Well, I’m here again, heading up Jewcy’s Amsterdam bureau, and figured I’d give you a nice old fashioned dispatch.

Perhaps in all of Western Europe, Amsterdam is the most Jewish of cities.  Any local will tell you as much, in the amused, slightly ironic tone we in the States use to say things like: “You know, the high school gym was built above an old Indian burial ground.”  

You wouldn’t know it from benign army of George Plimpton look-alikes whistling merrily atop their old-fashioned bicycles, seemingly unperturbed by Semitic worries like allergies, or digestive troubles, or genocide, but there are still a few real live Jews tucked away in Northern Holland.  I’ve even met five or six of them, which about as many as we had at my high school in Omaha.  What we didn’t have in Omaha, however, is the shadowy imprint of a once large and influential Jewish presence living in street names, history, and monuments throughout the city my magical, mystical tour of Forgotten Jewish Amsterdam.

If the lines snaking outside the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 267 are any indication, the famous Secret Annex and adjoining museum (and café—it wouldn’t be Holland without an attached café, serving sensible luncheon dishes of tomato soup, open-faced cheese sandwiches, and apple cake) are the still the first things people think of when they think of Jewish Amsterdam.  Tucked away around the corner is the little statue of Anne herself, looking for all the world the Degas sculpture La petite danseuse de quatorze ans in the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York (Anne herself was about fourteen when she was deported, so that’s a fun fact to know and tell.)  Just next to Anne’s statue is the famous Homomonument, Amsterdam’s tribute to all homosexuals that have been persecuted (especially by the Nazis) so if you’re Jewish and gay, that little stretch of the Rozengracht is really one-stop shopping (or sobbing) before you hit the sex clubs for the night.  

Far lesser known than the house where Anne Frank hid, however, is the house where Anne Frank lived, a nondescript apartment house on the Merwedeplein in the Riverienbuurt (in translation, River Neighborhood), which in the 20’s and 30’s was an overwhelmingly middle-class Jewish neighborhood—sort of the Skokie or Brookline of Amsterdam.  Today, it remains a middle-class neighborhood of comfortable WWI-era apartment houses and retains its Jewish heritage with the presence of an Orthodox synagogue and a small yeshiva alongside kebab shops and supermarkets.

Across town is the more historic Jewish section, surrounding the main drag of the Jodenbreestraat (which according to my handy online translator, translates literally as “Jews Cooked to Mush Street”; while tantalizingly poetic, I’m almost sure this can’t be right).  On this street is the famous Rembrandthuis the residence and studio of the great master Rembrandt van Rijn, who legendarily inspiration in the faces of his Jewish neighbors, many of whom he used as models for his work.  Nearby, taking up nearly the entirety of the Nieuwe Amstelstraat, is the Jewish Historical Museum, housed in four former synagogues, including the former Great Synagogue, once the largest synagogue in Amsterdam and founded in the 1671 by Ashkenazi Jews fleeing from the Chmielnicki massacres in Ukraine.  Next to the museum is the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, a square named for the first Jewish lawyer in the Netherlands (but rest assured, not the last) who fought for full Jewish emancipation under the law.  The square also bears yet another monument, this one to the dockworkers who briefly went on strike to protest 425 Jewish men and boys being sent to Mauthausen in 1941.  I’m sure it would have made Jonas Daniel Meijer proud.  

There are many, many monuments in Amsterdam; it’s a very old city and a lot of terrible things have happened here.  But my favorite, for sentimental reasons, is the Holocaust Memorial on the Max Euweplein, situated (appropriately, I’m sure you’ll agree) in front of the Hard Rock Café.  It’s a block of marble roughly the shape of a face that reaches to about eye-level, and the site of one of my personal Great Moments in Jewish History: we were returning from a free vodka tasting in a nearby gallery, completely off our faces, and my friend Maarten was amusing himself by drunkenly recounting Nazi jokes.  Sadly, he scarcely had time to crack himself up before he walked face first into the Holocaust Memorial, immediately breaking his nose and thus mingling his literal Aryan blood with the symbolic blood of my own anguished people.  I never laughed so hard in my life (but then I tried to take him to the emergency room, like a nice girl.  He wouldn’t go.)

Further south, behind the Heineken brewery, is a trendy area called the Pijp, and in the center is the beautiful Sarphatipark.  It’s prettier (I think) and more peaceful than the larger (and more famous) Vondelpark nearby, and in the middle is yet another monument (but this one is a fountain) to Samuel Sarphati, the Jewish physician and city planner who dedicated his life and work to improving living conditions for the poor.  The park was planned as a tribute after his death in 1866, and remains named for him to this day—apart from a brief interruption during the Nazi occupation when it was temporarily renamed.  

