of a people whose dizzying level of achievement on the world-stage is vastly disproportionate to their relatively miniscule numbers. Of the major world religions, we outnumber only the Ba’hai, and not by much. And how many Ba’hai are staff writers on The Daily Show?

For Jews, this legacy of prominence is a cause for celebrations, for the triumphs of a people that, to put it gently, the world has been rough with. For our antagonists, this never-ending parade of Jews in the news is evidence of precisely that—of a people of undue influence, an encroaching threat, a giant yarmulke-wearing octopus that gouging the world in its tentacles. And it’s precisely this sentiment that lends the streak of buried melancholy to Aunt Sharon’s discovery of the Beastie Boys, to Adam Sandler’s Hanukah Song, and to the doctrine of Jewish overachieving in general. If we can only keep churning out doctors, lawyers, rock stars, Nobel laureates, and ribald comedies about tubby, curly-headed stoners and the Gentile women who reluctantly love them, we will at last make ourselves indispensable. To committed populists like Kennebunkport’s own George W. Bush, elitism is a term of contempt. But for Jews it means something quite different. We know that even the Nazis let some of the elite—scientists, musicians, artists---slip through the cracks.

The elite survive. When we are all elite, then we will all be safe.

And on a personal note, I’m still trying to make it there myself, so Jew Watch, if you’re reading, put me on your list! Keep an eye out for my nefarious doings—I beg you! I’ll send you any biographical information that you need. And if you’d like to link to my Amazon page as well, who am I to stop you? I don’t care if you burn my book, as long as you buy it.

Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t precisely clear to me what a Semite was, but I knew what it meant to be anti one. It meant you hated Jews and wanted them dead.

The existence of such a prejudice was hardly news; the bookshelves in my room groaned under the weight of solemn tales of the Holocaust and the pogroms, stories festooned with grim illustrations of terrified children laden with bundles, peering helplessly through pen and ink fence of barbed wire. My parents had their own stories: anti-Semitism was the reason my immigrant grandmother refused to let her children go swimming with the non-Jewish neighbors, why my father had been beaten up several times a week on his way home from junior high by roaming gangs of feral Gentile children.

But that was years ago.

“I’m not saying it will happen,” she continued, “but I want you to prepare for it if it does.”

As I had not yet learned that my mother’s general pessimism towards the human race was not always based in tangible reality, her warnings filled me with a consuming, atavistic sense of dread. When would the assault come, and in what form? Would I be shunned in the cafeteria or disinvited from birthday parties? Would I be physically attacked: trapped in lockers or forced to gather change from the floor as a gang of Esprit-clad Aryans mocked the parsimoniousness of my race? At the very least, I assumed I would be taunted verbally with cries of “kike” and “yid”; “heebie” and “hook-nose” and “Red Sea pedestrian” and other racial epithets I learned from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

“You forgot sheeny,” said my mother.

“I thought that was an Irish person.”

“Nope. You’re a sheeny.”

As time passed, I would hear all those words and more. What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

Everywhere, young Jews are eagerly, even gleefully appropriating the traditional iconography and language of anti-Semites faster than you can say “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We howled with laughter at Borat, at the grotesque puppet in “The Running of the Jew” laying its “filthy Jew-egg” as Sacha Baron Cohen spewed der Sturmer-worthy invective in pidgin Hebrew. We read publications with names like Heeb and Jewcy, and cheerfully throw around terms and stereotypes that would have sent previous generations straight to the local ADL office. Recently, I was watching TV at home when I received a phone call from a co-religionist friend.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m at home, watching The Jewish Americans on PBS.”

“Yeah? What’s happening?”

“Oh, I guess this episode is on Leo Frank. But as far I as can see, the whole thing is mostly about how we’re ugly and everybody hates us.” We dissolved with laughter.

There are a number of possible reasons for this change in attitude. The age we are living in is a peculiar one, equal parts irony and genuine turmoil. Festering internecine and tribal hatreds have once again become a very real part of how the world operates; as a result, political correctness has died an unceremonious death, while multiculturalism is dying a somewhat more tortuous one. At the same time, overt intolerance has become nearly obsolete, to the point that one can perpetuate almost any form of prejudice with the implicit understanding that if the speaker is of a certain social class or education level, he or she cannot possibly be a bigot. On a strictly Jewish level, I think my generation has simply lost patience with our Hebrew school educations, with the constant focus on victimhood and hardship, and the sometimes reactionary politics of the Jewish establishment—with the powerful lobbies and their professional outrage, the shell-shocked parents and grandparents ever at the ready to pick up a phone or file a formal complaint the second a Jewish child is made to sing “Silent Night” or assigned a biology midterm on Yom Kippur (I speak from personal experience here.) There are better things to do with one’s time than to be constantly on guard against closet Nazis. Or maybe after 5000 years of the being on the wrong end of the world’s general shittiness, we’ve just stopped taking it so personally.

But to borrow a phrase from David Mamet in The Wicked Son, his provocative and occasionally infuriating book on the subject, “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Fine.

In this, my mother was right. All of our mothers were right. My generation, we American Jews in our 20’s and 30’s, may have missed having taunts and dirt clods thrown at our heads as we waited for the school bus, but you don’t have to look very far to find our people held in general contempt. In fact, don’t look hard at all—just look in the comments section of any major internet blog that so much as mentions the State of Israel, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, or boiled chicken.

So welcome to The Protocols, named of course for the famous (and forged) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or as I like to think of it, the book that started the international craze, the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. Here, I’ll strive to answer the important questions—not so much “Why do they hate us?” but “So what if they hate us?” I’ll look at how Jews have, for better and for worse, internalized the tenets of anti-Semitism and turned them inside out, how Jews judge other Jews, and what it means to be a self-hating Jew (as opposed to a Jewish self-hater.) I’ll examine anti-Semites through history, anti-Semites in the news, and once every few weeks or so, anti-Semites we love. (And yes, I’m taking recommendations.)

My qualifications for this mighty task, taken on by everyone from Moses Maimonides, Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Adolf Hitler? None whatsoever; except I’ma writer, I’m a Jew, and I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life worrying about who doesn’t like me.

So, my fellow filthy Christ-killers, if you can stop counting your golden ingots and draining your neighbor’s kids of their blood long enough to actually read something, I hope you’ll join me. We may not win any hearts and minds, but in the words of the immortal G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

And after all, we’re supposed to be so smart.