Anti-Semitic Snowball

[Reflections]

I got a snowball thrown at me last week. It could have been worse. It could have landed smack on my forehead, or glasses, or exposed nose. Instead it bruised my pants before blending into the two-foot-high pile of snow. I didn’t even get dirty. (Unlike earlier today when some fool desperately spun the wheels of his car, sending flying projectiles of snow mixed with dirt in my face.) The assailants – a bunch of teenagers – took off before I could entertain the thought of revenge.

It wasn’t the first snowball thrown at me, nor the most memorable. While vacationing in Zurich in the winter of ‘07 a potent mix of snow, ice, and dirt landed on my long black coat, spraying bits and pieces on my face, glasses, and black large-brimmed hat. The assailant, a blond teenage sheigetz, stood across the street with a satisfied grin on his face. Apparently, he wasn’t expecting me to run after him and was visibly stunned when I attempted just that. Running faster than me, he managed to look back several times with an astonished look: “How dare you?”

“This is not America,” Yanky, my host, said to me. “Here we just look the other way. We’re in galus, we don’t create scenes.”

My host and I had grown up in Manchester together, then went on to yeshiva in a London suburb, before we both married and moved to different parts of the world, he to Zurich and I to Brooklyn. Back in Yeshiva, he wasn’t that meek. We Mancunians sat with drooping lower lips listening to the American students regale us with tales of chaptzem heroics. Eventually, a group formed with the supposed aim of countering some local menace or other, but it was really just an excuse to emulate the Shomrim. Yanki was part of the group, hiding his yeshiva-banned radio transmitter under the mattress of an unsuspecting roommate.

“Nu, what happened to you?” I asked.

“The Continent happened,” he said.  The Continent is how Brits refer to rest of Europe.

Not that in Manchester things were that rosy on the anti-Semitic front. I must have been around twelve years old when our daily tormenters, a boy with a dog I would now recognize as an Alsatian, would wait for us on our way to “MH,” the Machzikei Hadas shul on Northumberland St. We would run for our lives. The little sheigetz must have enjoyed the sight of frightened Jews fleeing him and his dog. There was the occasional slur, the two-finger salute (the British version of the ‘bird’), and even punches weren’t unheard of, as were Easter eggs. Or was that Halloween? Guy Fawkes Day? What would a Chusid know. Thankfully, those memories are blurred, now that I live in the land of the free.

Or do I? Along came a snowball and reminded me again that Jews are just doomed to be singled out, if not persecuted outright.

Wait a minute. Not so fast. Today I wasn’t even dressed in traditional Chasidic garb. Like all the people around me in this not-at-all-Jewish neighborhood, I wore a short jacket, knitted beanie, and had my face buried in a heavy wool scarf. My beard wasn’t visible, so what made me stand out as a Jew?

Nothing. It was just kids being kids.

Recently, at a party in Manhattan, I was asked by a Muslim woman if I’d seen a difference in levels of  anti-Semitism between Europe and the U.S. (No, she assured me, she hasn’t experienced discrimination or racial tension herself, for being Muslim – although I suspect it may have something to do with her a pretty young face and her affable smile.)

It’s hard to be objective here. My experiences in Europe came as a youngster growing up while now, more mature and, perhaps, surer of myself, I’m not that easy a target. Also, it would be hard to lump this whole country together based on a sampling taken in New York City – where non-Jews can easily feel like outsiders. But I have been around the country, more often than not dressed in garb clearly identifiable as Chasidic, and I’ve encountered few incidents of prejudice – notwithstanding the indoctrinations of my youth that Esav will, always and forever, hate Yaakov.

It’s easy to claim ‘kids will be kids’. It’s easy too, to blame meekness for bringing on bullies who naturally prey on the weak. We can simplify it further (or complicate – depending on your vantage point) by pointing out the population percentage of Orthodox Jews in New York, which sees fewer incidents than Zurich with its 600 or so frum families. Other cities (like Manchester or London), where the Orthodox population is larger, endure fewer acts of hatred, but still not as few as in Brooklyn.

Despite my attempts at reasoning the issue to bits, logic has no footing when it comes to believing in anti-Semitism, certainly not with me. Even a very good friend’s innocent Jew jokes tickles my nerves. “But you make Southern jokes,” this proud Alabamian always protests. “No one ever killed Southerners en masse,” I retort, only to have the exact same protest and rejoinder repeated ad nauseum. Sigh.