The Amsterdam ArenA is home of the Amsterdam football team Ajax, colloquially known as “the Jews” (you know, like “the Yankees.”)  I’ve written about Ajax here before, so I won’t go into it all again, but…until you see a giant blond Eindhoven fan screaming “Up with Hamas” to a defiant Moroccan youth in baggy pants and draped in a sheet covered with Stars of David…well, welcome to New Europe, ladies and gentleman.  (Who thought it would sometimes seem so much like Old Europe?)  Often forgotten in Dutch athletic history, however, is the 1928 Dutch Women’s Gymnastics Olympic Team, who won the first gold medal given in women’s gymnastics at the Olympische Stadium in their home town of Amsterdam.  Nearly all of the team was Jewish, including their coach; only one would survive the Holocaust.  

And on that happy note, you can celebrate the fact that you are still alive by engaging in what is possibly the most preferred Jewish pastime of the postwar era—grab a seat at one of the many, many “coffee shops” in Amsterdam and spark up a big fat joint.

Goed zo!  Dat is het!  Dank u well, dames en heren, en tot ziens!
 

Last week, I had the pleasure of appearing in Westchester before a lovely synagogue reading group (and an even lovelier platter of Nova lox, replete with capers, cherry tomatoes and tasteful slivers of red onion) to discuss my book.  I read an excerpt from the first chapter, and then, as is expected of one at such events, fielded questions from the audience.

Usually, when I do this sort of thing, I hope that the questions are things like “Why are you so brilliant?” or “How can I get my granddaughter to be more like you?”—queries designed to appease the blend of overweening arrogance and overwhelming insecurity that forms my sad little psyche.  As of press time, these queries have never been asked by anyone in any forum, and this was no exception.  I was however, asked for my opinion on several issues pertaining to issues of Jewish identity, which I did my best to answer, but the perhaps the most challenging question came from an elderly gentlemen, a former speech and rhetoric teacher (who later took it upon himself to tell me that I had read way, way too fast and I’d better slow down if I ever expected to get anywhere in life.) 

This was his question:  “Tell me, what does your generation think of the state of Israel?”

I was startled.  No one, not even in the most indulgent, honey-you-are-good-at-everything-you-do bubbe kind of way, has ever so much as intimated that I am the voice of a generation.  And this was a question to which, it seemed to me, I had no good answers.  A sea of expectant senior faces turned towards me, eager to have their worst suspicions either fulfilled or assuaged.  For a brief, terrible moment, I was back in Hebrew school.

“Well,” I began, “I can only speak for myself…” and then launched into a half-hearted something or other about a two-state solution, and how an non-interventionist American foreign policy will ultimately be good for Israel, and almost cried with relief when a woman dressed head to toe in a color my mother likes to call “Menopause Purple”  raised her hand to tell me that she didn’t care particularly for my work, as she felt I didn’t spend enough time on all the positive things about being Jewish.  “You’re absolutely right,” I said, and shoved some more lox into my mouth.  (I refrained from my stock answer to this question: “Well, I hate myself and I’m a Jew.  So I guess you can draw your own conclusions.”)

In a piece endorsing Barack Obama on the Huffington Post this week, entitled “Israel’s Best Interest is a Morally Strong America," noted gazillionaire (and possessor of the most vivid dye job on an octogenarian since the late Ronald Reagan) Edgar Bronfman Jr. provides his answer to the former speech instructor’s question: “There is a generation growing up that is more distant from Israel than I should like. Young Jews do not automatically support Israel, and many are rightly troubled by what they learn about the ill treatment of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. No longer motivated by fear of anti-Semitism, they seek to understand what Israel stands for, not to say ‘my Israel, right or wrong.'  Without strong support among the younger generation of American Jews, Israel may lose its vital relationship with the U.S. government.”  Apparently Bronfman is also the voice of a generation.

As I mentioned, I can only speak for myself.  But I wish I had thought to ask my interlocutor to clarify: was he asking for my views on the State of Israel, or the state of Israel?  Because like my on the United States of American and the United (and various) states of America, these are two very different subjects, and my views on each are very different indeed. 

One I hold very dear indeed.  The other is something that I think we can all agree has a great deal of room for improvement.   

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.  

The honorees on this page will not only receive the honor (or ignominy) of my humble musing on their lives; they or their heirs, should they choose to claim it, will receive one (1) signed and dated certificate, suitable for framing, decorated with all the Judiaca-themed clip art my 1991 PC edition of Print Shop has to offer.  Also, each honoree will have a tree planted in their honor in the newly endowed Garden of Intolerance in the Jewcy offices, if by planting a tree you mean we’ll write their name in crayon on a Styrofoam cup filled with dirt, shove a kidney bean inside and hope for the best.  (I got a lot of bean sprouts this way as part of my third grade science project, so there you go.)  We’re also looking for suggestions for future honorees, so if you or someone you love is an anti-Semite, don’t hesitate to let us know!  

And with that, allow me to introduce you to Anti-Semites We Love, edition one: ladies and gentlemen, RICHARD WAGNER.

Every little girl fantasizes about her wedding day: the dress, the flowers, the cake, the music.  And every little Jewish girl remembers the day she figured out that her wedding wouldn’t be like the ones in the movies.  Why?

No "Here Comes the Bride."  Because Richard Wagner wrote it, and Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Hey Dick: what jew lookin' at?Such an anti-Semite, that despite being one of the most influential composers the world has ever produced, his work has never been given a public performance in the State of Israel. (It has been broadcast on the radio, for the well-known opera buffs of Hamas.)

Such an anti-Semite that he authored an entire, widely distributed essay on the subject (which he published under a pseudonym) entitled: Das Judenthem in der Musik (Judaism in Music), in which he savages Jews in general and Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular, deeming them a negative, alien influence harmful to German music and Germany in general.  While his language in this pamphlet is certainly offensive, it is worth noting that Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were not only Jews but also contemporaries and rivals, with Meyerbeer in particular being far more commercially successful and beloved by audiences (and truly, less gifted) than his antagonist.

It is true that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, and that the Nazis appropriated some of the kitschier aspects of his theatrical ideas for staging their own rallies; as well as co-opting some of his stickier ones about race and German identity.  However, even as the Nazis celebrated some of Wagner’s racial theories (as they similarly bastardized elements of Charles Darwin’s, but that doesn’t seem to bother us as much—after all, creationists don’t tend to perform very well on their MCATS), they aggressively suppressed other memes in his work—his pacifism, for example, and while Wagner’s writings and work may have been an influence on some of the Nazi’s loftier (and more ludicrous) mythological sentiments, he did have the good taste to die some 50 years before Hitler came to power.  

And if he had not?  Who knows what would become of him.  Wagner certainly was no friend of the Jews.  But he was also a genius; an irascible, iconoclastic man who might have had quite a bit of trouble adapting to totalitarian rule, which does not tend to look kindly on individual brilliance.  It seems fairly likely that Wagner, while an idol of the Nationalist Socialists in theory, might have run rather afoul of them in practice.  

But let’s look at what matters: his work.  Wagner, in his operas, was among the first artists to make use of cultural and nationalistic tropes as subject matter—not in purely folkloric terms, but as the underpinnings for transcendent high art.  In retrospect, the canonization of these old Germanic legends of Nordic heroes makes us (especially as Jews) cringe, having seen such names and archetypes splashed liberally across the primitive websites of white supremacists and people who sell SS paraphernalia on eBay.  But substitute Siegfried and the Valkyries for more comforting cultural archetypes—the larger than life characters of the American West, for example--and one begins to see how Wagner nudged open the door for countless artists using their own cultural identities as the inspiration for works that at once defined and transcended the realm of personal experience.

In addition to stretching the limits of tonal music (and arguably anticipating the modernist atonality that would dominate the beginning of twentieth century musical composition), Wagner also wrote extensively on his theories of performance, most specifically on his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total art,” in which music, dance, story, and stagecraft would be united into one complete whole.  Many scholars have written that cinema takes this concept to its ultimate and highest level, but I beg to differ. To me, the best example of “total art” as Wagner might have recognized it (and probably also hated it), of story, dance, music, and visualization coming together has a seamless whole for the participatory audience, is that most Jewish of art forms: the American musical theater.

Do you see where this is going?  I realize it’s a giant rhetorical leap, but stay with me for the sake of humor.  You take a cultural archetype from a storied (and comforting) past—say a jovial Jewish dairyman with five troublesome daughters.  You add a little Americanized Gesamtkunstwerk, a dash of New York chutzpah…and bam! 

That’s right.  Without Richard Wagner there would be no Fiddler on the Roof.

And then what the hell would anybody play at their wedding?

Richard Wagner, we salute you.  You are an anti-Semite we love. 

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!

The Amsterdam Joden: in all of their gloryIn regards to Jewish identity, Amsterdam is special. It has a special name, Mokum, bestowed upon it years ago by its Jewish inhabitants, and has many Jewish leaders, including the popular current mayor, Job Cohen. The old Jewish Quarter boasts kosher restaurants and a pristine Jewish Museum. There are several synagogues and Jewish cemeteries still in use, and the Anne Frank House, with an appropriately solemn façade of glass and steel, attracts thousands of visitors each year. And then there are the Amsterdam Joden.

The Amsterdam football (or soccer, for those of you hopelessly unversed in the ways of the Continent) team, Ajax, is one of the three main Dutch football clubs, and like many such teams, inspires almost cult-like devotion in it’s supporters who call themselves… wait for it… the Jews. At games, they drape themselves in makeshift, sometimes homemade, Star of David flags and wear hats and jerseys with Hebrew writing. Some die-hard fans (most of whom, like the players, are not Jewish) set “Hava Nagilah” as their ringtones, or even go the extra mile and have the word Jood (if you went on a field trip with your Hebrew school class to that traveling Anne Frank exhibit in the late 1980’s, your remember as the Dutch word for Jew), often accompanied by a Star of David, tattooed on their bodies. When the team makes a successful play deserving of praise, or a serious bungle requiring encouragement (or reproach) their supported shout "Joden! Joden!" (Jews! Jews!) down at the field.

I thought it might be funny to take up a similar chant whenever Adam Sandler or Robert Smigel appeared on the screen, but managed, thankfully to restrain myself.

In the years since World War II, we’ve gone from martyrs to mascots.

Click The Image: for more Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons!But it doesn’t just stop there! American sports fans may argue over the Yankees vs. Red Sox with conviction and fervor, but rarely does it come to bloodshed. Nor have we perfected the kind of taunting verbal warfare, forged in the crucible of centuries of painful and violent history, that European teams unleash on each other. When some teams play Rotterdam, they sing a song referencing the brutal bombing campaign inflicted on the city by the Germans in 1940: “When the spring comes, we will bomb Rotterdam.” Dutch fans scream at German teams: “Give us back our bikes!” (Interestingly, I don’t believe there are many cases of Israeli fans screaming at the same teams: “Give me back my grandmother!”) When The Hague plays Ajax, they often shout “Hamas! Hamas!” while they goosestep in place and salute straight-armed at the opposing stands. And most famously, and creatively, when the Ajax Joden take the field, you can hear a loud hissing sound come from the Rotterdam stands. This is not a hiss of derision. It is meant to sound like the hiss of the gas. Jews to the gas.

I know. I’d be offended if I didn’t sort of think it was a little bit hilarious.

That’s Holland for you. Jews making Jewish jokes (for example, moi) are goggled at and strangely reprimanded. Non-Jews, however, use the Holocaust as a football chant, and it’s basically fine. (I say basically, because now and then a politician or civic leader plays lip service to how terrible it all is, but it doesn’t make much difference.)

More interesting to me is the evolution. Jews have gone from a being a despised minority to being sainted martyrs, and finally, mascots. I think of a story my mother told me, when we toured the old Jewish quarter of Prague, and came upon a group of elderly women selling little figurines of Orthodox Jews outside the ancient and abandoned synagogue. As one of the women tried to press a ceramic Chasid into her hand, my mother asked her if she was Jewish.

“Oh no!” said the woman.

“What happened to all the Jews then?” my mother asked.

“Oh!” The woman fluttered her hand in the air breezily. “They all moved away.”

A vanished people from a long-past time, whose once reviled customs (and existence) seem quaint and picturesque, now that they’re all gone. How strange to be part of a group filed away into irrelevance by the prevailing culture, the rough, unpleasant edges sanded and swept away by the passing of time.

It put me in mind of another group of people similarly removed from lands that they had lived on for millennia, that we in America currently use as mascots and souvenirs.

The Native Americans.

Is there really so much difference between the “Tomahawk Chop” and the hissing of the gas? Do these cultural appropriations only sting when they appropriate our culture? The only answer, I think, is to just take them back. In the words of Amitai Sandy, the Israeli graphic artist and comic book publisher, in response to the anti-Semitic cartoon contest sponsored by an Iranian newspaper: “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian is going to beat us on our home turf!”

Personally, I’d love to see a version of how the Dancing Mascot of the Amsterdam Joden might look. My guess is that it wouldn’t be like Zohan.